The Morrison government’s contradictory messages have confused many, while the Ardern government has been clear and unequivocal

On Wednesday, Laney McLean, 65, and her husband, Murray, who is 70, fly home to New Zealand. They have lived on the Gold Coast for a decade, and their son and daughter-in law – a police officer and a GP – urged them to leave.

“It’s pretty hard to argue when your kids are in tears,” says McLean.

The retired couple hope to return one day, but now, “it’s about the numbers” of rising coronavirus cases in Australia and the leadership of the New Zealand prime minister, Jacinda Ardern.

“She’s been fabulous, very proactive, very confident in what she’s doing,” says McLean.

They will self-isolate when they arrive for two weeks, as required by law.

“We know when we fly in, they’ve already gone to level four, everything’s shutting down, everyone’s hunkering down.”

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There is no rulebook for leadership during a life-threatening crisis, but Ardern’s combination of steel and compassion instils confidence in many New Zealanders. All the strengths and weaknesses of a culture, and its leaders, appear in relief at a time when transparency and information is critical.

McLean notes that New Zealanders are lucky. “We’ve only got basically one state. It’s just Ardern speaking. Australia has got all the states making decisions and the federal government.”

Criticism and debate are the lifeblood of democracy, but there seems little point in point-scoring politics. The New Zealand government, too, was criticised for responding slowly at the start – “Kiwi complacency” it was called – and for doing too little testing.

But Ardern’s address to the nation on Monday announcing a four-week shutdown of New Zealand from Wednesday – “Kiwis, go home,” she said – was clear and unequivocal. The four-stage alert system in New Zealand – rising to level three immediately and level four by Wednesday, is simple to understand.

Level four means people are instructed to stay home, schools and universities are shut, all non-essential businesses close, air travel and public transport are only to be used to transport essential workers and freight. There will be no weddings, parties, gatherings of any sort. Essential services such as supermarkets, GPs and pharmacies will remain open.

It was Ardern’s tone at the lectern that mattered as much as the substance. She acknowledged these were the “most significant restrictions on movement in modern history”. But without them, “tens of thousands of New Zealanders will die. There is no easy way to say that.” She ended as she often does: “Be strong and be kind.”

If Ardern’s credibility as leader was strengthened by her response to the Christchurch terrorist attack last year, the credibility of Australia’s prime minister, Scott Morrison, was weakened by initial errors in the response to the unprecedented scale of the summer bushfires.

People value transparency, and most will forgive missteps in such a fast-moving and unprecedented crisis, but the contradictory messages in the early days of the coronavirus did confuse. (Morrison’s statement on 13 March that he would still go to a rugby league game after announcing that all gatherings of more than 500 should be cancelled after the weekend, was the most obvious, although he subsequently decided not to go.)

Morrison did establish a national cabinet, including all state and territory leaders, the first in Australian history, and has announced significant support for business, workers and those thrown out of work – all up, $189bn worth, almost 10% of GDP. A coronavirus supplement, $550 a fortnight, effectively doubles the current rate of Newstart (being renamed the JobSeeker Payment).

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The calmer response and the big financial commitments was shaken by a communications debacle on Sunday, when New South Wales and Victoria pushed for an earlier meeting of the national cabinet, then put out statements before the meeting announcing the imminent closure of all “non-essential” services, with the implication that they would act alone if the national cabinet baulked.

Whether the two biggest states were right or wrong in their advocacy of more comprehensive shutdowns, their actions and leaking to the media created confusion.

The Victorian premier, Daniel Andrews, was still saying on Monday – after falling into line with the commonwealth’s position – that he hadn’t been talked out of anything. He had asked for a “big step” and had got one. NSW was all over the place – schools would stay open, but people were encouraged to keep their children at home. It also acknowledged the potentially disastrous error of allowing passengers on the Ruby Princess cruise ship to disembark.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Australia’s health minister Greg Hunt, prime minister Scott Morrison and chief medical officer Brendan Murphy speak to the media in Canberra. Photograph: Lukas Coch/AAP

And on Wednesday, state premiers such as Andrews were sounding more forceful than the prime minister about the need to stay home. The Grattan Institute’s John Daley, who has pushed for a harder shutdown than we have seen so far, says of Australia’s current messages: “The most effective public health messages are clear and simple. When people are told that it is too dangerous to go to a cafe, but they are fine to get a haircut, they are right to be confused.”

