Inside MFAT’s biggest job
MFAT’s Chris Seed says mercy flights aren’t coming for everyone – but New Zealand will not abandon its citizens offshore. By Henry Cooke.
The world started shutting down in March. On Friday March 13 there were still 100,000 commercial flights flying worldwide. One week later that had dropped to 75,000 – within two weeks it was down to 50,000, and now there’s only around 30,000 a day, many of them close-to-empty domestic flights.
This presented a big problem for New Zealand. We’re a travelling people but even at the best of times it requires a lot of links in a chain to get home. On one day in March just 23 flights arrived in Auckland airport – there’s usually more than 420.
One man tracking this closely was Chris Seed, the head of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade (MFAT), who had just told the between 70,000 and 80,000 Kiwis travelling around the world that they should come home, immediately.
Throughout New Zealand’s history MFAT had never made a call that large – that any New Zealander anywhere who was not already living overseas should get on a flight home. On 17 March it did. But the historic call was soon followed by two more: two days later MFAT told Kiwis at home not to travel themselves. Then on 24 March it told all those Kiwis overseas that they should actually sit tight and ‘‘shelter in place’’ – unless they had a rocksolid route home.
‘‘The difference between the 19th and the 24th was just the speed with which a lot of the international airline system closed down,’’ Seed said.
‘‘People were getting trapped in transit.’’
And many of those in other situations had a somewhat unrealistic hope that New Zealand would come pick them up with a ‘‘mercy flight’’ – some kind of repatriation charter flight. This was leading to them not conserving their cash, or finding a place to stay long-term.
‘‘We felt people were focusing on the wrong solutions. They may have invested in a solution which wasn’t going to turn up any time soon, and they were much better to concentrate their effort and their resources on staying in place and sheltering.’’
Mercy flights have been organised by New Zealand in the weeks since, often after a lot of public pressure. Flights
have been organised by the New Zealand government out of Peru, India and China. Many other Kiwis have hitched onto government flights organised by other nations such as Canada and Australia – from Nepal, Bangladesh, and Japan.
Seed said there was a formula for working out when these mercy flights made sense but they would be the exception not the norm. You needed to have a critical mass of Kiwis in place where they really didn’t have another option to get home, and then the diplomatic push to make it happen – Foreign Affairs Minister Winston Peters was involved, talking to his counterparts in Peru and Chile to get Kiwis through strict travel restrictions there.
‘‘Charters and so-called mercy flights, they’re the last option when all the other possibilities have been excised. You remember a lot of the issues about mercy flights or charter flights came out of Europe, which we always thought was very odd, because even today, you can fly commercially from Europe to New
Zealand. We thought it seemed people should probably have been focusing on those options rather than thinking that a plane with a koru was going to turn up,’’ Seed said.
It’s also quite expensive – millions have been spent on the around $12,500 a ticket fares with passengers paying a token fee equivalent to a commercial flight. This is money the Government is happy to spend when the numbers are small – but there are still thousands of Kiwis overseas and they won’t all be getting $12,500 flights home.
Since the advice, more than 17,000 Kiwis have returned home, but only around 500 have been put on a flight directly by NZ.
Mercy flights will simply not be possible for some Kiwis in extremely remote areas although Seed said MFAT had other solutions for any Kiwi stranded.
Covid-19 is the single biggest event the organisation has ever dealt with. Kiwis across 139 different jurisdictions have asked the organisation for help, and every one of those jurisdictions is part of a constantly shifting web of new rules and dangers. Seed compares it to a Rubik’s Cube – there’s a lot to line up.
And so-called ‘‘consular help’’ is just one part of MFAT’s job right now. At a time when the world itself is shutting down, our remaining connections within it are more
Head of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade important than ever.
‘‘We’re trying to, in our case, support a range of activities in the Pacific, making sure our global supply chains are operating in relation to pharmaceuticals. We’re trying to ensure that we understand what other countries are doing, not only about dealing with our nationals, but also themselves, thinking about lockdown. And we’re sustaining our network of posts offshore.’’
A special Emergency Covid Response Centre was set up in late January and made 24/7 six weeks ago. It now takes in 418 staff across three shifts, themselves working with the 62 foreign postings MFAT maintains around the world – although seven of these are closed due to Covid-19.
Close to a thousand individual cases of people needing MFAT’s help have now been managed around the world.
Some of this work is advice and even a bit of crisis travel agenting – a distressed person somewhere in the world might think there are no commercial flights available when there actually are a few.
Sometimes it’s help getting prescription medicines, or financially as a traveller’s money is running out. At other points it’s fiendishly complex – particularly when it involves a cruise ship where infection is likely.
Seed says New Zealand is not going to be able to directly fly to the rescue of every single Kiwi offshore, but it won’t give up on anyone.
‘‘There definitely will be some people we won’t be able to get to, that we won’t be able to help in that way of sending an airplane, but we continue to use all the tools that we’ve got, using our relationship with the Brits, the Americans, the Australians and the Canadians, who have bigger reach.
‘‘There are a lot of things that we can and will continue to do. It’s not that we’re abandoning anyone.’’
‘‘Charters and so-called mercy flights, they’re the last option when all the other possibilities have been excised... We thought it seemed people should probably have been focusing on [commercial] options rather than thinking that a plane with a koru was going to turn up.’’ Chris Seed