Wellington’s long-awaited and controversial Transmission Gully Motorway opens to the public today – a mere 103 years after the MP for Otaki at the time proposed it be developed as a road for motor vehicles to commemorate the fallen soldiers of World War I.

The new 27-kilometre motorway, north of Wellington from Linden to McKays Crossing just north of Paekakariki, is a state-of-the-art project, incorporating the most modern design and safety features. In a first for New Zealand, it has its own radar system, like those operating on many European highways, to detect crashes and other road incidents and provide up-to-the minute information to motorists.

Speaking at the opening ceremony, Transport Minister Michael Wood waxed lyrical that “Transmission Gully is one of the most significant and complex new roading projects ever undertaken in New Zealand … requiring innovative environmental and construction techniques.” Yet only a few weeks ago, when Waka Kotahi did not open the road before Christmas as planned Wood dismissed the project, which commenced construction in 2014, as a National-led government “botch-up”, an intemperate claim churlishly repeated by the Deputy Prime Minister after yesterday’s opening, where he had seemed to be very content sitting, smiling, and purring, in the front row of the dignitaries alongside Minister Woods.

I had the privilege of driving over Transmission Gully – or Te Ara Nui o Te Rangihaeata, the name gifted to it by local iwi Ngāti Toa – shortly after the opening ceremony. It is a spectacular four-lane motorway, a vast contrast to the current winding, accident prone Coastal Highway it replaces. It will cut journey times into and out of the capital, as well as providing safe earthquake access and egress. (Transmission Gully has been designed to withstand an earthquake of 1 in 2,500-year severity.) While it has been a long wait, the finished product is certainly worth it, and will be quickly embraced by those living here and everyone using it.

But aside from its impressive technical qualities and the substantial improvement it brings to driving conditions into and out of Wellington, Transmission Gully/Te Ara Nui o Te Rangihaeata will be a game-changer in another respect as well. It is likely to be a massive boost to industrial and residential development to Wellington’s north, around the Porirua Basin and through to the Kapiti Coast. And with a new four-lane highway from Peka Peka (north of Waikanae) through to Otaki, currently about an hour’s drive north of Wellington, due for completion by the end of this year, the whole area should expand rapidly. Once the railway line to Otaki and on to Levin is electrified – to allow suburban rail services to operate that far north – as promised over the next three years, the greater Wellington region should be able to look forward a greater level of economic and population growth than ever before.

The problem with all this additional growth, though, is as some Wellington city local politicians keep pointing out, that it is likely to be at the expense of Wellington city. It is easy to see why – there is more residential and commercial space available to the north, the climate is more congenial, and improved road and rail links make the journey into Wellington less demanding.

But Wellington city has been dying a slow death for some years – a point former Prime Minister Sir John Key was roundly criticised for raising as far back as 2013. Nevertheless, Wellington’s CBD is a shadow of its former self, with prestige department store, David Jones, due to close around the middle of this year. Add to that the Covid lockdowns and the fact that most of the public servants who previously filled the inner city’s cafes, restaurants, bars, hairdressers, and other service businesses are still working from home, and the picture for Wellington businesses looks grim.

Moreover, in that context, the city’s projection of population growth of 80,000 for Wellington city over the next 30 years looks like ludicrous fantasy. Worse though the City Council has now decided that, to meet this fictional demand, apartment blocks up to six stories high can now be built in residential areas, on a non-notified consent basis. It is kneejerk nightmare stuff, based more on trying to keep Wellington city as the central point of the growing wider region than common sense.

The opening of Transmission Gully/Te Ara Nui o Te Rangihaeata confirms that the Wellington region’s future growth and development will not come from Wellington city.  The city’s future lies in being the centre of government, and the country’s cultural heartland, and the Council needs to shift its focus accordingly. What Te Ara Nui highlights is that the Wellington region is too small, even if future population fantasies materialise, to continue to operate as five separate insular cities (Wellington, Porirua, Kapiti, Lower Hutt and Upper Hutt) the way it does at present.

The opening of Transmission Gully/Te Ara Nui o Te Rangihaeata needs to become the catalyst for a new examination of the way the Wellington region works to get the maximum benefit from the new motorway. It is time for a fresh look at the viability of the region’s local government structure and whether a region of just 530,000 people needs a regional council and the five district councils.

