Families ‘pay price’ for latest blanket ban

The Government’s blanket ban on compassionate exemptions is an illconsidered and automated response that is seeing grieving families “paying the ultimate price”, Oliver Christiansen says.

Over the past two months, Christiansen knows all too well the impact of the Government’s decisions which saw him take director general of health Ashley Bloomfield and the Ministry of Health all the way to the High Court to get a decision overturned so that he could see his dying father.

He arrived in New Zealand from the United Kingdom on April 23, before applying for an exemption from managed isolation — based on compassionate grounds — so he could see his father for the last time.

The Ministry of Health, after first mistaking what was being asked for, repeatedly declined the application.

After winning his case at the Auckland High Court it sparked a review of applications like his, with many winning.

Christiansen is now back in the United Kingdom but has been following the “shambles” that has unravelled in New Zealand over the past week after two women were allowed to travel from Auckland to Wellington without being tested for Covid-19.

The women later tested positive, with Bloomfield revealing there were more than 300 close contacts of the women, including two who the pair “kissed and cuddled” after getting lost on the Auckland motorway.

After the bungle, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said she was putting a blanket ban on approving any compassionate exemptions for Kiwis returning home to see dying relatives.

Christiansen said it wasn’t fair and that grieving families shouldn’t be the ones having to pay “the ultimate price for the Government’s inability to follow its own procedures even at the most agonising time”.

“You only get one chance to farewell a loved one and to have that taken away is obviously going to have lasting effects and it will never be forgotten.”