Plea for seafarers
When communities bear an unequal burden of surveillance or use of force, co-operation and consent break down – if it was ever present.
I will lose my professional qualification – which took me years to obtain – due to government management of the virus.
I am, as a New Zealand seafarer, wanting to travel overseas to attend a revalidation course to renew my licence. I cannot afford to do this, as there is no allocated free access for NZ seafarers to MIQ, as there are with airline crew.
Vince Scully, Picton
You could almost hear the nation collectively breathe a sigh of relief when the prime minister announced that, at 6am tomorrow, Auckland will be back to Covid alert level 2, and the rest of the country back to level 1.
Within the space of a slightly bizarre week, the country has gone from being in level 1, to Auckland locking down, followed by virtually no new cases of Covid-19 before yesterday’s announcement.
The week has ended feeling a bit like the latest lockdown was a massive overreaction. But it wasn’t.
The main reason for this lockdown was the fact that a couple of people were less than forthcoming about contact they had with an infectious family. The possibility of spreading the virus was real, and action was taken to make sure that it didn’t. The remarkable thing is that there have been so few positive cases.
For the first time, this chapter reveals the political downside of New Zealand’s elimination strategy.
Up until now, elimination has been a big positive for the Government – the goal is simply zero tolerance of Covid cases in the community.
It is the reason why we all had a pretty good summer, and why life is much more normal in New Zealand than elsewhere. It’s a strategy that’s easily understood.
But it comes with a downside. Compare New Zealand to New South Wales: both have managed Covid equally well; both had prolonged stretches without cases in the community.
The difference is that NSW has never had an official elimination strategy. It effectively has one, but if cases do pop up, the level of comfort with risk is higher.
The outbreak that NSW had over Christmas was quickly contained and, by mid-February, the state had already gone 28 days without a new community case.
There hasn’t been another one since.
As Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said yesterday afternoon, ‘‘an elimination strategy is hard work’’.
There was much made of the fact that Ardern turned up the dial from love and kindness to sternly telling off the people who had broken the Covid rules. While some interpreted this as beating up on South Auckland and vulnerable communities, it wasn’t. It was making the point that people need to follow the rules.
But then it got much more complicated as conflicting advice emerged. One of the cases who went to work at KFC is insistent that she was not advised to selfisolate at home. The prime minister, director-general of health Ashley Bloomfield, and everyone else in Government is of the view that they were told.
Herein lies the problem for the Government. If a person was adamant that the advice they got was different to what the Government thinks it was, then clearly communication is not as good as it should have been.
The other problem, and this is one generated by the Ministry of Health, is that New Zealand’s management of little outbreaks has become more sophisticated as the contact-tracing capacity has been expanded.
But that has brought with it
complexity, such as ‘‘casual plus’’ contacts, the advice around which has changed.
Those designations are clinical decisions from the ministry, not political decisions, but basically it probably all needs simplifying again. One of the prime virtues of the alert level system was its easily understood simplicity.
While the prime minister’s
language has changed significantly from earlier in the week, there was much more clarity in her press conference yesterday around what people were required to do. Bloomfield issued an order under section 70 of the Health Act.
This was significant, because much was made of the fact that no such order had been issued until nine days after the Valentines Day
cluster, and even then it wasn’t publicly available on the ministry’s website. According to public law expert Andrew Geddis, it was also poorly written.
Bloomfield has always maintained that certain public health officials are empowered under the law to issue instructions that have to be complied with, but there is debate among public law practitioners about the extent of that power.
Either way, it is important to make these orders, and make them publicly. New Zealand is a nation of laws, and there has to be a clear legal basis for requests. The Government can’t just say things and then berate people for not following instructions when it is unclear what legal weight those instructions carry.
Either way, the whole Covid playbook probably needs to be rewritten a bit. The longer the pandemic goes on, the more fatigue sets in and the more difficult it gets.
National proposed a very sensible policy this week: make sure that people can be paid 100 per cent of their wages if they have to self-isolate (there is a limit, but it’s well above most people’s salary or wage level).
It seems crazy that the single biggest potential disincentive to isolate – an economic one – has not been closed off. Currently, the leave scheme is less than the minimum wage. National also proposed that employees could apply directly and have the money paid upfront.
When the Government designed the scheme a year ago, it was concerned about the fiscal costs, given that, at that point, it could have been inundated.
But that was then and this is now: it seems like a no-brainer. It is a few thousand people at a time, and a key defensive line against Covid getting into the broader community.
When asked about it during the week, Covid-19 Response Minister Chris Hipkins asked where National was going to get the money to pay for it. The same place the Government has got the money to pay people to hunt wallabies, and build more mountain huts, and pay the wage subsidy: by borrowing it.
The Government has been pretty good at tweaking its Covid plans and strategy in response to events. The communications side of that strategy was starting to look a bit strained and tired this week.
The longer the pandemic goes on, the more fatigue sets in and the more difficult it gets.