Transmission Gully/Te Ara Nui o Te Rangihaeata is about to dramatically change the Wellington region’s roading and transport landscape, and impact population growth and economic development for the future. At her speech opening the motorway, the Prime Minister said it was an “engineering marvel” which will benefit the whole country, not just local communities, for generations to come.

But to become a reality, that will require local politicians to look beyond their own parochial patch and adopt a greater regional and national perspective to ensure those benefits are achieved.

 

According to Mental Health and Wellness Commission statistics, one in ten New Zealanders made use of the website www.depression.org.nz in 2020/21. At the same time, just over 191,000 people (3.7% of the population) accessed mental health services directly and 9,392 were admitted to acute inpatient care. Our annual suicide rate rose to just over 600 cases, with our youth suicide rate remaining one of the highest amongst the world’s developed nations. 

By any measure, these statistics portray a serious mental health crisis in New Zealand. While differences in the way statistics are collected makes direct comparison with earlier years difficult, it is a more than reasonable assumption that the overall position has been getting worse over the last twenty years or so. The Mental Health and Wellness Commission reports that the percentage of young people seeking mental health services help has risen by a third since 2016. 

Following its Mental Health Inquiry in 2018 the government allocated $1.9 billion in the 2019 Budget to dramatically improve the delivery of mental health services. The announcement was widely acclaimed at the time and long overdue. In August last year the Minister of Health was proclaiming “This government is transforming Aotearoa - New Zealand’s approach to mental wellbeing with greater focus on care in the community, and more emphasis on prevention and early intervention.” 

However, in its report this week, the Mental Health and Wellness Commission has painted a somewhat different picture about the $1.9 billion new spending. Its conclusion that “improvements in services have not materialised as we had hoped for over this time” was simply damning. Even the Minister now concedes the Ministry of Health has “struggled to achieve as much as we would have liked them to,” on mental health, a far cry from his bold rhetoric of just seven months ago. 

The 191,000 people who accessed mental health services directly last year are but the tip of the iceberg. When family, friends and workmates associated with them are taken into account, the real figure is probably four, maybe five, times higher. It could well that around at least 10% of our population are affected directly or otherwise by mental health issues. 

It is likely to get worse before it gets better. I recall as a Health Minister being advised by mental health officials after the Christchurch earthquakes that typically the mental health crises following traumatic events can take up to four years to surface in the community. In the aftermath of an immediate crisis people are too busy getting their own lives back in order, they told me, it is only after time has settled that the mental health impacts become apparent. On that basis, the full impact of the social and economic impacts of the pandemic on the mental health of New Zealanders may yet be two to three years away, further highlighting the desperate need to improve services in the meantime.   

The point which the Minister made in his too gung-ho statement last August about the need to “focus on care in the community” is correct. But the problem is care in the community cannot be delivered by a centralised agency like the Ministry of Health, or even district health boards. The service base needs to be broadened dramatically, so it can be delivered in a way that is non-threatening to patients, without the cold walls of bureaucracy around it. That should go without saying in a country as culturally, ethnically and gender diverse as New Zealand, but it still seems the point is not getting through. 

When I was the Minister responsible for mental health, about a decade ago, I was stunned to find that, the prevailing view at the time notwithstanding, there was no shortage of mental health resources in the community. On the contrary, there were literally hundreds of agencies, big and small, up and down the country serving the mental health needs of local communities. Some were better than others, some were more well-meaning than they were well-informed, but there was no doubt about their dedication to meeting the mental health needs of their communities. 

The problem was then, and I suspect remains the case today, that access to funding for the improvement of service delivery and better training for mental health workers was strictly controlled by autonomous district health boards, who were legally not subject to Ministerial direction, and the Ministry of Health. Their joint attitude was that if a service could not be provided by a district health board it was probably not required or worth providing at all. So, many of these community health agencies have therefore been left largely to their own devices, over the years, while district health boards either tried to replicate what they were doing, or just ignored them altogether. Many patients almost certainly fell through the cracks because of that. 

