The injection this Government needs is a shot of urgency
Why isn’t the Health Minister on the phone, demanding health boards lift their game? asks Steven Joyce
This week’s Wellington Covid scare brings into sharp relief the Government’s lackadaisical approach to getting out of this pandemic.
If we get through without any local community transmission, it will once again be more by good luck than good management.
Wellington’s vaccination performance is at the woeful end of an already woefully slow national rollout. Reports this week suggest less than 8 per cent of the population has had at least one jab.
The nightmare scenario would be if one of the virulent new strains gets established here and rips through a largely unvaccinated population. It’s hard not to feel like we are sitting ducks.
If we do start to see community cases, the Government will re-impose lockdowns and heavily restrict people’s freedom of movement and their ability to do useful things like earn a living. Already, the on-again, off-again transtasman travel bubble is looking more like playing a game of border roulette than a safe way to travel.
Throughout this pandemic, the burden of a slow Government response has been borne by the general population. Excessive personal restrictions have become the go-to tool, in preference to officials having their feet held to the fire by impatient politicians.
While the first lockdown last year was understandable, subsequent ones have been caused by a poor track and trace effort, or a “Keystone Cops” approach to running MIQ facilities.
Meanwhile, migrant families have been ripped apart for a year or more, and people have been prevented from visiting dying relatives because the Government machine can’t organise itself to crank up enough MIQ places, or indeed, properly manage the ones it has.
The skills shortage is becoming extreme. The tech industry has largely run out of people to hire, and some companies are musing about moving work offshore. Our international education sector, too, has been steadily dismantled. While some providers are trying to cuddle up to the Government in an attempt to obtain a few more border places, Canada and the UK are stealing a march on us. New Zealand is getting an increasingly deserved reputation for being indifferent to the bright young things that want to pay to study in Western democracies like ours. Providers are getting desperate.
Officials regularly complain about New Zealanders’ lax approach to using the Covid tracing app and that is undoubtedly true. When there is no clear and present danger, most people can’t be bothered pulling out their phone to scan a code every time they go into a shop or caf. Unfortunately, it looks a lot like the Government has the same attitude, shrugging its shoulders and wombling along with a slow vaccination rollout. It fills in its time instead writing policy papers on the utopia that awaits us once they have completely reorganised our previously successful economy some years after the pandemic has passed.
The difference between an overly relaxed population and a sleepy Government is that we are paying them to look out for our interests. It is their job, and they should be working much harder and with more urgency at getting the place back to normal so people have the freedom to live their lives.
Internationally, the difference in urgency and determination is marked. Great Britain, the US, Europe are all doing everything in their power to return to normality as quickly as possible. Certainly, they have had it tougher. But they are also much more realistic that free money and constant government borrowing can’t work forever as a substitute for a vibrant, connected economy. And to them the freedom of their citizens and the ability to go about their lives is important.
So what should our Government be doing to show that it is actually focused on getting us all out of this pandemic and restoring normal life as quickly as possible?
It could start by visibly accelerating the vaccine rollout. The Minister of Health should demand a much faster rollout plan from each of the District Health Boards — and insist they meet national targets. His schtick about blaming the DHB structure is wearing thin. Tony Ryall would never have accepted that excuse from officials. He would have personally rung all the DHB chairs and upped their ambition, and then published league tables on their performance.
Of course we will need more vaccines. The Minister should be putting public pressure on MedSafe to pull finger and get more approved. It is hard to believe we are pretty much the only country in the world that is reliant purely on one vaccine and one vaccine maker; and that everyone else is too hasty. Yes, Medsafe is independent, but in my experience a little public ministerial pressure to get their A into G wouldn’t hurt.
Speaking of vaccine-makers, we need much more visibility on the deal the Government has done with Pfizer. Despite Minister Hipkins’ protestations, we are clearly at the wrong end of the queue, so why is that? Commercial sensitivity doesn’t cut it as an excuse. You can white out the price and release every other aspect of the deal. We need to understand why we are waiting and why volunteer vaccinators are cooling their jets instead of putting jabs in arms.
Beyond the vaccines, the Prime Minister should show some leadership by declaring her intention to get our border back to normal and allow reasonable freedom of movement as soon as is safely possible.
She needs to put the boffins and the Fabian Society theorists back in their boxes, and declare that our postpandemic problem is a shortage of labour, not a surplus.
She should have officials working rapidly on plans to allow vaccinated people to travel more freely, as both a method of restoring personal freedoms, and as a clear incentive for people to seek vaccination. If it’s good enough for Air New Zealand cabin crew, it’s good enough for everyone else.
Most importantly, the Government needs to grow a backbone when dealing with the public service. They’ve stuffed it full of money and people. It is not ministers’ job to justify a lacklustre performance. It is their job to demand more on our behalf.
We need to understand why we are waiting and why volunteer vaccinators are cooling their jets instead of putting jabs in arms.