Looking better at the borders

Since the earliest days of the pandemic response the Government and its officials have been reassuring us systems were in place. They’d planned for this. When chastening, frankly scary, system failures of border management came to light and the gaps between policies and practices became clear, the message from PM Jacinda Ardern, and more recently her Housing Minister Megan Woods, morphed somewhat.

Now the important thing we needed to understand is that there was no rule book, no playbook, for this. So the system came before the rule book? That would make it less a system than a general like-mindedness of intent, with methodologies to follow.

We should of course accept that rules need to change once they’ve been tested and problems emerge, as they pretty reliably do. But really a rule book was needed from the outset. We couldn’t, and wouldn’t wish to, deny that right now most countries would swap their situation for ours in a nanosecond. Or that the nationwide response to the emergency has been characterised by a disciplined, sometimes heroic, collective commitment to do the right thing by one another.

But when Ardern bridles at the contention that we’re still comparatively well-placed due largely to luck, she swings too far in dismissing this as merely insulting. Granted, luck certainly hasn’t been our sole, nor even primary, saviour. That doesn’t change the fact we’ve been running risks that we shouldn’t have been, and for which we could have been savagely punished. That’s a reality we should accept and learn from. Not minimise.

Significant lapses in managed isolation and quarantine practices have rightly attained public notoriety. An audit has shown up confusion over where responsibilities fell, compassionate exemptions have been a hot mess, requirements from on high sometimes showed up in advance of resourcing, and some quite obvious issues were overlooked until they intruded on officials’ consciousness. For instance, people coming in on container ships, or private yachts, to the apparent astonishment of our guardians. Surely officials worth their salt should have anticipated this fairly early in the planning for the easing of the border closure.

The PM rejects any direct blaming of individuals. It is, she says, a matter of collective responsibility.

This memo didn’t quite seem to have reached Health Minister David Clark, who drew much attention for making clear that since director-general of health Ashley Bloomfield had accepted responsibility for system failures, no-one need look to the minister to do likewise.

Happily, corrective measures have been launched, generally in support of better resourcing, better security and better communication. It’s extraordinary that the standardisation of procedures across all facilities is showing up as a corrective measure rather than something that applied from the get-go. And how should we react to Air Commodore Darryn Webb’s declaration that the Government needs to ‘‘own’’ the system of compassionate exemption transfers? Amen or Hallelujah?

Clearly, the introduction of military personnel to beef up border security on the ground and at the upper levels has been a thoroughly good move. In the circumstances it’s hard to imagine these men and women having more pressing matters elsewhere.

It’s extraordinary that the standardisation of procedures is showing up as a corrective measure ...