Comments by "Laurence Fraser" (@laurencefraser) on "Scripps News" channel.

  1. New Zealand's borders aren't going to be fully open for some time. 14 day quarantine for people coming in from other countries (unless this whole 'ok, we Know these countries are fine, and all have sufficient protections on Their borders, so traveling between them without that delay is ok' thing pans out.) to make sure they haven't got it, longer if it turns out they have. Makes preventing it from taking hold again quite possible. Edit: closing Some borders is useless. Just closing your borders to people from China would have done nothing (most US cases came by way of Europe). You have to shut the borders Completely, to Everyone (freight's ok if properly handled, though). And doing it Properly isn't a matter of "the democrats stopped trump" that's "trump wouldn't even consider it in the first place". Because exceptions for rich people are just as bad as any other. (That's why the WHO recommend against travel bans (or whatever it was) btw. Not because the WHO is in China's pocket, but because a travel ban on one or two places is Not a Full Border Closure, and thus wasn't good enough. They never recommend against closing the borders to travelers entirely, and doing so was a Key part of the strategy of all actually successful countries.)
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  2. Well... There is the fact that very large parts of the country have No One living in them (national parks, mostly), resulting in a very low average population per square km figure, 'sparsely​ populated' isn't Entirely wrong. Quite misleading though.
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  3.  @tweetyericsson  it was a plan to build a bunch of housing (and thus bring down house prices) that didn't work out. Doesn't Seem to have been any sort of con, or scam, or corruption problem, or even particularly mismanaged, as such things go, at least on the government's part (certain parts of the media would have been All over that if so, they weren't) but it was certainly costing more and taking longer than planned, to the point where it couldn't possibly meet the stated goals. Edit:might still be ongoing, for all i know, they revised it enough times to try to make it work...
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