Rewards outweigh risks
The trans-Tasman bubble that couldn’t come soon enough
Today marks the first day of quarantine-free transTasman travel. It is also a significant date because it marks New Zealand’s slow reopening to the post-Covid world.
This is the riskiest thing Jacinda Ardern’s Government, which has erred on the side of caution throughout the pandemic, has done to date.
There are significant rewards from restarting the free flow of people across the Tasman: some economic and some personal.
But let’s keep that risk in perspective. The chance of any positive Covid cases being imported from Australia is extremely low. The minute that risk ticks up significantly – in the case of an outbreak somewhere in Australia – travel will likely be paused.
The Australians will do the same in the event of an outbreak here.
While both nations are cooperating in this new regime, invested in its success, ultimately each is rightly being left to manage its own border in accordance with its national interest.
The closed border has separated many trans-Tasman families.
Politicians, business people and many others have found out over the past year just how important people-to-people contact is to maintaining relationships and doing business.
Zoom or Google Meet are both great, but they are not substitutes for the real thing.
At a political level there is a real feeling that the trans-Tasman relationship has become a bit sandpapery as a result of leaders and other ministers not being able to see each other in the flesh.
Throwing up the walls and keeping others out has been to New Zealand’s short-term economic advantage. Aided by a small population, distance and a border entirely bound by sea, New Zealand has been capable of mostly keeping Covid out.
That has meant that for more than a year Australians have not been able to come to New Zealand. New Zealanders coming from Australia have had to go through a rigorous quarantine regime.
While New Zealanders have been able to travel to Australia, mostly quarantine-free, since last October, they faced two weeks in a hotel on the way back.
For the Government, there is mostly only upside to this decision. There will be many people in the community nervous about these decisions and waiting nervously to see if Covid enters the country.
But they will be vastly outweighed by a restarted tourist and travel trade, family reunifications and people remembering the fact that it’s not the Government’s place to put bans on travel unless absolutely necessary.
While there is a very legitimate argument that the Government should have pushed more firmly on an already open door many months ago, that now means little.
What will matter now is the forward maintenance of quarantine-free travel and the proportionate management of risk.
Panicking and shutting the border as the first sign out cases has not served most Australian states well, and it would not serve New Zealand well either.
The traffic light framework introduced by the government to manage this new system – green for go, orange for pause, red for suspend – is an easily explained system to govern travel.
Yet, ultimately it is political. Cabinet, on the advice of Ashley Bloomfield and his health officials, will still be the final arbiter of travel freedom.
It is a system of caveat emptor – buyer beware – for those travelling.
Over the next few months there is a reasonable chance that some limited number of people could have their travel plans interrupted.
That simply reflects the new world that we live in until Covid is under control around the globe – most likely until most of the world’s population is vaccinated.
Either way it is a watershed day for the Government.
It is also a good day for the opposition parties – for the appropriate pressure they have kept on Labour and Ardern to make this happen.
For a small trading nation at the bottom of the world, reliant on importing goods, services and – most importantly perhaps, human capital and skilled labour – reopening and reintegrating cannot come soon enough.
This is the first, small step towards doing that.
The next will be getting the vaccine rollout right.
It is a system of
caveat emptor – buyer beware – for those travelling.