The fact that $1.9 billion of funding allocated to the Ministry of Health almost three years ago has led to no improvements in services will come as no surprise to anyone working diligently in the field, but it is a scandal of serious proportions, raising many questions. What has the money been spent on so far, or is it just still sitting there? Where was the plan for its utilisation at the time the original Budget bid was made, and how was that to be monitored? The impression is left there was no plan, let alone any monitoring, and it was all just left to struggling officials who have achieved very little. 

Mental health consumers will be both furious and frustrated that the promise of so much has led to so little. At the very least, there needs to be an urgent inquiry, by the Auditor-General maybe, into what has happened. 

The almost 200,000 New Zealanders accessing mental health services each year, and those close to them, deserve so much better.     

 

 

In our system of government, the Prime Minister is often described as “primus inter pares”, the first among equals, or the chair of the board when it comes to leading Cabinet and the wider team of government MPs. The Minister of Finance, correspondingly, is the effective chief executive overseeing and pulling together all the strands of government to make sure the government’s objectives are achieved. 

While the public focus is naturally on the Prime Minister who, in the modern environment, is expected to front for the government on everything, the Minister of Finance is never far behind. Although the Prime Minister is the public face of the government, the Minister of Finance is constantly making sure that government’s policies are properly co-ordinated and responsibly fiscally managed to its best political and economic advantage. At Budget time each year the Minister of Finance gets to put it all on display, and it is no coincidence that Budgets are often seen as the sole work of the Minister of Finance, rather than a collaborative effort by the Prime Minister or the rest of the government. 

Stereotypically, Ministers of Finance are normally expected to effortlessly quote endless financial statistics, percentages, and arcane acronyms, and always appear far more knowing and world-wise than anyone else. They invariably adopt over time a miserly persona – even more profligate Ministers like the current incumbent like to give off the sense that it is “their” hard-earned money they are spending, not the government’s, and certainly not that provided to them by the long-suffering taxpayer. 

Some Ministers of Finance have been mercurial – Sir Robert Muldoon liked being described as an “economic wizard”, even if his overall record suggested otherwise. Others like Sir Roger Douglas have been bold reformers, while more steady hands like Sir Michael Cullen and Sir Bill English have achieved major changes over a longer period. Some, like Sir Arnold Nordmeyer, are remembered for the wrong reasons (the 1958 Black Budget) while others have simply been forgotten altogether. 

It goes without saying that a strong and competent Minister of Finance is a key component of a modern, successful government. Equally important is the partnership forged between a Prime Minister and Minister of Finance. The relationship between the two must be close and supportive, with each having and showing complete confidence in the work of the other.   

When the partnership between David Lange and Sir Roger Douglas, which had been so successful, broke down, that government’s demise began. Similarly, when it became clear Jim Bolger and Ruth Richardson were moving in different directions, she had to go. On the other hand, the strong relationship between Helen Clark and Sir Michael Cullen was a key component in that government’s longevity, as was the link between Sir John Key and Sir Bill English in the last National-led government. So far, the partnership between the present Prime Minister and her Minister of Finance has looked strong and unified. 

Often, although not always, the bond between the Prime Minister and the Minister of Finance is reinforced by the Minister of Finance also being the Deputy Prime Minister. That is the case at present, and applied with other long-term governments, like those of Helen Clark and Sir Michael Cullen, Sir John Key and Sir Bill English, and even back to Peter Fraser and Sir Walter Nash. However, only a handful of Ministers of Finance – Nash, Muldoon, and English – have gone on to become Prime Minister. 

Against that background, the choice of Nicola Willis to be National’s new finance spokesperson to replace the departing Simon Bridges is a sensible one. Bridges’ sudden retirement is a blow to National – he was beginning to look like a potential Minister of Finance in the Cullen/English mode and will therefore be hard to replace. Nevertheless, Willis has the capacity to step up quickly and seamlessly to her new role, and she has many other advantages besides. 

As National’s deputy leader since late last year, she has quickly built a close relationship with party leader Christopher Luxon, and the pairing is already becoming established in the public mind. Her elevation to finance spokesperson should reinforce that and will confirm her authority over her Caucus colleagues, which will become more important as the party goes about preparing (and costing) its election policies for next year. Experience working for Fonterra, alongside Luxon’s own corporate background (he used to run an airline, you know) means she will be very much at ease in the corporate boardrooms Ministers of Finance need to pay heed to. 

