Follow the science? If only it were that simple
The reductive online argot currently fashionable among all generations from Millennials downwards has an unfortunate tendency to render quite important principles almost useless. A recent example of this is the annoying digi-maxim ‘‘Because science’’, used to express a desire among the digi-cognoscenti for science to set the direction of political decisionmaking.
On balance, this is no doubt a good thing. Governments around the world can and routinely do make terrible decisions that aren’t just unscientific – they’re anti-scientific.
There’s no doubt as to why this style of thinking is popular among Millennials, Zoomers and all other assorted ‘‘-oomers’’ under 30: these generations face a lifetime of climate politics spent cleaning up the resolute mess of anti- and unscientific decisions.
But the recent debate over whether epidemic science justifies further restricting the ability of New Zealanders to return home – possibly to the point of temporarily stopping all arrivals from certain countries – has helpfully highlighted the limits of scientific politics. To reply with another digital catchcall: ‘‘Because science? I can’t even . . .’’
New Zealand’s Covid-19 response has been blessed with a host of able scientific communicators expounding their expertise, and a Government generally willing to listen and act on that advice. Multi-credentialled scientists Siouxsie Wiles, Shaun Hendy, Michael Baker, and David Skegg have each furnished advice and opinion from their own fields.
But the prime minister has never said she’ll blindly follow the scientific consensus no matter where it leads (and consensus is fairly fluid in the midst of a fast-moving pandemic).
There’s good reason for this. A government’s job is always to balance the competing interests laid before it, working out which are the most important and acting on them. In a pandemic, heath science and epidemiology clearly take precedence, but they’re not the only interests.
Policy guided by science must be bound by the law, particularly human rights law. Bad, out-of-date laws can be changed if they’re no longer fit for purpose. The Government showed some willingness to do this in the litigation over the first lockdown. But our rights, expressed in New Zealand’s Bill of Rights, are something else entirely.
When health officials recommended the border be shut completely last year, the Government rightly threw the suggestion out. Further restrictions at the border, beyond the pre-flight tests rolled out this summer, could make coming home so difficult that it breaches the Bill of Rights. New Zealanders have a right to come home; that right must be balanced against the risk their return represents to the health of others – but it can’t be stripped away entirely.
There’s a naive tendency among some observers to assume that the perfect policy can be arrived at almost by algorithm: enter the science here, input the budget there, adjust for risk appetite, and out pops the optimum policy. Such a tendency is as common in Covid policy as it is in areas like climate change, where businesses expect the government to arrive at economically perfect policy guided by to-the-decimalpoint modelling.
This is a fallacy – but an understandable one in an age in which we consciously and subconsciously outsource ever more thinking to algorithms.
Perfect scientific policy doesn’t exist ... and even if [it] did, there’s no guarantee it would be ethical.
Perfect scientific policy doesn’t exist; a policy based on the science of epidemiology has to be balanced against the policy that comes from other sciences: behavioural science and mental health to name but two. And even if some perfect scientific policy did exist – one that were able to aggregate all possible scientific advice – there’s no guarantee it would be ethical.
This is precisely the issue the Government is currently grappling with. Shutting the border completely, or further damming the trickle of returnees, appears to this non-scientist like very good scientific policy. Slamming the door shut would likely take the Government’s Covid-19 response over the ethical boundary it has so far only brushed up against, but failed to cross.
No-one thinks this is easy. Covid policy is an ethical quandary: is it appropriate to charge returning New Zealanders for quarantine, when they might not have paid tax here for decades; what to do with returnees who use New Zealand MIQ as a back door to Australia; how to balance the rights of Kiwis overseas with the expectation of Kiwis at home not to live in a perpetual state of rolling lockdowns; and how to balance the effects of Covid across the generations?
Refusing to follow science down an ethical rabbit hole isn’t a failure of politics or politicians – it’s politics doing its job. For that reason – and for the reason that functioning politics is becoming ever more rare around the world – it’s something we should be thankful for.