Remember when? Cars queue at a Matamata testing site in March 2020, in the pandemic's early days. Photo / Alan Gibson
OPINION:
At last we can start to relax a little about Covid-19. The removal of restrictions this week was long overdue. Tuesday was like a new dawn. A return of freedom and normality.
As it happens, I was flying to New Plymouth that day. The change from a sea of expressionless, faceless masked humans to real people with real smiles was wonderful and invigorating. The new airport terminal in the city opened two-and-a-half years ago just as restrictions arrived. On Tuesday it saw its patrons' faces in all their glory for the first time. It was a happy place.
Covid-19 is certainly a tricky virus. It was weird the way it hung around in supermarkets long after it deserted cafes. It used to loiter at restaurant front counters and in toilets as well. For a while you were okay to be maskless sitting at tables, but not if you went to the bathroom in case it jumped you on the way. Like I say, tricky.
The rules had become silly. I've lost count of the number of people I know who confided that they had "forgotten" to tell the Ministry of Health about their positive rapid antigen test (RAT) for fear of being bossed around some more. As officials intoned each day about the number of new cases, I suspect most knew that under-reporting made the numbers largely meaningless.
Anyway, that's all gone. We can move on and put it all behind us. We can at last do what we want, when we want, without fear of being prevented from living our lives.
Not so fast. There remains the not so small matter of how to learn from and embed the lessons of our journey through Covid.
The pandemic response was the biggest public policy intervention in people's lives, in our lifetimes. From lockdowns to the mask and vaccine mandates, from closing the schools to effectively closing the hospitals. Everybody was affected. Everyone's life trajectory changed, some permanently.
People died, some from Covid and some from other things that could be traced to the choices we made about Covid.
We owe it to ourselves and to the memory of those lost to stop and take stock.
We need to examine what worked and what didn't. What had the biggest positive effect and what was more trouble than it was worth? When should we have moved more quickly, including both into and out of restrictions, and when should we have waited longer?
A Covid inquiry should not be a journey of recrimination or blame. Responding to a pandemic like this was never going to be a game of perfect. This has been a crazy two-and-a-half years of big decisions on top of big decisions where there was no game plan to work from. Nobody could have got everything right.
Some things obviously worked, some obviously didn't, and the jury is still out on many more.
This week there were premature celebrations that our economy "avoided a recession". The June quarter of 2022 was never the test. The real scorecard will come in the next year or so as we battle inflation caused by the Covid response with the medicine of much higher interest rates and a sharp contraction in money supply. Long Covid is as much a description of the economic and social hangover as it is of one aspect of this pernicious disease.
If we do this inquiry right, we will have a game plan for next time. And to me that is the most important thing. The past two-and-a-half years have been a journey of policy experimentation by necessity. We now have a golden opportunity to perfect a blueprint for future pandemics.
There is every likelihood this won't be the last pandemic this generation sees. There could even be another lethal variant of this virus next year. If by luck we are 80 or 100 years away from the next contagious pathogen, then all the more reason to write down the lessons before they are forgotten, for our children and our grandchildren.
The sort of lessons I'm interested in vary from the big to the small. How much did hard lockdowns achieve versus what other lesser restrictions could have? Could we keep working on, say, big construction sites with strong health and safety protocols without adding significantly to the risk? Could we keep butchers and fruit and vege stores safely open in hard lockdowns? How could we manage our border more humanely and stay connected to the world without materially worsening the risk?
What should be the threshold for closing our schools, and what are the true costs to the children of doing so, balanced against the risks of virus transmission?
How do we scale up hospital capacity quickly without sending ourselves broke in the meantime?
Is there a better procurement system we should use for buying urgently needed equipment and vaccines? And how do we ensure contestable advice from others besides the public health people, while respecting their expertise?
There will be those who say let it be, that we should save the expense and move on. There will be those too who want to weaponise an inquiry — make it an opportunity to bash the people whose fate it was to make the decisions. Both perspectives are wrong.
A well-constructed commission of inquiry will encourage reflection and planning for the future while learning the lessons of the present. Contrary to the Opposition's wishes and the Government's fears, it would likely not offer an advantage to either political side. The Government would probably even attract public kudos if it instituted a clearly nonpartisan inquiry for the country's benefit, rather than lapsing into its trademark defensiveness.
The Prime Minister ummed and aahed this week about what form an inquiry into our Covid response should take. She was considering it, she was awaiting advice. She shouldn't.
The advice never changes. It's kept in a drawer somewhere on the eighth floor of the Beehive. It runs through the various inquiry options, highlighting differences in cost and in the degree of ministerial control. Officials almost never offer a definitive view as to what form an inquiry should take. In waiting for "the advice", the Prime Minister might as well wait for Godot.
It can't be a hard decision. Our country's response to Covid was the biggest and most intrusive set of policy decisions taken in our name in this lifetime. Decisions of these magnitude warrant a serious review. It can only be a Royal Commission. It is time to announce one.
- Steven Joyce is a former National Party MP and Minister of Finance. He is director at Joyce Advisory.
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