Border remains the Achilles heel

A109 Light Utility Helicopter flight with mayor Gisborne City from the air in November 2023.

Opinion

The death of Prince Philip provided a sad end to last week's news cycle which once again was packed with developments.

The story of how a minor Greek prince, reputedly born on a kitchen table in Corfu 99 years ago, went on to become the longest-serving Queen Consort in British history — married as he was for 73 years to Queen Elizabeth — could provide the basis for a series to rival The Crown.

To those who are not ardent monarchists, Philip was in many ways the most interesting of the royals since the late Queen Mother with his propensity for major gaffes and the blunt speaking to be expected from a man whose great aim in life was to be a naval officer.

His death bookmarked a week in which Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced a ban on travellers from India even though they hold New Zealand passports.

The decision was made easy to justify by the fact two-thirds of the cases of Covid-19 in the past month have come from India, including 17 in one day last Thursday.

The border remains the Achilles heel in the Government's battle against Covid.

Its response has been to appoint a team of experts to advise it on critical Covid-19 decisions, as the country moves into the next phase of the pandemic response.

These include how many people should be vaccinated before border controls can be relaxed, and how to respond to any new variants that are not covered adequately by the current vaccines. The group is headed by epidemiologist Professor Sir David Skegg.

The Government knows it remains vulnerable to the opposition parties over its handling of border controls and that the greatest doubts and concerns from the general public relate to the situation there. National spokesman Chris Hopkins today called for unvaccinated border workers to be redeployed now, not by the end of April as the Prime Minister has said.

Elsewhere much of the news was almost uniformly bleak.

Brazil is close to overtaking the United States for total Covid deaths, hundreds have died in protests against the military takeover in Myanmar, sectarian unrest has resurfaced in Northern Ireland and in an unusual admission, North Korea's Kim Jong-un has warned the country faces a famine that could be as bad as the one in the 1990s in which up to 3 million people died.

The trial of former Minneapolis policeman Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd continued to provide damning evidence.