Health Minister ‘wanted to shut borders to Kiwis’
The Ministry of Health recommended shutting the borders to returning Kiwis, Foreign Affairs Minister Winston Peters has revealed.
The Ministry pushed ‘‘really hard’’ for the measure but leaving New Zealanders stranded was ‘‘simply inconceivable’’ to the Cabinet, he said. He confirmed that under international law, it would not have been legal to close the border to citizens.
‘‘As a blanket proposal, no, it would not be legal but you can stagger that by for example saying we will take one flight a month and thereby get inside the law. So we would have complied with the law and dramatically saved more people. We did not go down that path.’’
Those citizens would have had the right to feel forsaken by their country, he said. ‘‘The Ministry of
Health recommended a total shutdown of the border, including to returning New Zealanders. From a health perspective this was understandable and appropriate advice. But the Coalition Cabinet rejected that advice because it was and is inconceivable that we will ever turn our backs on our own. So, on March 17, New Zealanders were urged to come home while commercial options remained available.’’
There would have been a serious international backlash had they shut the border to citizens, he said. The Government then built, from scratch, a managed isolation and quarantine systems to mitigate against the heightened health risk posed by returning New Zealanders, he said.
During a speech yesterday, he also hit back at critics of the Government’s Covid-19 response, saying it shut the border far sooner than most other countries.
Citing international comparisons compiled by Ministry of
Foreign Affairs and Trade, Peters pushed back at criticism of the Government for doing too little too late to combat Covid-19. ‘‘Globally speaking, we went hard and we went early. International comparisons reveal that New Zealand was extremely unusual in closing our borders to foreigners and in implementing a lockdown before we had lost a single person to Covid-19. Very few countries did this.’’
Peters signalled that Cabinet would consider, in coming weeks, its foreign and trade policy approach in the new Covid-19 world.
‘‘We need to be focused on how New Zealand positions itself in the new normal emerging following the arrival of Covid-19.’’
About 80,000 New Zealanders had so far travelled home and many thousands of those were assisted by Mfat, he said.
Assistance had ranged from chartering planes to fly stranded New Zealanders home; getting Kiwis on to repatriation flights run by partners, including Australia, Singapore and the United Kingdom; smoothing transit issues; and providing advice about travel options, he said.
The managed exit of foreign citizens stranded in New Zealand was another complex decision, he said.
The Government had taken a measured and reciprocal approach to repatriations of New Zealanders stranded abroad and of foreign nationals stranded in New Zealand, he said.
One of the underpinnings of relations between nations was reciprocity, he said.
‘‘That is, we expect other countries to help return our people to New Zealand – so it would be wrong and dangerous to prevent foreign nationals from leaving here. Cabinet rightly decided that, despite advice raising risks about the potential negative health consequences of such a decision, we needed to safely manage the exit of foreign nationals. So we did.’’