Revered United States broadcaster Edward R. Murrow used to finish his programmes with the catchphrase "Good night and good luck".
It’s a phrase that suggests empathy with the audience, and shows someone cares how things develop for others. Unfortunately, in the wrong hands it can also sound glib and dismissive, and not that caring at all, rather like the job rejection phrase "all the best for your future endeavours".
Mr Murrow used the phrase genuinely. But with the Government’s loosening of Covid-19 restrictions this week, and the move from the Red to the Orange Traffic Light setting, we can’t help feeling it comes with a kind of "best of luck with it all" approach — one which sets the South adrift on the high seas of Omicron.
Of course there is only so much the Government can do to keep us safe. It has discharged those obligations well in the past, but southerners would be right to feel a little discounted in the current thinking, in fact for much of the time since the Omicron variant arrived.
The daily case numbers in the North Island, and especially around the Auckland region, may be falling, and nationally we may be over the peak of this outbreak, but the South Island remains in its grip.
It is far too soon for the South to have its protections removed. What was the Government thinking? Was it too focused on Auckland? Too focused on the arrival of tourists? Too focused on ensuring a good Easter break for those in less-badly affected areas?
We totally understand the need to get the hospitality industry up-and-running again. But, as someone has said, how many goods and services do people in hospital, or those who have died from Covid-19, purchase?
Case numbers are actually still rising among the older age groups across the South Island. Yet Covid-19 Response Minister Chris Hipkins has defended the move and says Cabinet and its advisers looked carefully at the hospitalisation rates.
Director-general of Health Dr Ashley Bloomfield also says the peak of the infection curve has been reached by all South Island district health boards, except the West Coast DHB.
This is not the first time the Government appears to have overlooked what is happening in the South Island, or the island has been lost in the mix of greater concern for the North. For months last year, southerners were stubbornly left in Level 2 when there were no cases on this side of Cook Strait.
Covid-19 has extracted an awful toll around the world. Aotearoa New Zealand has fared much better than many other countries, because of the Government’s successful approach in the early days to eliminating the virus and through the sacrifices of many Kiwis and the subsequent high rates of vaccination.
But we have not dodged a bullet totally, with more than 500 deaths now related to the virus and about the same number of people ill in hospital.
As well as the deaths, the people who are still suffering from long Covid, the business owners who have gone broke, and the workers who are now out of jobs, Covid has split our community in ways we would never have imagined when it all began more than two years ago.
The mandates may have been swept away, along with vaccine passes and some of the other restrictions on daily activities, but the wounds between the vaccinated and the anti-vaxxers remain fresh and deep.
Tonight marks the start of Easter proper, with vigil masses and services being held in many churches across the country ahead of Easter Sunday tomorrow.
Easter is a period of hope and rebirth. A time to stop, or slow down, and take stock of where we are at in our relationships with others.
However religious you may be, it is a good time for all of us to start working to heal those divisions across the motu.
