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David Seymour
ACT leader
It’s mandatory for businesses to display QR codes, but not for people to scan them. Only the Ardern Government could continue this madness.
ACT has supported compulsory scanning since January, but the Government is so complacent on COVID it’s sometimes hard to tell if there’s a global crisis on.
Our plan, COVID 2.0, said in March: ‘Require QR code scanning or other form of easy contact tracing check ins to bolster the contact tracing efforts. This followed my first call for this on January 12.
We have long said that the Government needs to do more to increase scanning use. On June 19 there were 415,000 scans, which was probably only 100,000 people using it four times a day each.
Fewer than three per cent of adult New Zealanders were using it, yet the Government did nothing.
As usual, they are reactive to a mistake, responding to the latest crisis rather than preparing for the next one.
The Government hasn’t advanced anything this year, contract tracing is still not up to scratch and we saw a mess in Wellington last week when testing needed to be ramped up.
There are plenty of other ideas in our COVID 2.0 plan, I implore Jacinda Ardern and Chris Hipkins to have a read and adopt more of our plans so we can be more proactive instead of reacting when things go wrong.
A full list of 15 policy proposals are available to the Government, free of charge from ACT here: https://www.act.org.nz/covid-response
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