The five months that destroyed the Covid consensus

Will the Royal Commission report let us stop fighting about Covid? Probably not!

A Taranaki Daily News item from 1919, credit Papers Past.

Good morning.

I have a piece in The Guardian today looking at the newly-announced Royal Commission into the Covid-19 response.

I think the crucial period that deserves the most scrutiny is not March of 2020, when the big decisions were made about shutting our borders and introducing level 4. After all - it worked. 2020 saw us enjoy very few days of lockdowns compared to our peers and a whole lot of Covid-free freedom.

No, the period we need serious scrutiny for started in September of 2021, when it became obvious that level 4 was not stopping Delta from spreading between households.

It is the period from about September 2021 onwards that deserves the most scrutiny. This was when we realised we couldn’t beat Delta and slowly started to dismantle the elimination strategy, introducing sweeping vaccine mandates as Auckland was on its way out of lockdown.

This somewhat chaotic period – at one point there were three separate stages within one of the four separate alert levels – is where the clarity of hindsight is probably of the most use.

Hopefully the Commission will use the unfair but necessary wisdom of hindsight to establish whether this period was messy by necessity, or because the Government didn’t adapt fast enough.

I got into some major Twitter drama when the Government decided to move down to level 3, despite the continued spread of Covid-19. I said level 4 hadn’t been “working,” so the step down to level 3 made sense. (I eventually deleted the tweet, like a coward.)

People seemed to be very upset with me for two slightly different reasons, although sometimes overlapped:

1. Level 4 had been working, because it made sure there was far less Covid-19 than there would have been otherwise, which was giving everyone a chance to vaccinate.

2. Stepping down was not an admission of defeat, and actually the virus was still beatable under level 3. Elimination was in sight.

I saw the point of number 1, although I felt they were attacking me for an anti-lockdown position I was not actually taking. Point 2? Not so much: Covid-19 has been present in New Zealand ever since, we will not eliminate it without some sort of major medical breakthrough.

I say all this not to simply rehash old Twitter drama, although that is always fun, but as a capsule to remind readers of the tensions of that time. This was also when vaccine mandates started to be introduced and Auckland began its long slow climbdown from the alert level system. It was also when fragile political truce around MIQ began to really waver.

Don’t get me wrong, there had been plenty of political fights about MIQ. But these generally were about its operational merits, not whether it should exist in the first place. National wanted it to be tougher, with less leaks, but also more were advocating for those trying to get a space for humanitarian reasons. But the idea of MIQ itself was largely taken as a given.

As Covid-19 started to spread within New Zealand and elimination faded from view, the case for MIQ massively shifted, and with it the politics. As one researcher memorably put it in November of 2021, you had a higher chance of catching Covid-19 at a supermarket than from a foreigner. It would take until March of 2022 for the Government to actually end MIQ however - and those months resulted in many cases of the bureaucratic cruelty that is inevitable when you shut borders, even with the best intentions.

This chaotic period obviously was capped off with the occupation in Parliament, earlier this year, which I touch on in The Guardian piece.

I talked to a lot of the protesters. They all believed abject rubbish about the vaccine being dangerous, stuff that much of the public clearly didn’t believe. Indeed, according to polling from the Public Service Commission trust in the public service was largely positive during this period, although it had fallen off from a peak during that golden summer at the end of 2020.

From the PSC’s long term insights briefing.

But there was clearly a bit of a break here, at least for the Government. Labour’s polls have never recovered. (It’s hard to pinpoint this perfectly, because Christopher Luxon took over from Judith Collins in December of 2021, and the economy has been far more turbulent in 2022 - politics is rarely explainable by a single factor.)

Now, the party politics shouldn’t matter to the Royal Commission. After all its Royal Commissions we use to be apolitical when we want to change our political systems - a Royal Commission led to the creation of the Auckland super-city and the advent of MMP, after all.

But the Commission will inevitably be read through political eyes. ACT are already upset it isn’t reporting prior to the election. A lot of scars from the Covid-19 period remain, and will remain for a long time: It was the largest intervention into our personal freedoms that the state has made in modern history, and will probably be the largest for some years to come. Whether they like it or not, the Commission will be ready by many as a big “Was this the right thing to do or not?” - and if that isn’t clear in the report it will be the first question in the following press conference.

We shouldn’t beat the response up too much, of course. I currently live in the UK, which has far deeper scars from Covid-19. A lot more people died here and the memory of lockdowns over Christmas make people very upset when you talk about them, especially as they know now some of those in power were ignoring their own rules.

One hopes that the report is useful not just for some political score-settling when it is published, but also for the next major pandemic. Hopefully at that point we’ll all be dead from natural causes, and no one will be around to argue about my tweets.

Recommended reading

• James Halpin on what youth crime stats actually show (a bump, but not back to 2016 levels)

• Thomas Manch on the mess around entrenchment.

• This wild story about a far right coup plot in Germany, featuring an honest to god old world aristocrat. Restoration fascism seems so old-fashioned!