Her time previously as a leading adviser to Sir John Key when he was Prime Minister will have given her a strong sense of the political challenges involved in running a government and implementing its policy programme. She will be able to use these skills to good advantage with her Caucus colleagues over the next year or so, as well as with Luxon who, it needs to be remembered, is still very inexperienced in such matters. 

As National’s housing spokesperson, Willis demonstrated a passion for the portfolio and an ability to talk with the public in very clear and understandable terms about the issues as she saw them and the changes she would like to make. She should be able to use these skills and experiences to talk about National’s cost of living “crisis” campaign and wider approach to economic policy in a way that seems real and relatable for people. Willis is unlikely to fall into the trap most Ministers of Finance and finance spokespeople do of relying almost exclusively on arid statistics to bolster her argument. 

Her clashes with the current Minister of Finance, Grant Robertson, will be fascinating. They know each other well having both stood in the Wellington Central electorate for the last two elections. Robertson is teetering on the verge of taking on the miserly persona of Ministers of Finance past, and given Willis’ unashamedly liberal credentials, is likely to find her a more difficult opponent to pigeon-hole than the much more conservative Bridges. While the exchanges between them will be courteous, Willis is unshakeable, and Robertson will need to be careful that her “working mum with four kids” approach does not get away from him. 

When Christopher Luxon became leader of the National Party there were many critics of his social conservatism who felt that would hamper his ability to present National in a modern and progressive light. So far, as the polls strongly show, he has defied that expectation, even if there is still a long way to go until the next election. His appointment of Nicola Willis as finance spokesperson continues down the path he has set. 

Just as Jacinda Ardern and Grant Robertson were Labour’s political generational change, Christopher Luxon and Nicola Willis are doing likewise for National. Luxon’s next challenge having set out National’s furniture the way he would like, is to show how he and Willis are going to use it. Their first task is to be sure none of their other colleagues decides to knock down a table or two along the way.

 

 

 

The most basic and cherished right in a free society is the right to vote. Wars have been fought over it, and people have given their lives and endured other indignities in defence of the right to cast a vote for whom they choose at election time. It is the great leveller – the one time when the say of the loftiest and the lowliest in society has the same value.

Therefore, revelations last week that nearly 800 New Zealanders living overseas have the lost their right to vote due to the closure of the borders because of Covid19 are extremely concerning. The situation arises because under current electoral law New Zealanders living overseas must return home at least once every three years to retain the right to vote here. When Covid 19 struck and the borders were closed it made it impossible for a number to fulfil that obligation, hence the cancellation of their right to vote.

Some may see this as an unintended consequence of the pandemic. More correctly, it is a direct result of government policy over control of the borders. The government was made aware in 2020 this problem was likely to occur but, to its eternal shame it chose to do nothing to protect New Zealanders caught out this way, either before the 2020 election or since. It could have easily passed emergency legislation back in 2020 to cover those likely to be affected but declined to do so.

Even now, when the borders are reopening, making it easier for New Zealanders to return home when they wish, and thus protect their eligibility, the Justice Minister remains non-committal about resolving the issue of the 800, saying only that he is prepared to “look at it”.

The vehicle for resolving this would be the normal legislation the year before an election to tidy up some of the administrative issues arising from the previous election. But even if this issue is addressed in this year’s legislation it seems unlikely to be in time to enable the affected 800 to vote in this year’s local body elections if they were of a mind to join the minority of other New Zealanders who do so.

Of more concern is the Minister’s lethargic approach to the matter. This involves the right of fellow New Zealanders to be able to cast a vote like the rest of us. It should not be a matter that the Minister needs to “look at” before deciding what to do. The issue is a no-brainer – the right to vote is absolute and it should not have been beyond the Minister’s wit to make a clear statement that the right to vote of those 800 New Zealanders will be immediately restored. This is one of those “no ifs, buts or maybes” issues that deserves a clear, unequivocal Ministerial response immediately. His inaction so far has been unconscionable.

Restoring their rights so they can vote in upcoming elections this year and next is straightforward. It should be treated separately from the wider issue of the so-called three-year rule itself. But it looks as though the Minister is keeping the rights of the 800 and the future of the three-year rule closely and incorrectly linked, which could well delay progress in resolving this electoral injustice.

