Analysis: There's little relief for businesses and separated families, with two more weeks' wait before Cabinet decides when to open the border to Australia
If there’s an outbreak in either New Zealand or Australia in the next two weeks the clock will almost certainly start again as either country sees out the Covid incubation period.
News late on Monday that a border worker has tested positive for Covid-19 will already be ringing warning bells at the highest levels.
And Jacinda Ardern has given no indication of when the bubble might actually commence if it gets the green light from Cabinet on April 6.
It could be weeks, it could be months, or worse, not at all.
Covid Response Minister Chris Hipkins revealed last week that Australia had pulled out of a joint framework for a bubble with New Zealand back in February, and now a unitary approach was being worked through with individual states.
After twelve rounds of meetings over nine months it’s been pretty much back to the drawing board for both sides.
Why both countries hadn’t already been doing the work on what a state-by-state model would look like, given it was raised as a potential alternative back in April, is anyone’s guess.
At the time Winston Peters was deputy prime minister and Foreign Affairs Minister and said there was merit in opening up to the eastern border of Australia or on a state-by-state basis first. It would speed things up and show resistant states how it could be done, eventually leading to an all-of-Australia approach.
It was raised with Ardern and Robertson at the time but never progressed any further.
Now the Labour-majority government is doing exactly that.
In her post-Cabinet press conference on Monday, Ardern said both countries had always been working on a two-country arrangement because “quite simply it was easier’’. It was her view that it would be faster to try and formulate an arrangement with Australia that took in all states, she said.
But asked by Newsroom if it would have been better to have taken a state-by-state approach in the first place, Ardern conceded a bubble would have opened earlier under that model.
She went on to say the Government had been trying to negotiate a framework that meant there would be some “consistency with the way we were dealing with Australia as a whole’’.
That would mean if an outbreak popped up anywhere in Australia, then New Zealand would shut the border until that particular hotspot was sorted, potentially stranding thousands of Kiwis overseas.
Under a state-by-state model individual states can, and already do, shut their borders when an outbreak flares up in another state.
In that situation New Zealand travellers in the one affected state would be stranded – not every Kiwi visiting Australia at the time.
Given the Government has constantly reiterated the problem it would create if thousands of Kiwis or Aussies were stranded in either country, it makes little sense as to why it was so determined to secure a model that would wreak the most havoc in an outbreak.
Treating New Zealand like an extra state of Australia goes against everything Kiwis believe in but in this case it makes the most sense.
Another hurdle the Government has repeatedly used as a reason why Australia isn’t ready for a bubble is the fact it has an exit visa for Australians wanting to leave the country.
Using a bit of paper as some great obstacle to a trans-Tasman bubble has been perplexing to those watching the debate closely.
Again on Monday, Ardern referenced the visa being something the Australian government needed to work through.
When an Australian journalist pointed out it had been lifted, Ardern shifted tack saying it had been part of talks between the two countries and it had been removed in preparation for the bubble.
Even as the bubble apparently draws closer it seems Ardern is citing non-existent reasons it can’t yet go ahead.
Keeping New Zealand free from Covid-19 is of course the ultimate goal, and most New Zealanders will rightly put safety ahead of any bubble.
But at some point the issues a closed border creates need to be addressed.
For now at least, a date for that remains unknown.
