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'We can't keep it out forever' - Sir Peter Gluckman on Covid and re-opening NZ's borders

July 4, 2021

New Zealand needs to stay in step with Australia if it wants to keep the Trans-Tasman bubble open, says former Chief Science Advisor Sir Peter Gluckman.

New Zealand needs to stay in step with Australia if it wants to keep the Trans-Tasman bubble open, says former Chief Science Advisor Sir Peter Gluckman.

On Friday, Australia announced a four-step plan for re-opening the borders – a strategy linked to vaccination rates.

Sir Peter told Q+A that like Australia and Singapore, New Zealand has to have a plan for the next few years, one that accepts that Covid-19 is now part of the environment and cannot be wiped out.

"Borders cannot stay closed forever," Sir Peter told Q+A this morning.

“It’s not been easy, but it's relatively easy to shut the borders of a country like New Zealand or Australia, it’s much harder to work to open them up.”

He told Q+A's Jack Tame the New Zealand Government’s response needed to be shaped around two fundamental ideas, that the virus is not ever going away, and that the population needed to take the vaccine when it was offered.

Gluckman said the reality with Covid is that “we cannot keep it out forever", and that the risk of Covid will be "reduced the more we vaccinate."

“We cannot eliminate it from the world, or eradicate it, because of the simple reason that it’s not only in humans, it’s also there in animals. Unless we were to do something beyond comprehension the virus will stay in the global ecosystem at some level. Just as the measle virus does.”

It means for this year at least restrictions will stay in place and the minister warns there's no magical moment we can open up our borders and go back to normal

He said “there’s no magic number” for vaccinations, and that as many people who can should take the vaccine when it's offered.

Sir Peter argued that if New Zealand wants to maintain a Trans-Tasman Bubble, we need to move in a similar direction to Australia.

"If we move in different directions too far from Australia the bubble becomes compromised.”

Consistency and clarity needed 

Paul Anderson the CEO of NZ Ski, like many tourism businesses that were counting on an influx of international visitors during the Australian school holidays, understands the need to prioritise a health response while New Zealand's vaccination rates are low. But he wants greater clarity from the government about what the plan is.

“What I’d love to see is a bit of a vision for what coming out of this pandemic looks like to the government because if we get that clarity then businesses can come in behind and plan.”

Dr Lara Greaves who lectures in politics at the University of Auckland agrees there needs to be a plan to re-open as New Zealand cannot remain in what she describes as “a hermit state like North Korea” indefinitely.

“We’re going to have to follow Australia to a certain extent because that’s peoples closet comparator and if suddenly that sort of travel bubble right is taken away for people to visit whānau over there and…business people are going to feel hard done by.”

Political commentator Brigitte Morten told Q+A there neededto be a consistent approach across Australia and New Zealand.

Epidemiologist Michael Baker believes New Zealand should continue its hard line on Covid-19.

“We believe that we are separate countries but ultimately we have such strong connections that we do have to move on the same path.”

Dr Greaves praised the epidemiological and overall scientific response from New Zealand’s scientists as “world class” but warned that the numbers were showing more needs to be done to vaccinate at-risk populations.

“A lot of that work is showing that we need to have proportionally more of the Māori population and Pacific populations vaccinated in order to get to that safer level.”

She pointed out that Māori and Pacific populations skew younger, and therefore will be slower to receive the vaccine which is being prioritised for older members of the community.

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