It will be just before midnight on April 18 before the trans-Tasman bubble opens for business, despite the Director-General of Health saying Australia was safe months ago. The Government blames “the systems” for the delay, but Political editor Jo Moir explains why the public has been a handbrake.
Ask the Prime Minister what her number one concern has been for opening a trans-Tasman bubble and without fail she says, “public safety’’, which is why the Government has “taken the time to get it right’’.
For 10 months now, officials in both countries have been working on getting planes flying across the ditch with no need for managed isolation on arrival.
Australia gave up waiting for its neighbour with some states opening up a one-way bubble in October, but still the Government insisted more work needed to be done.
On Tuesday Jacinda Ardern announced the Director-General of Health, Doctor Ashley Bloomfield, deemed the risk of transmission of Covid-19 from Australia to New Zealand is “low and that quarantine-free travel is safe to commence’’.
But on further inquiry from Newsroom, Covid Response Minister Chris Hipkins revealed he’d been in regular discussions with Bloomfield for six months and the health boss’ “assessment that Australia’s a low-risk country has been consistent for some time’’.
The hold-up was Bloomfield’s advice that “the systems have not been in place to allow for safe green zone travel both ways between both countries’’.
The systems officials have been working on have been focused on airports and how travellers make the trip from one end to the other safely, keeping bubble travellers separate from other incoming flights that may have Covid-positive passengers, and the contact tracing and processes for opening, pausing and in some cases closing the bubble if there were an outbreak in either country.
Talk to airports and they’ll tell you they’ve had their systems ready to go since August last year when health officials gave the all-clear to Christchurch, Auckland and Wellington.
The only advice the Ministry of Health has come back to airports with since then is extra cleaning when the bubble opens up, and other routine measures.
In the case of Wellington Airport, no managed isolation and quarantine flights land directly in the capital from overseas countries, so mitigating risks around mixing up trans-Tasman passengers with those potentially exposed overseas is and always has been non-existent.
And despite the political pressure ramping up from both National and ACT, the Government has been happy to continue with the go-slow citing a “cautious’’ approach in the name of public health and safety.
The reality is other than tourism operators and those whose businesses are directly impacted by tourist arrivals, most other New Zealanders accept it’s worth taking the time to get it right.
While there are plenty of Kiwis who have family and loved ones in Australia they wish they could have been with in their final days, or in their first few days, there is still a general acceptance that the luxury of an effective elimination strategy comes at a cost.
And the minute there’s a new outbreak in an Australian state, or here on New Zealand shores, any cries for a bubble simmer as the country’s own freedoms get pushed to the forefront.
It’s that sort of public sentiment – whether it be from the PM’s own inbox or focus groups or polling – that means she hasn’t felt the Opposition and business pressure to be hasty.
What further proof does she need that the country for the most part has backed her cautious approach than the election result that delivered a Labour-majority government under MMP?
Taking the time to tick all the boxes gives Ardern as much certainty as possible that there’s no holes in the bubble.
After seeing failures at the border time and time again over the last year, the Government is fully aware that no system is perfect, and when no other countries around the world are entering into quarantine-free travel zones there’s no pressure to move quickly.
Despite what some would see as unnecessary delays to opening the bubble, Ardern was still able to announce on Tuesday that New Zealand and Australia were “world-leading” and “starting a new chapter’’.
Pushing the start date out to April has allowed the Government to get border workers vaccinated – plugging what has been a huge hole at the frontline – giving the public peace of mind that if something does go wrong at the airport it’s less likely to lead to an outbreak.
For more than a year now, Kiwis have been told repeatedly that the border being closed is the biggest protection the country has for keeping Covid at bay.
More recently the nation has enjoyed a summer of festivals, freedom and travel not seen in other parts of the world.
Bloomfield’s advice that Australia has been safe to open up travel to for some months is actually immaterial.
When the Government has got as far as it has with an elimination strategy that almost every other country around the world is jealous of, why would it risk throwing it all away on the home straight?
While the political will to open the bubble any earlier has been missing, more importantly the public will hasn’t been there either.
Having the team on your side in politics is the difference between being in government, or not.
