Covid-19 Royal Commission: The Covid report arrives long after the country has moved on
Tuesday, 10 March 2026
Did you learn anything from the inquiry and what do you think could have been done differently? Have your say in the comments.
OPINION: The Covid Inquiry has come back with little more than expected. The first half of the response was pretty good, the second half less so — and for reasons that have been widely canvassed for years.
Despite some of the politics around this reconstituted Covid-19 inquiry, the report’s delivery is a good thing for New Zealand. The impact and importance of this report are unlikely to be mostly felt today, but in the years to come.
Thoroughly investigating what went wrong will be useful for some future government. In the present moment, however, it is mainly a helpful tool for the Government to use to whack Labour — and in particular Chris Hipkins — for decisions made during the lockdowns.
Although probably not as helpful as some in the Government had hoped.
Read More of Luke Malpass:
People were scared during Covid-19. The political incentives facing the Government at the time — people forget — were to err on the more conservative side rather than lean into risk.
Absolutely Chris Hipkins and others should be held accountable for decisions made at the time - although it’s unlikely the public was under any illusions of who was the ultimate decider on the big Covid calls (Jacinda Ardern). But whether a lockdown lasted a week longer here or there, or whether vaccines were ordered a little late, is hardly uncovering some enormous blunder in the context of the overall response. It seems unlikely to land any sort of decisive political blow.
The overall report paints a fairly accurate picture of the pandemic response: that it started well, but by 2021 had become marked by too much government assistance, too many rules lasting too long, too much money spent, and insufficient attention paid to the non-Covid consequences of the response.
The entire apparatus of the state directed virtually all its efforts toward the Covid response, and the costs of non-Covid problems and side effects were either not considered or underrated. Children had their schooling badly disrupted and were kept away from classrooms for too long. Non-Covid illnesses were missed. People were banned from attending funerals. Short-lived vaccine mandates caused disruption. Borders stayed shut, families were kept apart, and the supply of labour — especially in healthcare — was restricted.
The list goes on. The consequences are still felt in all areas, including the national balance sheet.
The report also finds — again, not new news — that the fiscal response involved spending on a number of projects that had nothing to do with Covid and were not delivered in a timely manner (that is, during the pandemic, when their stimulatory effect might actually have been useful).
The Green Party’s Ricardo Menéndez March made a good point that “while we are not happy about the fact that the Government is choosing to exploit monetary policy decisions from this inquiry, we acknowledge that an over-reliance on unconventional monetary policy saw one of the largest transfers of wealth that we have ever seen, along with the inflationary environment impacting low-income New Zealanders the most.”
David Seymour probably offered the most incisive political analysis in the House, referring to “that singular goal that increasingly consumed and, ultimately, devastated their Government.” It is difficult to argue with that.
But everyone basically knew all of that.
Of more interest is the finding that advice around vaccines for 12- to 17-year-olds — that they should not be double vaccinated — apparently did not get through to ministers. That will need to be examined and sorted out. Winston Peters raised a number of questions in the House about that issue after the report’s release on Tuesday.
Everyone also has a pet theory about Covid-19. Mine is that just about everyone is a little bit ashamed of how they acted during the pandemic.
Maybe you denounced fellow Kiwis a bit too gladly for not following the rules. Maybe you went down an anti-vax rabbit hole. Maybe you flouted the rules. Maybe you kept family away and hid at home for reasons that now seem a bit nuts. Maybe you dobbed in your neighbour for going to the supermarket too often or inviting some mates over. Maybe you treated your partner or family a bit shabbily. Or irrationally bought a thousand rolls of toilet paper.
The point is that most people seem to want to forget the whole episode.
The public does not like reading stories about it, politicians do not much like talking about it, and dwelling on it does not appear to be an electoral winner.
It was a crazy time, and a lot of the rules — and what people did — seem absolutely bonkers in hindsight. (There was a chap in something like a Chernobyl liquidator’s outfit lined up at my local supermarket one day.) But they made sense at the time, or at least more sense. Covid-19 was dangerous and there was no vaccine. People got sick, and quite a lot of people still carry around health problems thanks to the virus.
And it pays to remember that it was not until quite late in 2021 that the political class really began to diverge on what to do about it all.
Versions of basically all the rules were more or less agreed upon by all political parties until the Auckland lockdown dragged on and the public became far more receptive to arguments about the trade-offs of Covid restrictions and privations. Fundamentally, people were sick of it and just about everyone was vaccinated.
For instance, Labour made sure in its questions in the House to remind everyone that the then new National Party leader Christopher Luxon had been asking why the Government was not spending more.
This was a good report, one that will be important for New Zealand in decades to come.
But try as the Government might, it is difficult to see it having much impact in the current political climate — or giving anyone much of a political advantage.