New system aims to get the unvaccinated to play ball
AUCKLANDERS may have hoped for more imminent freedom yesterday, but what they got instead was the big stick, which the PM hopes will deliver it in another six weeks or so.
After months of cheering people on to get vaccinated, the prime minister yesterday confirmed that vaccination certificates will become a very large part of New Zealand life for the foreseeable future.
It will not be used sparingly.
It has been a road to Damascus conversion for the prime minister, who ruled out vaccination certificates only the week before the Delta outbreak landed, saying different categories of freedoms did not sit easily with her.
But they are now the backbone of the new framework that will replace lockdowns once 90% of people in every region of New Zealand are vaccinated.
Certificates will be required at hairdressers, gyms, restaurants, bars, festivals and anywhere that is fun.
People who refuse to get vaccinated will effectively be leading a Level 3 life: able only to enter places such as supermarkets and pharmacies.
Businesses that refuse to use them will not be eligible for government support packages, and will have to use spacing restrictions and other measures. They will legally be able to hire and fire based on vaccination status of workers.
The prime minister’s aim in setting out the oasis of delights offered to vaccinated people under the new traffic light system was to try to give Aucklanders enough hope to ride out the next six weeks or so that it takes to get there.
It will be at least that long before all of Auckland hits the 90% doublevaccination level required.
The only reprieve Auckland might get before then is the further easing of the Level 3 restrictions.
Ardern will be praying that Auckland can hold it together enough for long enough to hit the traffic light moment. She had better pray hard because by then Auckland will be in its fifth month of lockdown, and looking Christmas in the eye.
It is one thing to promise the land of freedom, and another thing altogether to get there.
Ardern has not yet set a specific date if the 90% target is not reached in each
DHB.
Progress will be assessed again on November 29, and the prime minister will face some tough decisions.
Although Auckland will be allowed to move to the red light as soon as vaccination rates hit 90% across its three DHB regions, it will not be allowed to move to orange until the rest of the country catches up.
And it is at orange that the real liberties kick in for vaccinated people and businesses.
What will she do about those other regions that do not hit the 90% threshold needed to get us to orange? What if Auckland does not get there?
Ardern will find it almost impossible to justify to Aucklanders staying in lockdown if it falls short, or remaining a fortress because other regions are proving hard to get over the mark.
However, she also stands accused of leaving some people behind by declining to set a minimum rate for Maori vaccinations before that traffic light system kicks in.
Maori are only at 67% for the first dose — and the Iwi Leaders Forum has called for a 95% threshold for Maori before the country can open up.
But Auckland has left her with little choice.
“We cannot ask vaccinated people to stay home forever,” she said and she was right — because vaccinated people simply wouldn’t.
The Sir John Key plan, and those by National and Act, also made it untenable to drag things out too long. They laid down a challenge and a point of comparison and they tapped into the growing discontent in Auckland.
Yesterday’s plan was about recognising the inevitable: that the point has come when those who are vaccinated have lost patience with those who are refusing to or are dragging their heels.
Ardern admitted as much when she noted her own prior resistance to setting a target that might leave some groups behind.
That she had now done so was because she could no longer justify continuing to lock down vaccinated Aucklanders.
The plan she set out is probably not as cautious as she would like.
But she is at an advantage over other countries where lockdown fatigue kicked in at much lower rates of vaccination.
In some of those countries that opened at the 70% to 80% mark, things have not gone well.
Setting the 90% target had to be a target the PM could be confident of hitting but not so low that we ended up in the same place as the UK.
The fear of that is why Ardern has not taken lockdowns off the table completely: they remain an option if the worst happens, but would be localised.
As for the new traffic light system, it will inevitably have teething problems as the reality of turning it from a plan on paper and into reality comes.
That won’t worry the Government. Similar issues hit the old alert level system when it was first introduced, and each time it was changed, and after a few weeks it always settled down.
It will also be some time before even the red light is turned on.
What is clear is that when it lands, to the vaccinated will go the spoils but for the unvaccinated life will be very miserable indeed. We will be a land of two lifestyles.
