The BFD | Lessons Learnt?

Chris Penk

First published by The BFD 26th June 2020

The BFD is serialising National MP Chris Penk’s book Flattening the Country by publishing an extract every day.

Lessons learnt?

The stresses and strains on New Zealand’s teaching fraternity must have been enormous. As always, I take my hat off to those working hard in our schools to educate the minds of our next generation.

The key criterion for children’s re-entry to the schooling system at the changeover to Alert Level 3 was whether they could remain at home, from the perspective of their parents or caregivers. Little wonder that many teachers complained they were being treated primarily as providers of childcare, rather than educators.

Partial reopening of education

Early childhood centres and schools will be available up to Year 10 only, but attendance is purely voluntary. For children who are able, distance learning is still the best option. Tertiary education will mostly be through distance learning.

Act as though you have covid-19, we were all being told while the country was locked down at Alert Level 3.

Act as though no-one has covid-19¸however, was the message for most teachers at the same time.

Perhaps the most unfortunately memorable moment in relation to this issue came during one of the daily 1pm briefings.

The Prime Minister was asked about criticism by the principal of Morrinsville College, who was clearly concerned for the health of his students. He’d recorded the following in a newsletter to parents: “Children can contract Covid-19 and pass it on when asymptomatic, and they can die.”

As the New Zealand Herald reported, Ardern was asked to respond to the concerns of the principal, Mr John Inger:

“I can’t help but wonder if Mr Inger is reflecting that I would have been one of those children returning to school with my father being a police officer and my mother working at the schools”, she said.

“Perhaps he had me in mind when he was making that judgment call.”

Perhaps he had you in mind, Prime Minister? Seriously?

Perhaps he had in mind the safety of the children in his charge, not an adult two decades beyond the school gates.

Like every principal, the head of Morrinsville College owes legal and moral duties of care to his current students. It’s clearly something that he takes very seriously, to his credit.

It’s beyond me why the Prime Minister thought that Mr Inger was appearing in an episode of This Is Your Life rather than trying to protect the life of each and every student in his care.

Bordering on reckless

“We squandered our major advantage, which was geography.”

These words of University of Auckland Professor Des Gorman, reported in the New Zealand Herald, should haunt every government minister, along with another remark he made on the same occasion: “The hard work we need to do to stamp it out is because we had failed to keep it out.”

While it’s helpful to have such credentials as Professor Gorman – and the platform of appearing before the Epidemic Response Committee accordingly – the question was one of commonsense as far as most were concerned:

I also knew that we should have closed our borders – lots of people knew it and you didn’t need letters after or before your name to have figured that out. It’s quite simple really: When there’s an infectious disease and it starts to spread to other countries, you close the borders.

Quite.

Back to the experts, though: the depressing diagnosis by Dr David Skegg was that – with our practically porous borders – we were trying to empty a bath with a jug while the tap was still running.

That was recited in a column by Heather du Plessis-Allan, who also went on to make a very good point about the inadequacy of measures that had belatedly been brought to bear:

Every day that arrivals keep bringing it in is potentially another delay in lifting the lockdown. It’s heartening that the Government is now quarantining arrivals who are sick or who have no satisfactory plans to self-isolate. But that’s simply not enough.

Not everyone carrying the virus on arrival looks sick on arrival. We’re hearing stories of people only feeling sick 11 days after arriving in New Zealand. Not everyone promising to self-isolate will self-isolate. How many stories have we heard of tourists taking scenic helicopter flights and posting letters when they should be in isolation?

Did this matter? Yes, definitely. Key cases and clusters were indeed connected with inbound travel:

The original source of the Matamata-centred cluster was linked to recent overseas travel, as well as domestic celebrations of St Patricks Day.

And similarly, the Bluff cluster was also linked to international travel, according to no less an authority than the Director-General of Health.

For reasons best known to Winston Peters (or maybe the voices inside his head), some weeks after the government’s negligence became known he claimed that the Ministry of Health had advised the government to close the borders completely, including to New Zealand citizens.

That wasn’t possible, according to the Prime Minister he’d selected a couple of years ago, because that would have been to render Kiwis overseas “stateless”. That’s a classic case of Ardernian ambiguity, however, as most people would understand the word “stateless” to mean that a person is stripped of citizenship such that they cannot belong anywhere.

In fact, the sensible course of action – as the National Party urged at the time, to no avail – would have been for the government to allow Kiwis to return but on the basis of conditions such as contact tracing, quarantine, testing (probably voluntarily, to shortcut other measures being demanded) and self-isolation that was actually monitored and enforced.

The actual situation was well summarised by Paul Glass in this opinion piece published in the New Zealand Herald:

In NZ we were slow to close our borders and once the decision was made our implementation of the closed border policy has been simply awful. If we had set about trying to import Covid-19 we would have struggled to do a better job.