The three-year rule has not been looked at for at least 30 years, so a review is probably timely in any case. It is presently one of the most restrictive voting rules in the world when it comes to citizens living overseas. Yet only Ireland has a greater diaspora than us amongst the OECD countries, with over 62,000 New Zealanders voting from overseas at the last election.

In the United States, France, South Africa and most recently Canada, there is no limit on the time a voter can live overseas and still vote in elections in their home country. In Britain, the right to vote is protected provided the person undertakes to return home within 15 years, and it is 6 years in Australia. Italians living in a country with no Italian Embassy where they can vote are reimbursed up to 75% of their travel costs to return home to vote.

Alongside these more generous provisions elsewhere our three-year restriction looks out of step and harsh. Other countries seem more intent on keeping their diaspora closely linked to the home country than we do, even though around 20% of our population now lives outside New Zealand.

Strangely, there seems little domestic political appetite for reviewing three-year rule, let alone extending the period to something more in line with other countries. Perversely, New Zealand political parties have become far more active in recent years in campaigning overseas for the votes of those expatriate New Zealanders still able to vote and can be expected to increase that role in the future. In its interim report on the 2020 election the Justice select committee did recommend considering allowing votes from overseas to be cast electronically, given the difficulties often experienced in getting voting papers to overseas in time, but this was separate from the three-year rule.

For those New Zealanders living overseas already aggrieved at being shut out of coming home for so long because what was the world’s most oppressive state-run isolation and quarantine system, and who have now lost their right to vote as well, the “team of five million” has become no more than a cruel and sick joke Indeed, it is a testament to their patriotism that they remain so determinedly New Zealanders, in the face of what is at best indifference and at worst callous disregard by the government for their circumstances.

The right to vote is absolute, not conditional – it needs to be restored immediately to those New Zealanders who have lost it because of government policy.

No ifs, no buts, no maybes. 

 

I was reminded recently of T.S. Eliot’s famous lines at the end of his classic poem, “The Waste Land”: “This is the way world ends. Not with a bang but a whimper.” 

The occasion was the government’s latest announcements bringing forward the dates for reopening New Zealand to returning New Zealanders and overseas visitors with the removal of most border controls. These new dates speed up considerably the timetable the Prime Minister had earlier announced just four weeks ago, telling Newshub then that “these are very firm dates we’ve set” and she would not be backing down from them. 

The government realised in October that despite the Auckland lockdown it was not going to be able to stamp out the Delta variant. Since then, it has been on an inevitable but still reluctant pathway of reducing the restrictions it has imposed on New Zealanders, at home and abroad, since the arrival of Covid19, just over two years ago. 

The arrival of the far more contagious Omicron variant in late December and its rapid spread since then finally forced the government’s hand. Maintaining a complex system of restrictions and mandatory isolation requirements was just not going to work in an Omicron environment, and it finally dawned on Ministers that it was time to trust people to self-manage their own situations. 

But this was no bolt from the blue. Opposition parties had been warning since late last year that the arrival of Omicron on the same scale as in other countries would overwhelm our rules, not to mention our health system potentially, and that the government needed to move to relax restrictions. Revelations this week about the unacceptable delays in getting PCR testing results to people in a timely manner confirm that view, but, at the time last year, the government’s response was that the Opposition parties’ plans would “give New Zealanders Covid for Christmas.” The calls were therefore ignored then, only to be picked up and announced as her own in the Prime Minister’s “Reconnecting New Zealand to the world” speech on 3 February. 

When Opposition parties criticised those announcements as too little, too late, they were again excoriated by the government as irresponsible and wrong. But, as before, this week’s announcements of an accelerated timetable – again presented as all the government’s own idea – substantially addressed the fresh points made by the Opposition. Now it seems only a matter of time before the current early October date for the complete reopening of the border, something else Opposition parties have been calling for, is also brought forward. 

All this means that rather than ending with a bang, New Zealand’s pandemic restrictions now seem more likely to peter out in a quiet whimper over the next couple of months or so. 

