Russell Coutts may be unpleasant for a thousand reasons, but he must be given credit for at least three things: he is a sailing champion, Olympic gold medalist and 5-time America’s Cup winner; he is a good manager, of himself but also of big events such as SailGp more recently; he is not afraid to say what he thinks.
In this case, feel free to write it, with a post on his athlete page on Facebook. Coutts criticizes the Kiwi government, which still today subjects the country to armored restrictions and borders. Just to say, the men of Team New Zealand explained how the inability to travel abroad, between grueling quarantines, also weighed on the delay in indicating the location that will host the next America’s Cup: they too must undergo isolation at government hotels and there is no place. Book your flight in January, find a room in March.
And Coutts, who travels the world with his SailGp, doesn’t tell them. Here is his post:
“After experiencing what it is like in Europe since May, it seems that there are a lot of things in New Zealand that are being misreported. The media here seems ready to promote fear. It would be interesting to send a truly independent crew overseas to report on how much more balanced things really are elsewhere … I suspect most kiwis would be incredibly surprised.
If you have any doubts about what I’m saying, turn on the TV and check out the stadiums full of various overseas sporting events. Check out the Premier League, the Champions League or the recent Ryder Cup. The All Blacks just played against the USA in front of 40,000 fans in Washington DC.
The fact is that people abroad are living with Covid and, although some people, perhaps many, rightly remain cautious, life has largely returned to normal in many places. But that’s not what we’re told here in New Zealand.
The erosion of our freedom of choice, freedom of speech and the loss of precious time with family and friends and all the other negative aspects of a lockdown should be balanced against the health risk of Covid. Imagine if we had invested an extra 1 billion spent each week in lockdowns to improve our health system, education or roads (we had 8 deaths in NZ road accidents this past weekend).
It seems absolutelyIt is crazy that double vaccinated people are terrified of meeting unvaccinated people. Will it be like this for the rest of our life? What about people who have health problems and can’t get vaccinated? Will they be banned from society? (for the record I’m doubly vaccinated).
Finally the fact that the NZ government has now said that even if Auckland were to get 90% double vaccination, people could still be limited to traveling at Christmas seems like total nonsense (for those reading the post, Auckland has already 93% first dose and 82% second dose vaccinated – the whole country has 87% first dose and 72% double dose).
It is also total nonsense and contradictory that double vaccinates who have negative covid tests are blocked for 14 days in the MIQ while people with Covid can isolate themselves in the community.
New Zealand was a country where people very much appreciated the freedom of choice. How we got to this stage of blindly accepting this sort of unilateral rule, power and dictatorship on the part of our government is truly deeply troubling. “