MIQ lottery put politics before transparency
Iwonder if this is the moment when the narrative about the Government’s Covid response shifts. A friend working overseas couldn’t get a place in MIQ to return home to see his parents. He told me he has never felt so rejected or alone in the world. He supported New Zealand’s initial elimination approach. He voted for Jacinda Ardern and Labour. He waited until the country was vaccinated before trying to get a place at MIQ. He is a young, talented Ma¯ ori who will never call New Zealand home again. He thinks the pandemic made us narrow-minded, isolated and frightened – or perhaps revealed we were all along.
We can only convince him he’s wrong by being open-minded, accepting we make mistakes, accepting other views are valid. Justice Jill Mallon’s High Court decision against the MIQ system confirms we made some terrible decisions. We could still have protected New Zealanders from Covid without depriving others of basic rights.
The MIQ lottery system made no distinction between an MP having a holiday overseas, a mother trying to get home to say goodbye to her dying son, or a daughter wanting to hug a dying parent one last time.
When Kiwi journalist Charlotte Bellis couldn’t get back to New Zealand to have her baby, it was obvious that the lottery system was cruel. That was about the same time we learned that as many as 80 DJs and entertainers were let into the country without going through the lottery system.
The Government’s defence always sounded thin. Its position seemed to be that the courts should defer to the discretion of ministers. Hard choices had to be made, and a democratically elected government should be left to weigh the pros and cons.
The point about enshrining rights in law, though, is some rights are not to be weighed like any policy. They are so important that they should only be denied in ways consistent with democracy. If the courts are to defer to whatever ministers think is best, then what’s the point of the Bill of Rights? Guarding the rights of citizens is a fundamental duty of ministers. They have been found to have got this horribly wrong.
Political narratives can change in a moment. Germany’s former chancellor Angela Merkel left office last year a much-admired ‘‘Mutti’’. Now she is seen as the leader who not only befriended Vladimir Putin but made a pet project of the Nord Stream 2 gas pipe to bring Russian gas to Germany. Suddenly, the old narrative about her has gone.
History will always approve of the tough decisions our Government took to keep us safe in the first year of the pandemic. It showed courage and clarity. But even in that first year there were decisions that were plainly wrong – not just in hindsight, but at the time: why were supermarkets allowed to stay open, but butchers and greengrocers had to shut? A butcher with a one-in-oneout policy would have been a safer place to shop than the overcrowded supermarket meat section.
That was the first sign the Government had closed its doors to outside advice and was failing to see a difference between improving management of the pandemic and letting thousands die. It was a short jump from there to cynical politics when instead transparency was called for. It concluded throughout the crisis that public opinion would be less forgiving of going too soft than too hard.
Some rights . . . are so important that they should only be denied in ways consistent with democracy.
The Government started to be guided by politics, not science. There was no transparency when it decided to switch from AstraZeneca to Pfizer, which delayed the rollout of vaccines and may have led to the second, long Auckland lockdown. The decision had its pros and cons, but these were never openly shared with us.
There was no humility that the vaccine rollout designed by bureaucrats was not suitable to reach Ma¯ ori and Pacific communities. Ma¯ ori health providers had to take the Government to court.
There was deflection and dissembling when rapid antigen tests were banned, even though they were used extensively in other countries, then business orders for RATs were seized.
What the MIQ decision reveals is that the choice was never ‘‘keep people alive’’ or ‘‘let them die’’. There was always a more humane way to protect people here. There were lots of better ideas and innovations to help, if only there had been the humility to be open to them.
There needs to be a royal commission so that we learn lessons. The Government should call one while it can still set the terms of reference. Otherwise another government will.
Just as Germans are having to reassess ‘‘Mutti’’, it’s tough to accept mistakes were made, but pretending otherwise makes us weaker. It would prove my friend right that we are too frightened and narrow-minded to grow.