In part, this is because the measures taken to control the spread of the virus have been effective – particularly the national vaccination programme, which after an incredibly low and fitful start has seen New Zealand end up as one of the world’s most highly vaccinated nations – and in part, it is because the government, like just about everyone else, is suffering from Covid19 fatigue. This is because despite all its ravages, the massive economic and social disruptions it has caused, here and elsewhere, and because of the public response, the impact of the pandemic has not been nearly as severe as first feared. 

In 2020, for example, Professors Michael Baker and Nick Wilson were predicting up to 33,600 New Zealanders could die from Covid19, if the government took no action. In a report released this week they say that 2,750 New Zealanders lives have been saved since 2020 because of health measures taken to suppress all respiratory viruses, not just Covid19. In the event, the total number to date of Covid19 deaths has been just 56, just under a tenth of the number that die annually from influenza, a remarkable tribute to the efficacy of the public health response. 

At the same time, however, this success has contributed to the public complacency about Covid19, because things have not been that bad after all. Many New Zealanders now feel simply “over it.” That pervasive feeling, which even the Prime Minister admits to having, was always going to make it difficult for the government to sustain the previous high level of restriction into a third year, even before the arrival of Omicron made it impossible. 

What reminded me of Eliot’s lines is that according to at one least interpretation they relate to the end of one world – in his instance the world of pre-World War One Europe – and the birth of a new world, consistent with the whimper of a new-born child. The “Waste Land” of the past lies buried with that old world, and the focus moves to the new world ahead. 

So it is with Covid19. While its spectre will remain for some time, and with that, the prospect of new and yet more virulent strains emerging, the increasing reality for New Zealand, like every other country, is of having to live with the virus and return to as normal a way of life as possible. That will impose a fresh set of challenges that governments will need turn their attention to. Reopening borders goes far beyond just welcoming family and friends back from overseas or seeing the return of international tourism. 

Future challenges include the restoration of social cohesion and the reconstruction of the decimated small to medium sized business sector, mainly but not exclusively in hospitality and tourism. And rebuilding capability in the health, health services, and infrastructure sectors to ensure we can cope with any future pandemic that comes our way. This includes restoring the whole of government approach to pandemic planning and response that was allowed to lapse after 2017. 

As the period of prescriptive national measures to fight the pandemic wanes and is replaced by a greater reliance on self-preparedness, the focus will shift to governments needing to work alongside people to help them look after themselves, rather than just tell them what to do. 

In New Zealand, as elsewhere, it has been so far relatively easy for Opposition parties to criticise governments for the rules they have imposed on their peoples to fight the pandemic. As we have seen here, to gain uniform compliance government-imposed rules have invariably been complex, often appearing inconsistent, unfair to some, and difficult to administer efficiently. MIQ would be the obvious example, but the procurement problems the Ministry of Health has faced throughout the pandemic – from PPR equipment, to vaccines, and RAT tests – cannot be ignored. These have all proved fertile ground for Opposition parties to till. By always initially denying the worth of any criticisms, and then acknowledging their validity only in its subsequent actions, the government has to some extent been playing into the Opposition’s hands. 

However, the new focus on self-management and personal responsibility changes all that. While calling for the government to get out of people’s lives and let them take personal responsibility for their own wellbeing is an easy rhetorical call to make, it becomes harder to be critical when people do just that. Governments cannot easily be blamed for people’s individual decisions, especially by those saying they should have been trusted all along to make them. 

Therefore, while Opposition parties may feel they have won a battle with the ending of managed isolation and border restrictions, the move to personal responsibility means they are now facing a completely new political challenge.

 

The surreal occupation of Parliament's grounds and environs and the increasingly objectionable behaviour of at least some of the protesters is understandably dominating the news cycles at present. 

Whatever else it is doing, it is distracting attention from other arguably more important developments in New Zealand's struggle against Covid19 and its variants.

Next week New Zealand resumes its slow and hitherto spluttering reconnection with the world. From 27 February New Zealanders who are fully vaccinated, and eligible travellers from Australia will be able to enter the country and self-isolate, rather than go into MIQ. Two weeks after that fully vaccinated New Zealanders and other currently eligible travellers from the rest of the world will be spared the ordeal of MIQ, if they are fully vaccinated, in favour of self-isolation.