Bill Bowtell, who led Australia’s response to the HIV/Aids crisis in the 1990s and has slammed government responses as far as too slow, uncoordinated and timid, tweeted: “The federation is useless in this crisis.”

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One of the issues is that the expert advice in Australia is different to that of New Zealand and many other countries. To date, it is advocating strong measures, but not an enforced shutdown of all but essential services. In its latest advice on Wednesday, the Australian Health Protection Principals Committee said that while it was advising stronger measures such as those announced on Tuesday - real estate auctions, wellness centres, community groups to stop operating - it was still taking a step by step approach. It was “too early to assess the impact of current social distancing measures,” it said, and that “materially more disruptive measures should ideally be held in reserve”. That could include a “carefully considered closure of all activity” except for essential industries and services.

Morrison on Tuesday night announced even stricter measures, but not an enforced lockdown similar to New Zealand. The committee does not support school closures right now given the lack of evidence of significant disease in children and the lack of reported major disease spreading in school. It said that school closures may be “more effective when approaching the peak of the epidemic and enforced for a shorter period”. On Monday, it did not support a more comprehensive shutdown “at this time”.

Social researcher Dr Rebecca Huntley said she doesn’t want to criticise the government, but past research shows that people look for “hard and fast” rules in times of crisis.

“Australia was too slow in the early days of the crisis about the need for behaviour change. The messages around hygiene and social distances should have been ‘carpet-bombed’ even before we had significant cases,” she said.

“What people need are hard and fast rules. When you give people discretion, at a time of panic, then that’s very difficult for them.”

Research into peoples’ responses to the global financial crisis found that most people did understand the notion of sacrifice for the broader group and had a sense of “civic pride” in contributing. In such a huge and confusing crisis as this, politicians had to shift their normal instincts, she said.

“Fundamentally, you have to find a way to channel your inner human being rather than your inner politician. Politicians are very good at constructing words that they feel won’t come back to bite them and words that aren’t so definitive. This is not the moment for that.”

In the UK, the government was criticised for wasting weeks on a “herd immunity” strategy, which meant a more passive approach to the virus, then pivoted hard when a study was released on 17 March showing the death toll of such a strategy – 260,000 –would be catastrophic.

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The change in direction was confusing and hardly engendered trust, but the British prime minister, Boris Johnson, is now in lockstep with New Zealand and many European countries.

The US president, Donald Trump, has variously underplayed the threat, ramped it up, and now questioned the wisdom of draconian measures.

“Our country wasn’t built to be shut down,” he told a briefing. “If it were up to the doctors, they’d say let’s shut down the entire world. This could create a much bigger problem than the problem that you started out with.”

Meanwhile, the states are going it alone, moving to stay-at-home orders, covering 158 million Americans in 16 states.

In New Zealand, there is no downplaying the seriousness of the response, and what it will mean. As well as lining up for food and alcohol before the lockdown comes into effect, a local newspaper reported that there was a long queue outside an Auckland gun shop.

But many people appear to agree with Ardern’s decisions, and trust her to make them. Samuel Clack is a 27-year-old PhD student at the Victoria University of Wellington, and a trainee psychologist. Lockdown is “scary”, he says, but he’s glad of it. The communication from Ardern and the ministry of health has been calm and clear and helped to minimise panic.

“Jacinda in particular has led with clarity and compassion,” he says.

“New Zealand has had to go through a lot of difficult times over the last year. But regardless of where you sit politically, I think you would find it difficult to criticise her ability to lead the country through the most difficult of times.

“As she keeps reminding us, this is the time to be kind, to be strong, and to unite.”