Othering those Kiwis outside our border only sows division

Thursday, 20 January 2022

Covid-19 Response Minister Chris Hipkins says the Government is not ready to release more MIQ rooms. (Video first published on January 22, 2022)

Janet Wilson is a freelance journalist until recently working in PR, including a stint with the National Party. She contributes a column weekly.

OPINION: Omicron is here in the community and while there’s a plan to protect those domiciled here, for expats there’s none.

The Government can’t claim it wasn’t told what would happen before the variant arrived. A classified Across Government Situation Report from the Insights and Reporting Team in the Covid-19 Group, leaked to Māori Television, reports the authors’ fears of panic-buying of food, protective masks and medication. The report outlines the pressures on MIQ, which makes Tuesday’s effective closing of the border understandable but the execution of it unforgivable.

Instead of being announced from the Podium of Truth, the decision was tweeted from an MBIE account late on Tuesday night.

Covid-19 Response Minister Chris Hipkins and the Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern have fast become the faces of the MIQ regime.

The announcement was a postponement of the January 20 announcement for March and April, a “pause”, Covid-19 response minister Chris Hipkins claimed, in effect a border closure for those of the million Kiwis abroad trying to get back to their homeland.

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

* 'We don't know what to do': New Zealanders stuck overseas in limbo as border re-opening delayed

MPs including, from left, National’s Erica Stanford, Harate Hipango, and Chris Bishop, and ACT leader David Seymour (masked, blue suit) gather in December to receive a petition from the Grounded Kiwis group to open up MIQ.

* Covid-19 NZ: Government brings forward boosters, postpones end to MIQ because of Omicron

Janet Wilson: “What the protest highlights once more is the shattering of a once united population into multiple discontented factions.”

If the pause is so necessary, why can visitors enter the country during the rest of January and February? Some of those people left our shores because in November the prime minister said fully vaccinated New Zealanders could return from Australia without MIQ from January 17, with citizens from other countries arriving from February 14. Yes, Omicron has changed everything – except the Government response to Kiwis overseas, which is opaque and fumbling and certainly doesn’t pass the kindness test.

Hipkins defended the announcement on Wednesday at a stand-up ahead of Labour’s caucus retreat in New Plymouth, describing the tweet as an ‘operational’ matter. Then, in a phrase straight out of Armando Ianucci’s satire The Thick Of It, Hipkins said the Government “was working very hard to provide certainty in an uncertain environment”. Which is, actually, no certainty at all, minister.

If Tuesday’s announcement was a clear signal that the Government is moving away from holding the baton on Covid announcements, it will be a decision that will be well received by the voting public who live here. After all, who cares about the foolish people who decided to leave Aotearoa, that’s their fault isn’t it? This othering (defined in the Urban Dictionary as “the act of alienating from the group; not including someone because they are different”) was rife on Twitter this week and, while the prime minister hasn’t indulged in it recently, she has in the past.

It may be a new year, but Labour is still singing the same old song despite providing us with a glimmer of hope at the end of last year that it would be different. Having kept Auckland under lockdown last year - arguably longer than necessary - to get vaccination rates up, Labour is back at the buying-more-time refrain by closing the border and hoping for an expected jump in booster shots. This time the message has been communicated without any empathy for those sequestered overseas, many of whom have faced months of anguish and uncertainty and have had enough, as Tuesday’s closure came on top of the delay of legal action the expat group Grounded Kiwis has against the Government in the High Court.

Desperate times give rise to desperate actions. David Farrar’s Kiwiblog told this week of “a Kiwi family in Australia who were desperate to get home, as there were serious mental health issues due to being stuck in Australia”. Unable to secure MIQ vouchers, they devised a cunning plan, booking a flight from Australia to Fiji, with a stopover in Auckland.

In Auckland the kids refused to get back on the plane, telling authorities they wanted to see family in Auckland. Farrar’s post explained, “it seems that there is some international convention that prohibits forcing children onto a plane, so the family was transferred into an MIQ facility in Auckland, which is what they wanted.” Further media enquiries to establish the veracity of the post were met with a bureaucratic two-step duck-shove. Alongside a quiet flotilla of boats crossing the Tasman, expect to see much more of this malarkey in 2022.

A barrister, who enjoys the glorious name of Tudor Clee, outlined how this was achieved in a follow-up guest post on Kiwiblog. The Government, he claimed, had “removed the rights of millions of Kiwis without ‘removing’ the rights” by using MIQ as a blunt instrument at the border.

“No citizen is stopped entering,” Clee claimed. “They are stopped boarding an overseas commercial aircraft that will be penalised if they allowed someone to board without a voucher. It has only one flaw – citizens can still board the aircraft without a voucher if they are transiting New Zealand.”

Under Section 13 (1) of the 2009 Immigration Act, every New Zealand citizen has “the right to enter and be in New Zealand at any time”. Despite the law, Clee says that a combination of Government misinformation on its website and fear means it has been able to achieve this sleight of hand.

The Government has been given phenomenal power to protect those on New Zealand soil, at the expense of New Zealanders who aren’t here. Othering them only divides us and denies expats their legal rights. The same rights we all have.