Over a week after the Prime Minister gave the instructions to close the border we still had cruise ships calling into NZ ports on a daily basis (up to 4 a day in Auckland) and infected people from the ships visiting cafes and tourist hot spots.

Tens of thousands continued to come in through our airports with minimal checks and even today all those coming in are not placed into mandatory Government quarantine unless they have symptoms.

Yet we all know that up to 50 per cent of people with Covid-19 display little or no symptoms.

Patrick Gower was on the same page but writing in a bold font, meanwhile, in a piece entitled “Quarantine border arrivals now or waste our sacrifice”:

Those returning should all face 14 days of monitored quarantine so we can be sure they won’t infect the rest of us.

We need a proper seal on the border, rather than the current “honesty box” policy in which the highest risk people promise to go home and self-isolate.

The description of self-isolation as an “honesty box” system is apt. Not only was compliance left to the conscience of individuals – some of whom would have played by the rules and some of whom definitely did not – but participation was voluntary even when it eventually came to police monitoring returning travellers’ movements.

Police Commissioner Bush admitted in early April that overseas arrivals were asked to give their consent to being monitored during their self-isolation period. Bush explained that they would be monitoring only those who had decided to “opt in”.

That’s not a thin blue line. It’s an invisible one.

As Simon Bridges commented at the time:

They could come right off the plane today with Covid-19 and be in the supermarket by the afternoon.

It’s worth recalling at this point that National had been calling consistently for more meaningful border controls since January – yes, January – only to be ignored by government ministers too sure of themselves.

This news item dated 26 January 2020 contains the following highly relevant extract:

[T]he National Party said the government needed to start screening for the virus at New Zealand’s international airports.

Its health spokesperson, Michael Woodhouse, said given cases were confirmed as close as Australia, serious precautionary measures were needed.

But he said just like with measles and meningococcal disease in Northland, the government was asleep at the wheel.

“The prudent proactive approach by the government is to start screening at our international airports. It’s what our neighbours are doing and it’s what will control the spread of this disease.”

In the weeks that followed, ministers of the Labour-led government had been defensive, even derisive, in response to our pleas for measures to be implemented at the border.

History will record that the Prime Minister eventually relented and did put in place the very measure that we’d been seeking all those months. But by then of course the damage had already been done.

As noted in the New Zealand Herald on 7 April 2020:

Despite Ardern calling the measures an effective border closure, about 6000 foreigners flew in in the days before the borders closed to all non-New Zealanders on March 20.

And since March 16, more than 55,000 New Zealanders have returned home from overseas and were told to self-isolate.

It wasn’t just that the virus was allowed to fly to New Zealand, it literally sailed in. And yes, I do mean “literally” and “sailed in”.

The tale of the cruise ship Ruby Princess and its extraordinary exemption is worth re-telling:

It’s the biggest known cause of the coronavirus epidemic [in Australia] – more than 430 cases and seven deaths can be tracked to it – all after it landed in Australia from New Zealand. […]

The Ruby Princess made five stops throughout New Zealand – starting in Fiordland on March 11 and finishing in Napier on March 15 – but there are questions over whether it should still have been operating as normal.

Cruise ships were actually banned in New Zealand on March 14 but the Ruby Princess was given an exemption, allowing it to go to the Hawke’s Bay.

I don’t suppose we will ever know which government minister was responsible for granting that exemption. Probably one who shamelessly continued to spruik the line that they’d “gone hard and gone early”.

Cheerleaders for the government attempted to re-write history when, in April, they claimed that National was merely jumping on a bandwagon by calling for border control measures. In fact it had been well over two months since we had started seeking that the stable door be shut, before the horse could bolt.

With no meaningful measures having yet been put in place by the Ardern administration, the National Party was forced in frustration to take its case to the people with a petition.

Seeking mandatory quarantining for everyone arriving at our border, we received an astonishing 50,000 signatures in less than two days.

Naturally, when Ardern did finally act in mid-April she breezily explained that the government had been planning these measures all along.

It was as though the government was surprised that merely planning having border controls was not as effective as actually having border controls. It was as though the government believed that the coronavirus itself would be swayed by spin.

I suppose that we can be thankful no working group was established, perhaps to be chaired by a former Labour or other leftist politician, and asked to report back in 12 – 18 months.

For the longest time, the government proudly patted itself on the back for the fact that there appeared to be little, if any, community transmission of the virus.

The measure of New Zealand’s success, Ardern and others advised, was that almost all our cases originate from overseas. That was actually the measure of New Zealand’s government’s failure, of course, but they were too busy re-writing history even in the moment to realise.

So why didn’t the government fulfil its first duty to protect its citizenry against external threats prior to mid-April, several months after the threat became known outside of Wuhan?

As Willie Jackson explained, with artless clarity:

We quarantined at the right time because, as you both know, we didn’t have the infrastructure to support a quarantine two or three weeks ago.

As the government scrambled to remedy the error of its inaction ministers learned one important lesson at least.

Stardust is not an effective antidote to a coronavirus.

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