Why returning Kiwis shouldn’t have to pay

Labour is surely not really considering this, is it? Does it really expect to lock up all Kiwis returning from abroad – albeit in comfortable rooms – and then get them to pay for it?

Nevertheless, Housing Minister Megan Woods has said the Government is looking closely at its options.

New Zealanders have a legal right to return to New Zealand. Covid has not changed that. The fact that the Government insists that all returners enter quarantine is not their fault. Frankly it seems that requiring people to have to cough up some sort of co-payment fails even the most basic fairness test.

It’s not returning Kiwis’ fault that the Government has decided to close the border and introduce quarantine.

The list of reasons why this policy would be unworkable starts with the fact that a lot of people are returning home precisely because their visas have expired, or they can no longer work wherever in the world they were pre-Covid. They are victims of the global recession as much as the Kiwis resident in New Zealand who have lost their jobs.

Or, it is a fact that there are many people who have been stuck in far-flung parts of the world have struggled to get back, and are only just arriving now.

And who would pay what? It wouldn’t be worth means testing it, yet clearly some people – particularly those from Australia without jobs or access to Australian welfare – wouldn’t have the means to pay.

There is a case to ask some foreign nationals, America’s Cup teams and film crews and so, on to foot the bill. Yet there seems to be a minority view, stoked along by talkback radio and elsewhere, that somehow Kiwis are being treated to a comfy holiday, paid for by the public purse. They are not. Returning Kiwis are being forcibly detained in Governmentrun facilities in order for the Government to achieve a wider public health goal.

Putting people through the quarantine and government isolation regime (there are both isolation facilities and more strict quarantine hotels) will have cost about $81 million by the end of June. The government has put aside another $280 million until the end of year. It is not chump change. But viewed in the wider context of the entire Government response to Covid-19 (it voted itself $52 billion by June 30 along to deal with this) that’s not much money. The fact that there are now new cases being picked up in isolation facilities shows the policy is working.

Fortunately, the co-payment talk is most likely a bit of political misdirection by the Government, trying to make the political conversation about who should pay, not the clear failings in its testing regime that have come to light over the past week. Even the Aussies don’t make detainees on Christmas Island pay for their own incarceration.

Returning Kiwis are being forcibly detained in Government-run facilities.