This Covid phase one report – the verdict is in, and it's pretty much ‘guilty your honour’.  

Fine to begin with, and then they as the single podium of truth basically went too far, for too long. Tell us something we don't know.  

Trust in our institutions as shot, media took a hammering —and rightly so in some cases— Labour supporters and hysterical scientists and other groups went full militant.  

I never spoke about the messages I got from some of them during my interviews, challenging old Jacinda Ardern during that period, especially those outside of Auckland during the lockdown to end all lockdowns. They were threats of beatings on my social media, loads of homophobia, I was killing people with my questions, there was hate, there was vitriol.  

Now I'm not complaining about this, this is part of my job. But it just shows how wacko everyone got. Which is not to say the anti-mandate lot were angels either, but what we, the public were fed was a meal from only one of the two menus.  

Then there was the MIQ cruelty – you will never get another opportunity to kiss a loved one goodbye. Never. I watched Hipkins in his media stand up yesterday with the usual half mere culpa lines. We can learn lessons from this in the future and the benefit of hindsight is a great thing.  

What's the problem with that? Well, there were plenty of people with plenty of advice at the time. He could have listened to but chose not to. Instead, they labelled the protest as a river of filth, we wrote off entire sectors of scientific community in the name of social cohesion. Like a pack of rabid dogs attacking a limp lamb – that's what we were, we turned into that.  

Had they listened to Auckland, to the Plan Bers, some economists and experts and other fields, to Lady Deborah Chambers who bravely put her head above the parapet on behalf of the legal fraternity, Simon Bridges basically lost his job over a Facebook post, pointing out many of the problems that turned out to be quite accurate. But now it was all Siouxsie Wiles and Co. crying because we didn't go further and go harder.  

And where are we now? Kids not going to school, productivity jabbed in the face, crime out of control. Mental health and anxiety, particularly for kids, also taking a hit to the face. The wait list for critical medical treatments delayed, construction stopped, projects delayed despite the Aussies being faster and looser on both counts. It was the biggest overreach of power, both in real terms and in some cases, legally, this country has potentially ever seen. And only now do they say we might reconsider forcing a barista to get a jab that they don't want.  

Don't get me wrong, I got the jab twice, but that was my choice to a large extent. And is this all Labour's fault? No. The bigger culprits, in my mind: media hype, social media pylons, and unwavering support for the party pushing that lockdown agenda. The problem was tunnel vision. It was arrogance, ignorance or both, and now we're all paying a very hefty price tag for it.  

There was just one thing missing from yesterday. Any response from the four horsemen of the Apocalypse: Grant Robertson, Jacinda Ardern, Ashley Bloomfield, and Adrian Orr. Where were they? Grant’s on $800,000 at Otago University, Orr's doing victory laps for cutting rates he hiked too high and then flooding the country with cash. And Adern, remember, she said her single biggest driver in politics was to fix child poverty, now living in New York while the cost of living crisis she helped engineer, then deny was existing, hammers some of our poorest, and to use a word they made famous during the Covid catastrophe, our most vulnerable.