Respect? Plenty. But I fear Aucklanders travelling the country
Friday, 3 December 2021
OPINION: The Government is, apparently, betting its credibility on delivering “the classic Kiwi summer”: baches, beaches, barbecues, and beer.
Anything less is a promise broken and a season lost.
At least that’s the angle when locked-down political commentators and the Auckland-based media are writing and speaking. The reasoning is that, with Aucklanders spending more than 100 days in lockdown, doing their bit to help keep the Covid-19 virus in check, the residents of our largest city deserve freedom.
In this context that means the freedom to travel to their usual summer destinations for a well-earned break. A normal summer and an abnormal spring, in other words.
**READ MORE:
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* Covid-19 NZ: What Auckland opening means for the rest of the country
* Covid-19 NZ: Auckland border reopening too soon, say Green and Māori parties
* Covid-19: Experts say vaccination push needed as virus 'will travel for summer'
* Covid-19: Calls for Northland to return to lockdown after seven Covid cases
**
And when you frame it like that, who can possibly deny Aucklanders their freedom summer?
If it wasn’t for essential service workers in Auckland, like the distribution centre workers in Māngere, the entire country’s economy would grind to a punishing halt.
If the vast majority of Aucklanders hadn’t been complying with alert levels 3 and 4, Covid spread within the city would surely have become exponential, and the rest of the country would soon have followed.
Of course, none of this happened, and that is almost entirely due to the sacrifices Aucklanders made. We each owe them our gratitude.
But does this entitle Aucklanders to, as some media are suggesting, simply travel across the country to enjoy a “normal” summer?
For many Māori communities the answer is a tentative “no”. Tai Tokerau Border Control is reactivating, for example, to check that travelling Aucklanders are either fully vaccinated or can produce a negative Covid test before holidaying in Northland over summer. Iwi on the East Coast are planning to do the same.
Rhythm & Vines, the country’s premier music festival, held near Gisborne, isn’t going ahead over the New Year period after widespread opposition from locals (many of whom are Māori) afraid of even one Aucklander spreading the virus to their virus-free communities.
This is the delicate balance that we need to strike. It’s not that, say, Tai Tokerau Border Control are parochial Māori intent on keeping people out for the sheer sake of it. Instead, their border control teams are undertaking Covid screening this summer to ensure that the virus doesn’t make it into their communities until vaccination rates are up and they and their whānau are better protected.
The same is true on the East Coast. Māori vaccination rates are still approximately 10 per cent below the national rate, meaning the virus would find far more vectors among Māori than other population groups.
Māori already make up a majority of new infections, reflecting that Covid-19 is increasingly a disease of the poor and unvaccinated.
Rural Māori communities are rightly entitled to do what they can to help stop that spread outside of Auckland. That includes border protection.
Māori communities maintain long memories. The first epidemic in these islands was the result of disease crossing the porous border, with 18th century sailors from Europe spreading venereal disease across the country’s harbourside communities.
Respiratory and other viral infections would follow later in the 19th century, reducing the Māori population to a historic low.
Pākehā politicians and media were speculating in that colonial period that Māori were not long for the world and their job, as enlightened policy-makers, was to “smooth the pillow of a dying race and to ease its passing so that history would have nothing to reproach them with”.
Obviously, Māori didn’t disappear, but it was a trying, traumatic period. In the 20th century the influenza epidemic took an equally shocking toll, with Māori eight times more likely to die than non-Māori.
This is an inequality that Māori communities in Northland, the East Coast and elsewhere are keen to never reproduce. And the best way to do that, in these circumstances, is to retain some control over movement into your community.
And where is the virus likely to spread from? Simple: Auckland. This is why it’s worth Aucklanders reconsidering whether they are entitled to that “classic Kiwi summer”. Will it put others at risk? Are you confident, even as a fully vaccinated person, you aren’t a vector for the spread?
Personally, I regard Aucklanders with a newfound respect and admiration. But I’m afraid of what happens once they begin travelling across the country again.
Morgan Godfery is a senior lecturer at the University of Otago and the te ao Māori editor at Metro. He is a former Parliamentary staffer for the late Labour MP Parekura Horomia.