Greetings. It's a pleasure to join the committee to share some of the experience and insights from Aotearoa, New Zealand. I think there has been understandable interest in the efficacy of New Zealand's response. We've only encountered just over 2,600 cases of the virus and only 26 deaths during the pandemic. And one-third of those diagnosed cases have been caught at the border before entering the community.
The virus was, if I can say, first stamped out in the community nearly a year ago, five months after it first infiltrated. Since then, there's been a handful of flare-ups largely arising from what we describe as “border breaches”, which have again been stamped out in what has become quite a sophisticated game of whack-a-mole. The last instance of community transmission was at the end of February this year.
In many respects, I think our current settings, the arc of the pandemic and thus the government response, have been quite different from Canada's and many other countries'.
However, to give you a sense of the nature of the regulation of the government response that has been deployed, I think that story is best told through a series of bubbles, which has been a very powerful metaphor in the New Zealand context. We started with what we described as our “household bubbles” from back in March 2020 nearly, where we had two months of aggressive and strict nationwide lockdown, stay-at-home directives and closure of premises other than those that were essential. That really broke the chain of transmission and allowed that shift from what was intended to be a mitigation or a suppression strategy to our current elimination strategy. That “go hard and go early” approach—which is how it was branded by the Prime Minister here—has probably been the main driver of New Zealand's success so far in combatting the virus. The achievement of that COVID-free community set the conditions for an ongoing elimination strategy where those re-emergent instances of the virus could continue to be stamped out, and that's been the focus.
After our household bubbles, where we were confined to our houses, we had a nationwide fortified bubble where ordinary day-to-day life largely resumed almost a year ago with most restrictions largely lifted. We have some ongoing restrictions, low-level measures such as a contact tracing system with QR codes, face coverings on some public transport and so forth.
Significantly, we had a fortified border fortress with a 14-day state-managed isolation and quarantine system, an escalating system of border testing, and management of incoming border flows through bookings, charges and pre-departure testing. It was very much trying to create an impenetrable border to protect the nation as a whole.
Within that, as I said, there were some flare-ups. I think of this in terms of resurgent localized bubbles where we had a handful of regional lockdowns, largely in Auckland, and other targeted measures to address the small number of flare-ups.
More recently, we've developed and moved to a transnational shared bubble where we've reopened our borders with Australia and a couple of other Pacific nations, allowing restriction-free travel. In order to do that, we've also harmonized our public health monitoring and measures across those countries.
Our hope is for a future popped bubble, if I can describe it like that, where there is a slow but steady vaccine rollout. We look forward to hopefully being able to fully open up our borders again and reintegrate with the world.
While we can see that success, the government regulatory response I don't think has always been smooth, stable and slick. The early days were characterized by a lack of preparedness for this type of virus, but a willingness to pragmatically innovate and respond.
Legally, the resort was to perhaps ill-fitting public health and civil defence tools, principally directive health orders issued by our senior medical officer of health, the director general of health, enforceable by the police. There was also heavy reliance on an extra-legal alert level framework as a communication tool, characteristic communication from our Prime Minister, ministers and director general in building a collective community trust in the government and the government's response.
I should note that there was one notable instance where the high court found that the government messaging overreached the underlying legal requirements, and I'm happy to talk about that some more if that's of interest.
After the lockdown was lifted, more COVID-specific, bespoke legislation was passed, which gave broad power to ministers to continue to issue directive health orders mandating public health measures and continuing police enforcement. The authority to do that was moved from the officials to the minister. I think of it in terms of belt and braces protections being overlaid on top of that.
Preservation of the right to contest any of the measures was, for example, inconsistent with the Bill of Rights Act's protections, such as freedom of movement and so forth, select committee scrutiny of orders and House confirmation of orders and other examples of checks and balances being grafted onto that power.
My final comment might be to say that the other notable feature has been a strong social licence in the community for these very aggressive measures. My analysis is that the legitimacy for that response has been catalyzed by the government maintaining and enhancing accountability through direct, face-to-face, reasoned explanation of the problem and the measures, openness and transparency—for example, all of the cabinet papers dealing with measures and so forth are publicly available—active scrutiny, continuing improvement and large doses of kindness.
Thank you.