The prospect of that is exactly what the PM is hoping will serve to get enough people to give up on their hesitancy and get us to orange.
Claire Trevett is
political editor.
Concise Oxford English Dictionary of Current English (1995 edition) has ‘‘a band of persons acting or going about together’’, adding ‘‘esp. for criminal purposes’’.
In Civis’ childhood a gang was a group of children ‘‘herding together’’ at and after school, without, so far as Civis knew, criminal purposes. But such gangs could be cruel, ‘‘othering’’ those not in the group.
Now, in New Zealand, mention of gangs triggers images of ‘‘patched’’ members of motorcycle gangs, responsible for shootings, assaults, burglary and drugdealing, and ‘‘othered’’ by society.
They’re fodder for politicians more interested in inciting populist support (as with Judith Collins’ recent dismissive ‘‘They should go away — I’m sick of them’’) than in addressing the underlying causes of gangs — deprivation, abuse, illiteracy, loneliness (and Australia uprooting New Zealandborn, Australiangrown individuals, sometimes just for gang association without criminal activity, ripping them from families and other supports, and dumping them on New Zealand as ‘‘trash’’). But gang members are human beings, and, as many have pointed out, find in their gangs the support society hasn’t given them.
Last weekend a couple of different items on TVNZ news featured gangs.
One showed thousands of foolish, selfish protesters ‘‘herding together’’, egged on and addressed by antivax preacher Brian Tamaki, leader of the Destiny Church, repeating the earlier illegal protest about (and breaking) Covid19 restrictions, and demanding ‘‘freedom’’. Those crowds seem to fit well with Dr Johnson’s and the Concise Oxford’s definitions, and have attracted ‘‘contempt [and] abhorrence’’ for their actions.
The other news clip showed a gathering at Huntly of patched members of several of New Zealand’s notorious, usually rival, motorcycle gangs. Those gangs — Black Power, Tribal Huks and Mongrel Mob members were present — were ‘‘acting [and] going about together’’, but, on this occasion at least, not for criminal purposes. They’d been invited there by Mongrel Mob Kingdom Waikato leader Sonny Fatupaito, to hear expert opinion on Covid19 immunisation from GP and coleader of Te Ropu Whakakaupapa Uruta, The National Maori Pandemic Group Rawiri
McKree Jansen, University of Auckland Associate Professor of public health Collin Tukuitonga, and intensive care doctor Annette Forrest, who works in North Shore and Waikato Hospitals; and to be offered immunisation.
‘‘Covid’s going to be a s...storm,’’ Dr McKree Janson told them — ‘‘Vaccination’s the one thing we’ve got’’. Asked about someone’s wife, who was receiving chemotherapy, ‘‘Hell yeah, I want her protected’’, he said — and those around her too. He said later that an event like the Huntly gathering could convince a lot of people. Seeing a whanau member or friend get their vaccine without problems might persuade fencesitters to put their arm out down the track. He’d seen at least one dad who felt uneasy about getting the jab before his kids could. ‘‘What a beautiful concern to have. As a father, he doesn’t want to feel like he’s abandoning his kids.’’ But leading by example and holding the kids’ hands when they can get theirs was the best thing the father could do to protect them. The dad got his shot.
As Ngaruawahia’s Nga Miro Health Clinic manager Glenda Raumati said, this was only a start. Fourteen of the 50 present got their first dose (some were already immunised), and more korero was needed for some members. But they left with trustworthy information, in contrast to misinformation spread through social media.
It’s salutary to compare these patched gangs’ thoughtful and responsible behaviour, which will protect not just gang members and associates of those at the Huntly hui, but the society which usually condemns them, with the criminal irresponsibility of the gangs which encouraged the deliberate mass breaching of Level 3 rules by especially vulnerable people (many wouldn’t have been immunised) and, experts say, are likely, despite meeting outdoors, to have further spread Covid19 among Aucklanders.
❛ People who refuse to get vaccinated will effectively be leading a Level 3 life: able only to enter places such as supermarkets and pharmacies.