The Royal Commission of Inquiry into Covid-19’s final report has been released.
Deciding that the first phase of the inquiry was inadequate, the coalition Government expanded the terms of reference to focus on lockdowns and vaccine mandates.
In particular, the current Government wanted to find out whether the former Government had “considered the impact these decisions would have on society, health, education and our economy”.
The report makes 24 formal recommendations, including: framing the elimination strategy as temporary, limiting the use of urgency in lawmaking, keeping an eye on the research around social cohesion and creating financial assistance scheme options before the next crisis.
Dame Jacinda Ardern and Grant Robertson responded to the report with a joint statement saying that it was “consistent with the first report” commissioned by Labour.
“We accept the overall findings and recommendations of both reports,” they said.
Health Minister Simeon Brown told The Front Page that phase one of the inquiry didn’t go far enough.
“It asked a large number of questions in relation to pandemic preparedness, things such as the vaccine rollout, access to tests. So it asked a number of important questions, but ultimately didn’t ask some of the harder and tougher questions which were in terms of the effect of the lockdowns, the vaccine mandates, the economic cost of the previous Government’s decisions.
“Effectively, what this report has found is that the last Government did lock New Zealanders down longer than was necessary, it did spend more than was required to respond to the pandemic, and kept on spending.
“Ultimately, New Zealanders are still feeling the cost of that still today, in terms of cost in the economy.
“So this report was critically important because we need to learn the lessons and as the report says, the best thing that can be done in terms of preparing for future shocks, whether that’s a pandemic, a natural disaster, or an economic shock is we have to haveprudent fiscal management of our economy, in order to be as prepared as possible.”
The second phase of investigations, prompted by NZ First and Act coalition agreements, added millions more to the commission’s budget.
“It’s approximately $30 million; slightly more was spent on phase one than on phase two. It’s come within the budget that was set at the time,” Brown said.
He said he thought the total was around $17m for phase one, and around $14m for phase two, “but I can come back with the exact amount”, which he thought was around $30m.
University of Auckland microbiologist Siouxsie Wiles noted that the report found that New Zealand’s response was effective, that former ministers and their officials tried their best to make the right decisions and that the decisions they made were balanced and reasonable.
“Overall, the inquiry concludes that former ministers faced an extremely difficult situation, making decisions in what the commissioners describe as ‘the worst of circumstances’,” she said.
Labour leader Chris Hipkins has said they didn’t “have all of that luxury of time and more information when we were making those decisions”.
“So are there lessons to learn? Absolutely. Are there things you could do differently in a future pandemic? Yes, absolutely. The real question for the current Government is: have they taken any of this on board?
“The first Royal Commission made a whole lot of recommendations about how we could be better prepared for the next pandemic – and the Government have done nothing with them. If anything, we’re less prepared for another pandemic in the future now than we were when Covid arrived,” he told Ryan Bridge TODAY.
Hipkins, the former Covid Response Minister, has been open about mistakes made during the pandemic.
He said in 2022 that if his Government could have a redo, he would have scaled back the Auckland Delta lockdowns more quickly in the last three months of 2021.
Asked what he would do differently on TVNZ’s Q+A, Hipkins said that at the time decisions were made, they could only be made on the information that was at hand.
Brown doesn’t buy that.
“They left Auckland in Level Four for longer than needed in late 2021, against official advice,” he said.
“They also left a boundary in place around Auckland over the summer of 21/22, which officials recommended was not necessary; it was not needed. Auckland had been in lockdown for many months at that point, and there was no need for that.
“In fact, officials said that the boundary should have been lifted on December 15. Chris Hipkins went to Cabinet and said, ‘well my view is that it should stay until January 9′. The Cabinet eventually agreed to January 16.
“So Aucklanders had their summer taken away from them after months of lockdown, whilst at the same time, the official advice was being ignored.
“New Zealand has put a huge amount of trust and confidence in the ministers of the day. In turn, Chris Hipkins stood up every single day, and he said ‘I am doing this on the basis of official health advice’.
“The Royal Commission highlights, in a number of instances, no, he wasn’t.”
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The Front Page is a daily news podcast from the New Zealand Herald, available to listen to every weekday from 5pm. The podcast is presented by Chelsea Daniels, an Auckland-based journalist with a background in world news and crime/justice reporting who joined NZME in 2016.
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