Policy and action must combine

Our border remains the first line of defence against the global Covid-19 pandemic so it is right to expect even one of the most successful containment regimes in the world to get even better.

Countless New Zealanders are working hard and against seemingly impossible odds to stop the virus from breaching our border and slipping into our communities.

Few, if any, are going to work to fail but it is clear the biggest risk at our border is human error.

People who know they cannot leave managed isolation continue to look for ways to leave managed isolation, and people on the front line continue to work to varying degrees of diligence.

About 60% of those workers in Auckland had not had a Covid-19 test before the latest outbreak. Many declined to have one.

Front-line testing is now compulsory but the battle-weary among us do not want the pandemic response to become a patchwork of mistakes and quick-fixes.

The fixes are welcome, but that mistakes happen despite official assurances and a beefed-up, military-supported border control regime is frustrating.

It is clearly frustrating for the Government. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern was far from pleased when she discovered the regular border testing Cabinet wanted bordered on irregular.

There is no evidence the Auckland outbreak is linked to the border, but the chance a maintenance worker caught the virus in a lift at an isolation hotel shows how porous it may be.

It also shows why there must be no let-up in expectations the border and associated facilities are tightly managed.

Ministers ought to ask the right questions of their officials, and ask the same questions time and again to be sure the answer this week is as good as it was before.

That they have struggled to make headway is demonstrated by the need to establish a new group to support the Ministry of Health as it ramps up testing at the border.

Former Health and Disability System Review chairwoman Heather Simpson will be among those to ask questions and make sure things happen. As during the health system review, she has been employed to help sort things out.

National Party deputy leader Gerry Brownlee yesterday suggested this was another example of ministers needing help to do their job. Perhaps, but drafting some of the nation’s foremost fixers makes sense where there are problems to be fixed.

The timing was good for National, which fortuitously released a border security plan party leader Judith Collins said would "inject some steel into the country’s first line of defence against Covid-19". Where it used to advocate for opening the border, its new policy actually enhances the current system.

It proposes a border protection agency to provide comprehensive oversight and management. Details are scant but critics have drawn parallels to the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority, the oft-criticised super-agency led by Mr Brownlee; it will be interesting to see how much of his previous experience will figure in the party’s promotion of its policy and the team to lead it.

New Zealanders living overseas have already rounded on requiring travellers to provide evidence of a negative Covid-19 test within three days of arriving in New Zealand.

With some justification, they say a test will only prove they were not infected at testing, that many infections are linked to transit, and that it will count for nothing if arrivals must still spend time in quarantine. Testing takes more than three days in many countries.

It will also have an immediate effect on the number of people returning home: who in their right mind would risk buying a ticket if a test outside their control might render it worthless?

Enhancing contract tracing with bluetooth technology, and making contact tracing technologies for agency employees, border facility workers, and health staff compulsory seem sensible options that might otherwise grow out of the current approach. The former party of Hamish Walker and Michelle Boag will need to reassure New Zealanders of their privacy.