I can’t begin to imagine how dispirited the thousands of Kiwis trying to return home are right now. 

The new online lobby the Government set up is a joke – the excitement of being allowed to enter the ‘lobby,’ where you queue for a spot in MIQ, is shot to pieces when you realise you are then allocated a number – and your chance of actually getting a spot is about the same as winning the lottery.

Along with all the returning Kiwis needing a place in MIQ are those who travel internationally for work, essential workers who are needed to plug gaps in our job market – such as truck drivers and seasonal workers – and all the others who need or want to come to New Zealand.

A largely closed border means businesses can no longer gain the migrants to fill high-skilled and low-skilled jobs. Meanwhile, uncertainty over working holiday and essential skills visas and employment restrictions on foreign nationals have hindered firms’ ability to hire in recent months.

It’s clear that elimination as a strategy isn’t going to 

be achievable, and despite our best efforts, we’re all going 

to have to learn to live with COVID in our communities. 

We can be vigilant, get ourselves vaccinated, continue with testing and isolation of infected cases, but we can’t 

keep putting the country into lockdown for weeks on end: It’s not good for our economy and it’s not good for our mental health.

For those businesses in the South Island, it’s been a particularly bitter pill to swallow. They’ve been lumped in with the rest of the country, despite having no COVID cases for almost a year.

Queenstown Lakes District Mayor Jim Boult has bravely come out and called for the South Island to get its normality back. He quite rightly pointed out during lockdown that it was unfair to be subject to the same level of restrictions as Auckland, where the majority of cases in the latest outbreak had occurred.

Canterbury Employers’ Chamber of Commerce chief executive Leeann Watson has voiced what most businesses have accepted – we need to learn to live with COVID-19, and in such a way that businesses can continue to operate, trade and travel.

She said: “As we continue to learn more about COVID-19, ideally we would like to see sophisticated, high-tech border management for timely access to importing critical skilled talent, for business travel and for foreign students; rapid tracking and tracing of cases; and a risk-based approach to the operation of businesses, based on a COVID-19 operational health and safety plan – given how acutely aware businesses are of the impact of further outbreaks and lockdowns.”

I firmly believe the time has long since passed for the Government to look outside its own myopic obsession with case numbers and the inaction of the public sector. The Government needs to listen to business leaders and those who understand the private sector. People like Sir Ian Taylor, former Prime Minister Sir John Key, and the Government’s own business adviser, Rob Fyfe.

Fyfe has expressed understandable frustration over the lack of progress in getting officials to work with the private sector to solve major issues linked to the pandemic. He said the world was mobilising day by day and NZ now has to play catchup or businesses will suffer. I agree with him when he talks about an ideological block on Government seeking help from the private sector – something that is not exclusive to the current government, and has been a feature of the public service for decades.

Sir Ian Taylor has also noted Government reluctance to seek help from the business sector. He is right to suggest that the business community has a lot that it could offer the Government in managing the pandemic….if only they were asked to help. 

Taylor stated publicly: “We, and others, have operated in some of the most COVID-ravaged countries in the world and we have kept our Kiwi staff COV-free for more than a year and a half because of the protocols that have been put in place by the businesses we work with.”

Unfortunately, the MIQ situation meant Taylor’s organisation, Animation Research, had to walk away from a significant, multi-year contract because he could not risk sending staff overseas without knowing when they could return to NZ. He spoke of a business colleague who operates in nine countries around the world who was planning to move his entire family to Europe because he could not guarantee an MIQ space for business trips that he regularly took to keep his business in NZ operational.

It’s this kind of story that should be ringing alarm bells around the Cabinet table, but unfortunately you get little impression that they even understand the longterm implications of what is happening right now.

Lockdowns, longterm restrictions on our freedoms and a closed border are what this Government knows. They have finally come around to the importance of vaccinations after an embarrassingly slow start, but are still reluctant to use the many other innovative tools advocated by the private sector or opposition political parties. 

It is high time that they acknowledged that they and their small coterie of epidemiologists and modellers don’t have all the answers – and instead be open to alternative ways of doing things. Surely, that is the least we could ask of our government.