Whodunit? Mystery border call a clue to new normal

Wednesday, 19 January 2022

The Director-General of Health says some parts of the Covid-19 traffic light system could need to be strengthened or adjusted if there's an Omicron outbreak in the community.

Ben Thomas is a public relations consultant and political commentator. He is a former National government press secretary, and is part of the Gone By Lunchtime podcast.

OPINION: Who closed the border?

That was the mystery after the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment on Tuesday night, via Twitter and its website, announced that the border would be effectively closed to returning New Zealanders without existing reservations from March.

It wasn’t phrased so dramatically, of course. Instead, this week’s planned MIQ allocation for returning New Zealanders was being “postponed”, effectively closing the border for an indeterminate period from March.

It wasn’t clear, in fact, who had made the decision; in classic bureaucratese, MIQ chief Chris Bunny’s statement said “a decision has been made”.

* Covid-19: Chris Hipkins talks to media before Cabinet meets on Omicron, MIQ

Covid-19 Response Minister Chris Hipkins confirmed on Wednesday that effectively all re-entry to New Zealand was closed from March.

If you’re a New Zealander trying to book travel home it probably doesn’t matter who held the pen. But the reality, confirmed by Covid-19 Response Minister Chris Hipkins on Wednesday, was that effectively all re-entry was paused from that date, pending Cabinet decisions.

Whether a decision by Bunny or not, it was part of the Government’s wider and changing policies on “reconnecting New Zealand”. In mystery terms, Hipkins’ fingerprints were all over it.

Ardern is going to announce a minor reshuffle at 3pm today.

And leaving such a significant decision to an official to announce late on a Tuesday is a clue to something bigger: that Jacinda Ardern and her Cabinet want to move even very significant parts of Covid management away from being a political issue and towards being a merely operational matter.

This is significant. Since 2020, to paraphrase Louis XIV, the perception has been that “New Zealand’s Covid response is the prime minister, the prime minister is the Covid response”.

That’s not in any way intended to denigrate the extraordinary efforts of the public service, community groups, the health sector, iwi, or the team of five million, or even the support Ardern has received from her trusted lieutenants Grant Robertson, Hipkins and Megan Woods.

But the political reality is that the country’s response to the virus is inextricably linked to Ardern, her leadership, and her decision-making. In 2020, Labour swept to a historic victory in what Ardern herself dubbed “a Covid election”.

After a holiday away from the pressures of pandemic management, and with a less deadly but seemingly unstoppable variant in Omicron on the doorstep, it seems that is an association Ardern herself may wish to break free from in 2022.

As news mounted about Omicron’s breathtaking surges overseas during the summer break, the prime minister and her cabinet remained incommunicado.

This week, Ardern said that in coming weeks she would be in a position to share some of the work that had already been done to prepare for Omicron (a sentiment recognisable to plenty of workers arriving back in January and staring at an empty screen while telling their boss over the phone that they are “ninety-nine per cent finished!”).

This is not necessarily a sign of dereliction or incompetence, so much as an indication the Government is finally ready to move Covid on from being a national emergency at the centre of public and political life, and into a place of business-as-usual; of “living with the virus”, like road accidents: tragic, unavoidable, and not the prime minister’s fault or problem.

It’s not an entirely new approach. Ministers have been treating good news about Covid as political, and failures (such as border testing) as let-downs by public servants, for the past two years. The prime minister has long justified what are clearly complex political and economic decisions about, for example, alert levels as simply following Ministry of Health advice.

The Government has a full agenda of very significant reforms on its plate, and it has less than two years left to get them over the line with the majority it earned in 2020, and which is almost certainly unrepeatable. It needs to free up some of its own time for pursuing its ambitious agenda.

So another mystery. We’re now well into time frames during which experts predicted Omicron could escape into the community, and have dodged a couple of bullets. Shutting off arrivals in March won’t help prevent the highly transmissible variant from breaching MIQ over the next six weeks.

If the variant embeds in the community anywhere near as swiftly as it has overseas, it will be far too late to bolt the gate. So will the border even close at all? Or is the closure a red herring, and really while we were trying to find out whodunit, nothing ever actually got done at all.

This column has been amended to spell the name of MIQ joint chief Chris Bunny correctly. (Amended 11.47am, January 20)