Kate Hawkesby: Hipkins may regret Auckland's lockdown, I can tell you who regrets it more

The audacity of this Government - seriously, it makes you wonder whether this the most hypocritical government ever. Yesterday, Chris Hipkins - as in pulpit of truth Chris Hipkins – Covid Minister Chris Hipkins, the guy who ran the whole shebang alongside Jacinda - showed he's now so desperate for votes, that he said he now regrets the 2021 lockdown length for Aucklanders. No kidding. Does he really? I lived through that lockdown, alongside everyone else in Auckland. These guys could not have banged on about the importance of locking us down more. They could not have been clearer and surer that they were doing the right thing. Despite all of us who were vocal at the time - myself included - that it was overkill, and too much, and out of hand, and ridiculous, and way too long, they defended it. They chastised those who spoke out against it. They tried to frame anyone who railed against it as some kind of far right conspiracy theorist or anti-vaxxer. They lambasted and discredited anyone who questioned it. They hung on to the power they held and waved it around with gay abandon. And yet - now look. Suddenly Chris Hipkins regrets it. I mean how do we take these guys seriously? Will they literally throw away very ounce of principle they ever had to try to win this election? We’ve already had Grant Robertson swallowing the dead rat that is GST off fruit and vege. Now we’ve got Hipkins regretting Auckland’s lockdown time. Too late mate. Way too late. We lived it. We lost it. We’ll never get that time back. All the people who missed funerals, lost weddings, sacrificed being at their child’s birth, never got to say goodbye to a dying loved one, all the operations delayed, all the people shut out, all the businesses gone under - none of them can get any of it back. So a glib ‘it was probably a bit long’ doesn’t cut it. You don’t get to go back on your decisions now. Not decisions of that magnitude. It’s reprehensible that you could enact such strict rules, with such courage of conviction at the time, only to completely back-peddle later – based on poor poll results and a desire to get back into power. Is this not the pinnacle of unprincipled government? They should hang their heads in shame for what they’ve done to New Zealanders. An apology was owed to Aucklanders - not a cheap line about it probably being too long a lockdown. ‘Looking back,’ Hipkins said, the length of Auckland’s 2021 lockdown was ‘probably one of the decisions he would change.’ Do you reckon? He acknowledged it was a challenging time for this country, but that ‘out of adversity had come strength’. Well while that’s a nice sentiment and possibly true in some cases, it also resulted in people broken, bankrupted, and bereft. To now say you probably regret it just smacks of the amateur hour we knew at the time was running the show. People out of their depth, determined to control the narrative, to shut down any opposition, to rule the roost and play God with people’s lives. We got scammed by power drunk rookie leadership, one of whom has already scarpered leaving one who now has the audacity to tell us he regrets it. So while he may regret Auckland’s 2021 lockdown, I can tell you who regrets it more; Aucklanders.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.