The week's big story has been the Government's abject incompetence in overseeing basic border and quarantine services. More important long-term is its shift towards less doctrinaire Covid-19 policy.
The two developments are related.
Behind the scenes, Jacinda Ardern's surrogates use the strongest language to describe the accuracy ofthe Ministry of Health's briefings to ministers over recent weeks. Had the Prime Minister not practically pinned a red rosette on Ashley Bloomfield over recent months, he may have been a useful fall guy for ministers' weak oversight.
Most governments work out a bit earlier to be sceptical of the operational information senior mandarins provide to the Beehive, but better late than never. The good news is that the hold Bloomfield's ministry and its wider network have had over Ardern has been weakened.
When Covid first entered New Zealand, the University of Auckland's Te Pūnaha Matatini estimated that, left unchecked, it could infect nearly 4.5 million Kiwis and kill 80,000.
Those estimates now seem too high. Only in the utter shambles of Trump's US and Bolsonaro's Brazil have deaths exceeded 80,000. Even among the 1.4 billion people of India, the official death toll has not yet reached 80,000.
The estimate assumed that neither the New Zealand Government nor civil society would do anything to combat Covid-19, and that it would spread more quickly and be more lethal than it has turned out to be.
Still, the lack of knowledge about Covid, plus the need to avoid the risk of overloading hospitals, justified the first lockdown — even though the courts have now found it was unlawful for nine days, and the Treasury and the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) have confirmed it was not subject to any cost-benefit analysis. It should probably have begun earlier.
Ardern and director general of health Dr Ashley Bloomfield arriving for the Covid-19 response update. Photo / Mark Mitchell
It was clear early on that a lockdown as severe as the first could only be a one-off. When Ardern extended it on April 20, she said it was necessary to lower the risk of another. Yo-yoing between levels, she said, would be "the worst thing we can do for our country".
As someone with a unique connection with public sentiment, Ardern knows more than anyone that she could not achieve repeated public compliance with lockdowns as extreme as March and April. While the rules for levels 3 and 4 are different, Google's analysis of Aucklanders' whereabouts indicates retail and recreation are now down only 57 per cent compared with almost 90 per cent during the first lockdown. Half of us are going to work, compared with just a third in March and April.
As long as it is not led by a Labour stooge, the inevitable Royal Commission will discover just what level of incompetence was needed to allow Covid back in so easily. It will not be enough to say ministers were misled by Bloomfield's ministry. On something so important, a Steven Joyce, Michael Cullen or Bill Birch would have established independent channels to verify bureaucrats' claims.
The Government is now throwing everything including the formidable Heather Simpson at belatedly setting up the basic border control and quarantine system it has been telling us for months was already in place.
The National Party has also released its border control policy, which calls for a single Pandemic Response Agency. It says it will apply tougher border controls but smarter domestic monitoring and contact tracing to pick up outbreaks sooner to avoid lockdowns.
But both parties now concede the virus will be around for many years and will continue to get past initial border defences from time to time.
The PM's decision to move Auckland only to level 3 after the latest outbreak was the first indication of a more mature approach. She followed it up by leaving the Waikato in level 2 even after cases were found in Tokoroa.
Ardern, Bloomfield and Health Minister Chris Hipkins have ruled out a return to level 4.
Cabinet meets today to discuss the level-3 Auckland and level-2 New Zealand restrictions, with the PM to announce any decisions at 1pm. Instead of lockdowns, consensus policy is moving towards that proposed by National, including monitoring sewage for signs of the disease and contact tracing much more advanced than the Ministry of Health's failed manual app.
Both Government and Opposition have moved away from trying to keep Covid-19 out at all costs.
Protection of the elderly is going to be paramount to avoid the disasters among the 70-plus age group seen in other countries such as Sweden.
In New Zealand, not a single person under 60 has died of Covid-19, despite more than 1330 confirmed and probable cases (see table). Among that group, even the hospitalisation rate is as low as 4 per cent, or 1 in 25. It is only for those aged 80 or above that Covid-19 becomes something like a death sentence, albeit still only with a 30 per cent chance of being hospitalised or dying.
Of course, the laxity of testing means many more people will have had Covid-19 than the Ministry of Health knows about, so New Zealand's true hospitalisation and death rates will be lower even than those shown.
It is untrue that New Zealanders face a choice between regular lockdowns and dying with the virus.
Nevertheless, if we have to accept periodic outbreaks of Covid-19, our rest homes need to be as safe as the Reserve Bank's vaults. On their own initiative, most rest homes adopted level 4 rules last week.
The Government remains under pressure from some in the medical schools to retain lockdown as its primary strategy. Like the most doctrinaire right-wingers in a 1980s economics department, they say there is no alternative.
In contrast, the Prime Minister is to be commended for her more sophisticated approach.
Those in the medical schools would serve NZ better by engaging with those who are expert in human nature to design a strategy capable of retaining public acceptance not just this week and next, but until the end of the decade or beyond.
- Matthew Hooton is an Auckland-based PR consultant. He was speechwriter for former National Party leader Todd Muller. These views are his own.
