David Seymour's argument is you need the Royal Commission into Covid despite the fact it will cost tens of millions of dollars.

It will cost tens of millions to save tens of billions, he tells us. But you know what? I don’t think it will.

What I have learned out of Covid very broadly is that a lot of it was luck. That luck, or not, was in who was running your country at the time of the outbreak.

Further luck was involved when it came to the electoral cycle when there was a vote in the middle of it. In this country's case, we had Labour in a coalition, we had our first true MMP government, and we had the main opposition party in turmoil. You could not have dreamed up a bigger mess.

We also had a vote just after the outbreak had started. We didn't know what was what, we were freaking out, we had a government we weren't convinced had worked, so we panicked and gave Labour 50 percent of the vote.

The rest, as they say, is history. What ACT want to do is re-litigate history, and I can save them the money.

The lessons are simple. Beyond the luck aspect of who is running the place, you then look at delivery and you look at honesty. Any government would have been flying blind, but not all governments are driven by a blind ideology that the state can do it all.

Lesson one; let the private sector and the experts in the field in from day one. Trust the private sector and the experts.

Lesson two; don't lie and don't say stuff that simply isn't true. We were told there was plenty of PPE as the doctors and nurses told us there wasn’t, they weren't making it up. We were told there was no delay on vaccines. You've heard it all before and we have seen the reports.

Lesson three; learn as you go and fix stuff. The most glaring of which was healthcare. Our entire response was predicated on the health system not being overloaded. Yet they produced no more beds, hired no more nurses, and even now haven't come close to addressing the problem.

Lesson four; don't rely on hype, spin, and BS. The one o'clock pulpit of truth was anything but, and it was designed to give the Government ultimate power, or the facade of ultimate power. You couldn't breathe unless they said so.

A Royal Commission would produce thousands of pages worth of intricate detail, but it would all be finer points of the basic points. But the ultimate issue as to why a Royal Commission is a waste is lessons would only be learned if the right government were in power to learn them.

This one, Royal Commission or not, will never admit what a disaster these past two years have been. They would reject the premise of the Commission.