Overseas students will be able to return from early April and it is likely by July, if not sooner, that New Zealand will be effectively open once more to all those visitors from countries with visa free entry here. By October, at the latest, it is intended travellers from all countries, with or without visa free entry status, will be allowed back to New Zealand.

These shifts are taking place against the backdrop of the rapid escalation of the number of Omicron cases showing up in the community, with the outbreak expected to peak over the next three to six weeks and decline quickly thereafter. Based on overseas experience, most of those contracting Omicron are likely to experience mild symptoms, akin to those of a heavy cold.

However, at the same time as this slow shift to normality is underway, and the emphasis shifts to living with the virus and its consequences, rather than eliminating it, there are still public health messages that paint a far grimmer picture. Some epidemiologists are still warning that Omicron is serious, and that people should be cautious about more normalised contact with others.

Therefore, it is no surprise that public opinion on what to do next remains divided. A recent Ipsos poll found that about half the country supports the current red traffic light approach, with the other half split between those who think it is too rigid and those who think it is not rigid enough. A Research NZ poll reported that people are evenly divided between getting on with their lives as usual and going into a personal form of Level 4 lockdown while Omicron is around.

Overall, the government moves to reconnect New Zealand with the world notwithstanding, there is no doubt that many people remain wary of doing so. Despite high vaccination rates and the international evidence that Omicron’s impact on the health of vaccinated people is generally no more than an inconvenience, many New Zealanders are still too frightened about the potential risk Omicron poses and are therefore reluctant to resume life as usual.

Against this backdrop, comments last week from the medical director of the Royal New Zealand College of General Practitioners, Dr Bryan Betty, are worth noting.

Dr Betty has been a vocal supporter of the government’s approach to the pandemic but says it is now time for a “change in mindset” in how the country lives with Covid-19 and to move on from the fear and anxiety that had been built up about Covid19.

He wants to “focus on other health issues and illnesses that are waiting in the wings.” With winter on the way, he said, influenza is a “big concern” because lockdowns and border closures have reduced the public’s exposure. (It is worth noting that around 500 people die from influenza each year in New Zealand.)

He also said more attention needs to be given to non-Covid child immunisation rates, because falling jab rates could trigger outbreaks of whooping cough and measles. “The pandemic will come to an end in the next six to 12 months. That’s not to say Covid-19 will disappear - it won’t. However, we will learn to live with it in the same way we do with colds and flu … We need to be de-escalating this down to get into a position where most of us are just going to have a mild to moderate illness, that we're going to get through like any respiratory illness in winter, and we need to be moving on, and perhaps the way we're approaching it at the moment is causing more problems than good, and we may have reached a pivot point with that,” he said.

His comments were echoed earlier this week by Dr John Bonning, chair of the Council of Medical Colleges, who said that while many public health measures needed to stay, and changes should be step by step, Omicron, combined with high vaccination rates, was causing much less serious illness among vaccinated people. It was time to start to reduce some of the public anxiety that has built up over the last two years, he said.

Implicit in both the Betty and Bonning comments is the suggestion that the continued hyping up of the Omicron threat is not helpful to New Zealand’s management of this phase of the pandemic and may even be counter-productive in terms of the public response.

These are telling criticisms from experienced medical professionals that deserve far wider attention and consideration than they appear to have received. As New Zealand stands on the cusp of becoming connected once again to the rest of the world, and there is clear public apprehension about that, commentary from senior Ministers along the lines of Betty’s and Bonning’s remarks would be helpful in reassuring a jittery public. Unfortunately, there have been none so far, suggesting the government, like its epidemiologist advisers, still sees maintaining a high level of public fear of the current state of the pandemic as useful, while it goes about the reconnection process.  

Drs Betty and Bonning have raised important issues that deserve debate and consideration, greater than the ongoing focus on the occupation at Parliament and the gridlock it is causing in the nearby streets. Whatever other impact that circus may be having, it is not reducing the fear and anxiety many people retain about the impact of Omicron. The focus needs to shift to addressing the far more important issues Drs Betty and Bonning are drawing attention to.

The government should heed their message and change its messaging to reflect what they are saying to reduce the fear and consequent anxiety many New Zealanders still have about returning to a more normal way of life.

