Comment

Ardern walks fine line on lockdown, Bridges missteps

The decision to extend New Zealand’s lockdown was undoubtedly complex, but Jacinda Ardern seems to have struck a fair balance. The same cannot be said for Simon Bridges’ shrill response, Sam Sachdeva argues.

As the clock struck four and Jacinda Ardern strode onto the stage of the Beehive Theatrette with Ashley Bloomfield, it was easy to imagine a nation holding its collective breath.

After nearly four weeks of coronavirus lockdown unlike any period in New Zealand’s recent history, would we be granted parole as planned? Or was there a last-minute snag, a fly in the ointment that would prolong our purgatory?

Those looking for clues from the Prime Minister’s opening remarks may have been buoyed by her praise for our success in breaking the chain of transmission.

“We have done what very few countries have been able to do - we have stopped a wave of devastation,” Ardern said, citing our low transmission rates and confirmed cases.

Then came the (slight) sting in the tail: it was because of that success that we needed to extend our time at Alert Level 4, to lock in the gains made so far.

“We considered that the longer we are in lockdown, the less likely it is we will need to go back,” Ardern said, announcing we would move out of Level 4 at 11.59pm on Monday April 27 - after the end of the long weekend caused by Anzac Day, and just five days longer than initially planned.

It seemed a classic case of compromise, between businesses begging to reopen as soon as possible and epidemiologists making the case for weeks more on high alert.

The fear of moving down the scale on the cusp of a long weekend must have played on ministers’ minds, with the images of would-be holiday-goers being stopped at police checkpoints over the Easter break still fresh in the memory.

And while neither Ardern nor Bloomfield were entirely candid on the matter, a scathing audit of contact tracing procedures conducted by University of Otago senior lecturer Ayesha Verrall and released only after the press conference’s conclusion offered some hint of why our gains had not been locked in place.

Verrall’s report found significant gaps in the existing contact tracing system, including slow processing times and workloads that exceed the capacity of underfunded public health units - problems that may be due to structural flaws pre-dating this Government, but which nevertheless presented a difficulty in scaling down the current restrictions.

Simon Bridges again misjudged the tone of the occasion when the time came for a Covid-19 response. Photo: Mark Mitchell/Pool.

An additional investment of up to $55 million announced on Monday will go some way towards fixing those flaws, albeit not in the next seven days, but health officials will now be double- and triple-checking to ensure what is in place now can do the job until then.

Extending the lockdown, even for a fairly short period, would not have been an easy call to make.

Some businesses may well go under between the original exit date and the amended one, while public compliance with the rules will diminish over time.

But the extra time before the move to Level 3 will allow schools and businesses to prepare for something more normal, while most New Zealanders seem willing to stick it out another week in the belief it will make a meaningful difference.

It is that willingness that National leader Simon Bridges badly misjudged in his response to the lockdown decision, accusing the Government of holding back the country in its testing and tracing failures.

The concerns he raised are legitimate; less so is his desire to lay it at the feet of the current administration and wail as if we were spending another month in solitary confinement.

Bridges’ repeated mantra, that sometimes “the medicine is worse than the cure”, both made little sense (the traditional saying is that sometimes the cure is worse than the disease) and came uncomfortably close to US President Donald Trump’s arguments for reopening the economy despite his country’s death toll passing 40,000.

His pining for an approach closer to that of Australia also rang false, given many experts have said the two countries are more similar than they are different at present (even though you can get a haircut across the ditch).

Bridges would have expected criticism from the Twitterati - but even he may have been taken aback by the torrent of negative remarks on his Facebook page, while not all in his caucus seemed happy with his approach.

After some missteps early on in the Covid-19 response, the National leader seemed to have found his feet, rebuilding his profile through chairing Parliament’s epidemic response committee and raising some valuable questions about the government response.

But Bridges too often exercises questionable judgment at critical moments, uncomfortable in the role of a statesman offering constructive criticism rather than stinging attacks.

He will have a chance to recover from his latest faux pas, as there will surely be missteps from the Government in the weeks ahead; the issue of the education sector looms as a particularly tricky issue for Ardern and Education Minister Chris Hipkins to navigate.

It would be no surprise, though, for Bridges to take advantage of the long weekend for some time out of the spotlight licking his wounds.