It is being reported that the Chair of Parliament’s Health Select Committee has refused a request by Dr Shane Reti, National’s shadow Health Minister, for the Director-General of Health to be summoned to appear before it to answer questions relating to his Departments management of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Labour’s Louisa Wall, Chair of the Committee, said she consulted her coalition party colleagues (NZ First and the Greens) before making her decision to pull up the drawbridge.
Begs the question … what do ‘they’ know that we don’t … what have ‘they’ to hide?
Democracy Labour Party style.
No Minister 
AS anyone with functining thought processes knows this is the biggest cockup made by the ruling elites since they started WW1 102 years ago.
An outbreak of irrational mass panic lead by the News Media and exploited by a medocre politicial class to tighten their grip on the peasantry
Mind you I don’t know why Labour bothered their current opposition as re[resmtd by the atiomal party are as usless as a square wheel andd totally out of their depth when it comes to leading public debate and just go along to get along and are totally intimidateed for the most part bythe harridans of the press gallery who of course run rings around them
Good question, I’m sure the answer will come out much later when the answer will be irrelevant.
All I want is to see a clear and coherent plan on how we are going to get out of this fiasco and getting the country fully functional again. Sorry Judy but you need to offer more than claiming that your mob will just manage the border better.
The CCP caused this fuck up, aided and abetted by their sock puppet at the WHO, sensationalised by the media, with politicians led along by over zealous bureaucrats and fake academics. What a mess.
Andrei … been at the sherry again with a miss-mash of poor grammar and spelling. Now I know that in your authoritarian bubble the asking of inconvenient questions is to be discouraged (by offering a cup of tea) but that’s not the way it works in a real democracy. The Select Cttee process is an important cog in the wheel and when the government uses its majority to shut the questioning down we are entitled to ask ‘why’.
It was the same Select Cttee that Judith Collins used to bust open the lies that successive governments had told re the AO debate. Clearly your Labour friends don’t want to give her opportunity to do the same again.
Figures.
Although I think news footage of Nat MPs haranguing one of the most popular men in NZ would significantly improve the governing parties’ election results, that doesn’t feel like it’s worth wasting his time over.
From that same report:
“Kiwis, who have already sacrificed so much, deserve answers as to why they were forced into lockdown again,” [Shane Reti] said.
They do, and when the investigation finds out those answers, no doubt they’ll be published. As it stands, the investigation hasn’t yet found the answers, regardless of whether or not Ashley Bloomfield gets put in a room to answer questions from Nat MPs.
This constantly hinted-at conspiracy theory that the government knows things about this outbreak that it isn’t making public just makes National’s MPs look like loons. I hadn’t thought Reti was one of them, but this report makes me wonder.
Probably be no further informed by the report than what is already available.
https://theconversation.com/genome-sequencing-tells-us-the-auckland-outbreak-is-a-single-cluster-except-for-one-case-144721
Milt … your demonstrated socialist arrogance on display for all to see along with your contempt for the parliamentary process. The job of the opposition, any opposition, is to expose the shortcomings of government. It does that thru Questions to Ministers and by questioning officials at Select Cttee hearings.
It matters not that in your eyes Bloomfield is above reproach … what matters is that the opposition has a right to question him and your mob are gagging the opposition from doing the task it is mandated to do.
The Greens talk the talk about democracy but when push comes to shove you abandon your principles (so called) in favor of the baubles of office. Jeanette Fitzsimmons will again be rolling her eyes as the Party she did much to promote is high-jacked by the hard left. I have principles and if you don’t like them I have other principles … not original I know but fits you and yours to a tee.
And no, I don’t do conspiracy over cock-up. But when you see ‘Chippy’ saying the only news to believe is that what your hear at ‘our’ official briefings and those utterances are later shown to be misleading at best and lies at worst, coupled with the refusal to let the opposition do its job, and you are entitled to ask … what’s being covered up.
Milt, your slip is showing.
It can’t be an automatically part of the “parliamentary process”, or else the Labour-led government couldn’t decline the request for Bloomfield to appear before the Health Select Committee. Whether that is good in theory and in this instance will depend in large measure on ones politics, but in principle it seems good that he should have.
Mind you, I’ve seen the US equivalents, and the grand-standing that goes on when they call witnesses or other public servants to appear. Sure, some good may come out of some of the disclosures and 2uestions, but there as a lot of nauseating show-boating by both Democrats and Republicans depending on the issue at stake, or the person they are questioning. Indeed, it is often nauseating, and you can argue it is antithetical to good government.
If the National Party have a matter to ask, then Question Time and directed to the PM or Minister of Health – to whom Bloomfield is responsible in operational terms (not discounting the State Services Commission) – is still open to them.
Plus I’ve seen rat bags like Winston Peters use the forum of Select Committees to attack public servants with, as Milt suggest, plot theories. Which is par for the course given his recent abuse of parliamentary Privilege.
But then one rotten apple shouldn’t be a reason why Bloomfield won’t appear, and as Milt suggests, Reti has some cred. Incidentally Muldoon always felt Anderton shut down the Select Committee into the devaluation just after the 1984 election, right about the time he (Muldoon) was calling the public servants and producing his own records which showed the “crisis” and Muldoon’s alleged stone-walling over devaluation were nothing like Lange or Roger Douglas had reported.
And we’re at Level 2.5!
Do these people actually think this is like a machine, where you can just put the setting to exactly what you want?
I can’t be bothered but somebody should be keeping track of the various detailed line items of control that have gone into these settings over time, and how they’ve changed.
Given ordinary people’s confusion over regulations in general how the fuck does any bureaucrat actually think this is going to work at their precise desire of “2.5”.
Kimbo … to an extent Question Time is a farce. Ministers don’t need to answer the question … just address it … and all the while you have the Speaker running interference if he feels there is potential for government embarrassment. Do I think Mallard is biased?… is the Pope a Catholic.
There have been some great Speakers; Speaker Oram and Speaker Smith come to mind … and some really bad ones .. to whit Speakers Hunt and Wilson with Mallard right up there with them.