 

 

In the early years of the twentieth century United States President Theodore Roosevelt described his approach to foreign policy as “speak softly and carry a big stick.” He stood, he said, for “the exercise of intelligent forethought and of decisive action sufficiently far in advance of any likely crisis.” 

Our Commissioner of Police might well have considered Roosevelt’s dictum as he contemplated how to respond to the occupation of Parliament grounds that is becoming more entrenched as each day passes. While he has certainly spoken softly enough – indeed, some would say far too softly and even then very belatedly – since the protest began, it is now woefully clear he carries no big stick. Nor does it appear there was any forethought ahead of the protest about what might eventuate and how it could be intelligently and decisively handled. 

To date, none of the steps taken by the Police have worked. The early resort to mass arrests looked chillingly like the dragging away of protestors during the Bastion Point occupation in the 1970s. It petered out after only a day when it became obvious that it had done nothing to weaken the resolve of the protestors, and that there was not sufficient cell space available to hold large numbers of people arrested this way. Nor were the Courts likely to appreciate having their already hopelessly overcrowded timetable further burdened through the large number of cases likely to arise as a result. 

So that approach was abandoned, giving an unwanted pyric victory to the protestors. Then came the clumsy plan to allow people to shift their vehicles to a specially established safe haven at Wellington’s nearby Sky Stadium. That failed when protestors became wary that it was primarily a thinly disguised device to get them off Parliament grounds, rather than the traffic management response it was promoted as. It was therefore hardly surprising that the uptake of the offer was minimal. 

Only after a week of the occupation, when tempers and public tolerance had become extremely frayed, did the Commissioner of Police make his first public comment. That time delay was extraordinary enough but just as extraordinary was the limpness of his eventual statement, described by Newshub’s political editor as a “joke.” 

The Commissioner intoned the protest was “no longer tenable”, something those living and working nearby had been saying for days beforehand. He then issued his ineffectual warning that obstructing vehicles are about to be towed away, confiscated, and anyone who impedes that process will be arrested. While that might have sounded good, he seemed to overlook that it is one thing to make such grand statements, but something else to enforce them.   

For whatever reason he has not got the co-operation of the towing industry to start towing away vehicles. Nor does he yet have the commitment of the Defence Force. There have been loose suggestions that the Defence Force might be utilised to assist in the removal of vehicles, but nothing more specific has so far been forthcoming. Nor, based on experience, is it likely. 

Over the years, the Defence Force has been very wary of becoming involved in law-and-order situations, for obvious and proper reasons. Where it has assisted the Police it has been in responding to civil emergencies like earthquakes, floods, or severe storms, where its logistical and recovery skills can be employed to best effect. From the time of the Springbok tour, though, the Defence Force has generally and prudently shied well clear of becoming a back-up law-and-order agency to the Police. 

All of which leaves the Commissioner’s tardy response looking hesitant and pleading, rather than decisive. That is sadly more grist to the protestors’ mill. It also places the front-line Police who have been doing a thankless but professional and vital task holding the line in Parliament grounds in an impossible position. They have been left in the meantime to carry on their tedious task of holding the line almost indefinitely while their leaders continue to flounder around in search of a viable solution. 

When added to the vacuum of political leadership now exposed, the situation is rapidly being reduced to the level of farce. Politicians are happy to stand loftily to one side, saying while they respect the right of people to protest, they will not talk to them because they disagree with the cause they promote, and that, in any case, the matter is for the Police to resolve. For their part, the Police leadership seems bereft of any viable strategy to do so. Worse, what steps they have taken to date have neither worked nor been sustained. The Police now look as impotent as the government has proven itself to be. 

Inevitably, there has been airy talk of changing the law to prevent this situation ever recurring. But that is a meaningless and unnecessary diversionary tactic. The law as it stands is sufficient, if properly enforced. The erection of the first tent should never have been allowed, let alone the proliferation that followed. Letting that occur legitimised the occupation that has followed. 

The real solution lies in Roosevelt’s warning of the need for “intelligent forethought” followed by “decisive action” to bolster soft talk. In recent years we have become far too focussed on treating speaking softly about how things should be as end of itself. However unpalatable it may currently be, there needs to be more focus ensuring there is a workable big stick to back up the rhetoric. In his current predicament, the essentially earnest and well-meaning Commissioner of Police would likely agree.