Hollow ring to Hipkins’ Bellis apology

• Published date: 24 June 2022
• Publication title: New Zealand Herald, The (Auckland, New Zealand)

The Ardern Government’s smearing of Charlotte Bellis, the pregnant New Zealander stuck in Afghanistan after the Government denied her permission to return home to give birth, is in a similar category

In mitigation, then COVID-19 Response Minister Chris Hipkins at least did his smearing transparently rather than anonymously through social media.

But aggravating his offence is that the Ardern Government knew that what Hipkins was saying about Bellis was not true.

Hipkins has now apologised to Bellis, but only after threats of defamation proceedings.

Making his words even more hollow, the public apology comes five months after Hipkins must have been advised that his smear was untrue and more than three months after he apologised to Bellis privately.

For five months, Hipkins has allowed the public to believe that Bellis had twice been offered government assistance to return home from Afghanistan but had turned it down — implying she was some kind of drama queen making a political point, rather than a mum-to-be wanting to give birth in her hometown of Christchurch rather than Kabul.

For her part, Jacinda Ardern says the main thing is that an apology has now been given.

I believe the sequence of events smells of the public apology being cynically delayed until the Government was required to release official information revealing its lie and after Hipkins had been relieved of his COVID responsibilities in last week’s Cabinet reshuffle.

Were Hipkins still COVID-19 Response Minister when it all became public on Wednesday, Ardern would have had to sack him. He still remains Minister of Education, Minister of Police, Leader of the House, fifth-ranked in Cabinet and Minister for the Public Service, making him head of the entire Wellington bureaucracy.

Once, Hipkins remaining in Cabinet at all would have been untenable. But standards have progressively fallen, first under John Key’s Government and further under Ardern.

Those who still think ministers should meet previous standards of integrity might celebrate that at least one brave woman has squeezed an apology out of the Beehive.

But the Government this week wouldn’t apologise to the hundreds of other pregnant New Zealanders who were blocked from returning home by Hipkins’ MIQ lottery and emergency allocation system, which the courts have found operated after September 1, 2021 as a legally unjustified limit on the right of New Zealand citizens to enter their own country. By October, 229 New Zealanders had applied...