Like or hate Sir John Key's suggested solutions for NZ's Covid recovery, in one intervention the former Prime Minister has forced the Government and country to confront finding a way out of a drawbridge and lockdown mentality
It took just one weekend news column for Sir John Key to do what the entire National Party has failed to do throughout the past 18 months. In tones reminiscent of his time as Prime Minister he not only put forward a critique of the government’s performance on Covid-19, but also set out his own five-point plan for what should happen next. More importantly, he dominated the news cycles for the first half of this week as a result.
It was a straightforward, clear, and concise performance – a pointed reminder of what a loss his departure was to the National Party. Whether one agreed with his comments or not did not matter. Sir John grabbed public attention and forced his former opponents to respond. In the past four years no-one from National has come even close to commanding media attention the way he has done in recent days. Aside from anything else, his comments highlighted once more the woeful state of the National Party today, which this week’s Colmar Brunton poll has further reinforced.
Sir John’s timing could not have been better. Not only did his comments gazump National’s Covid-19 recovery plan announcement (although he says he was not aware of it at the time), but they also came at a time of renewed focus on the next stages of New Zealand’s fight against the pandemic. With other countries – including Britain, Ireland, Denmark and now Norway – already having removed Covid-19 restrictions, and others, like states of Australia, talking of doing so once a certain level of vaccination is achieved, the question is being asked more and more frequently – but not yet adequately responded to by the Government – about when similar relaxations might occur here.
There has been vague talk of maybe doing away with Level 3 and 4 lockdowns once more than 90 percent of the eligible population has been vaccinated, and a very limited pilot programme of home self-isolation has just been announced for business travellers returning from overseas. Beyond that, there are no target dates for when borders might reopen, nor is it clear what life is going to look like for the general population even a few months from now. Everything is couched in terms of hope and aspiration, rather than firm intent, leading to Sir John’s retort, “hope is not a plan.”
For its part, the Government’s response is that Covid-19 is a constantly changing event, meaning it is best for New Zealand to watch developments elsewhere before setting New Zealand’s future course. This has some initial merit but fundamentally is logically inconsistent. After all, waiting for an ever-changing situation to stabilise simply means nothing will ever happen. Other countries grappling with the same issue have concluded that the time is now right to seek a return to the near normality of a couple of years ago. Meanwhile, in New Zealand, the prudent initial caution last year in the face of the pandemic is turning into obstinacy in the face of international practice.
Britain’s Daily Telegraph reported last week that most international epidemiologists – but not New Zealand’s hermit variety it appears – now see achieving “Zero Covid” as unrealistic, and that instead the virus will become less and less harmful as immunity increases, to the extent that it will become just like another winter flu. Certainly, they say, that has been the pattern of previous similar coronaviruses, so there is little reason to believe this one will be any different over time. But, yet again, this international perspective has been dismissed as not relevant to New Zealand.
The problem for New Zealand is that because of the heavy primary reliance on lockdowns to control outbreaks of the virus, and the initially appallingly low rates of vaccination, we are unlikely to build up for some time the levels of community immunity there is in other countries, meaning potentially that our path out of Covid-19 may be slower, because community resistance will be lower. But this concern may be overstated. With our generally sparsely spread population the risk of low community immunity may be balanced by the spread of our population and the comparatively low number of cases overall. The prevalence of cases in Auckland to date would tend to suggest that likelihood. When cases have appeared out of Auckland they have not spread widely and have been quickly suppressed.
In this regard, the Government’s constant warning that it cannot let Covid-19 overrun the health system is worth noting. One of the reasons this is a major issue, aside from the individual health implications, is a genuine fear that our Intensive Care Units could not cope with a substantial and constant number of Covid-19 cases. This fear arises because, by way of international comparison, we have one of the lowest rates of ICU beds per 100,000 population of the countries we benchmark ourselves against. To make matters worse, our ICU bed numbers here are currently declining, rather than increasing.
What this says very loudly is that inadequate ICU capacity to deal with a surge in Covid-19 numbers is the primary reason why the Government seems more reluctant than any in the world to reduce the restrictions imposed over the past 18 months. Any moves to open up New Zealand to itself, let alone the rest of the world, risks exposing this gross deficiency. So, best to keep the borders closed and New Zealanders restricted in the meantime, no matter what is happening in the rest of the world.
According to ICU specialists, we do not even have enough beds currently for normal circumstances, let alone any pandemic-related emergency. In addition, there is an estimated shortfall of around 100 specially trained ICU nurses, further exposing the parlous state of current intensive care facilities. While the lead times for building additional facilities and training additional staff are long, it is scandalous that services have been going backwards since the outbreak of the pandemic, and that the country’s move to a post-Covid-19 situation is being held up because of it. Even worse is the fact that nothing appears to be being done about it, despite persistent calls over the past year for improvements in ICU services. Talk that existing facilities could be re-purposed to cope in the event of a major emergency still overlook the fact that there are not the numbers of trained professionals available to help.
Although, according to the Treasury, the Government has so far allocated more than $62 billion to Covid-19 recovery programmes – borrowed at the rate of $1 billion per week as Sir John Key pointed out – none of that seems to have been allocated to any form of upgrade, however short term, to our ICU infrastructure. Meanwhile, all range of other projects, big and small, have been funded from the Covid-19 recovery fund – including many with little or no apparent link to the pandemic. Nor is there any sign things are likely to change.
New Zealand increasingly looks trapped in a Covid-19 straitjacket of its own making. While we made considerable progress last year in eliminating the first wave of the virus, we have failed subsequently to maintain the momentum established then. Our slow moves to obtain supplies of vaccines, and then our, until recently, sluggish approach to vaccination saw us slip behind other countries. Now, while our domestic vaccination rates are improving and coming near to matching those in other countries we still cling to a cumbersome, unfair and outmoded MIQ system, which compromises New Zealanders’ citizenship right, by effectively preventing them from returning home when they wish.
Nor are we yet anywhere near any real plan to reopen borders and the country as a whole. There are signs emerging that New Zealand is being cut out of business and transport loops because we are regarded as too much of a closed shop to New Zealanders as well as outsiders, with no real prospect of that changing in the near future.
Although Sir John Key’s plan is not perfect, it may end up being the circuit breaker the country needs. At the very least, by virtue of its simplicity and now being out in the public arena it will become the benchmark against which future Government decisions and actions (as well as policy from Opposition parties) are judged.
For that reason, and quite remarkably, a weekend opinion piece from a former Prime Minister has held the Government directly to account much more successfully than the official Opposition has been able to do at any point since the outbreak of Covid-19.
