The chair of a World Health Organisation (WHO) advisory group is urging world leaders to denounce misinformation around health.

Sir Collin Tukuitonga is reacting to comments made by US Senator Robert F Kennedy, who claimed that measles was not the cause of 83 deaths in Samoa during a measles outbreak there in 2019.

Samoa’s Head of Health Dr Alec Ekeroma rejected Kennedy’s claim, calling it a “complete lie”.

• READ MORE: Better immunisation coverage needed to prevent Pacific measles, says WHO
• The deadly consequences of disinformation in the Pacific
• Other Samoa measles reports

Speaking to RNZ Pacific Waves, Sir Collin said leaders had a duty to protect people from inaccurate public health statements.

He said he was “absolutely horrified” that the person who “is the most influential individual in the US health system” could “tell lies and keep a straight face”.

“But [I am] not surprised because Kennedy has a history of subscribing to fringe, incorrect knowledge, conspiracy theories, and odd things of that type.”

He said Dr Ekeroma was very clear and direct in his condemnation of the lies from Kennedy and the group.

‘Call it for what it is’
“I encourage all of our people who are in a position to call these people for what it is.”

Sir Collin is the chair of the WHO’s Strategic and Technical Advisory Group on the Prevention and Control of Noncommunicable Diseases.

He said Kennedy’s comments and attitude toward vaccination will feed the anti-vaxxers and and discourage parents who might be uncertain about vaccines.

“So, [it is] potentially going to have a negative impact on immunisation programmes the world over. The United States has a significant influence on global health policy.

“These kinds of proclamations and attitudes and ideologies will have disastrous consequences.”

He believes that the scientific community should speak up, adding that political and business leaders in the region should also condemn such behaviour.

Withdrawal of US from WHO
Sir Collin described President Donald Trump’s decision to pull the US out of the WHO as “dangerous”.

He said Washington is a major contributor to the money needed by WHO, which works to protect world health, especially vulnerable communities in developing countries.

“I understand they contribute about a fifth of the WHO budget,” he said.

“The United States is a world leader in the technical, scientific expertise in a number of areas, that may not be as available to the rest of the world.

“Research and development of new medicines and new treatments, a large chunk of which originates in the United States.

“The United States falling out of the chain of surveillance and reporting of global outbreaks, like Covid-19, puts the whole world at risk.”

He added there were ‘a good number of reasons” why the move by the US was “shameful and irresponsible”.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

Surveillance and better vaccine coverage is needed to prevent another measles outbreak in the Pacific, says the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) Western Pacific regional director.

Dr Saia Ma’u Piukala said many children missed out on routine vaccinations — including measles and rubella — during the covid-19 pandemic.

According to WHO, measles cases jumped by 225 percent — from just over 1400 cases in 2022 to more than 5000 last year — in the Western Pacific region.

“I think the health workforce were concentrating on covid-19 vaccinations and forgot about routine vaccinations, not only for measles, but other routine immunisation schedule,” Piukala told RNZ Pacific.

“People are going back to fill the gaps.”

From 2022 to 2023, 11 countries in the Western Pacific, including Fiji, Kiribati, Marshall Islands, the Federated States of Micronesia, Palau and Papua New Guinea, conducted nationwide measles and rubella vaccination campaigns.

Catch-up successful
Piukala said the catch-up campaigns had been successful.

“That will definitely reduce the risk,” he said.

“No child should get sick or die of measles.”

In 2019, Samoa had an outbreak that killed 83 people off the back of an outbreak in Auckland.

Piukala said the deaths made people understand the importance of measles and rubella vaccinations for their children.

Fiji, Guam, French Polynesia and New Caledonia are the only countries or territories that have local testing capacity for measles, with most nations sending samples to Melbourne for testing.

Piukala said WHO plans for Samoa, the Cook Islands, and the Solomon Islands to have testing capacity by 2025.

“The PCR machines that were made available in Pacific Island countries during the covid pandemic can also be used to detect other respiratory viruses, including the flu, LSV, and measles and rubella.”

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

Former broadcasting minister Willie Jackson has defended Aotearoa New Zealand’s public interest journalism fund that his government started during the covid-19 pandemic, after the new deputy prime minister characterised it as “bribery”.

Speaking to media on Monday after his swearing in, Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters accused state-funded media organisations of a lack of independence from the previous Labour government.

Peters was asked how quickly he expected government departments to take action on removing te reo Māori from their names.

• LISTEN TO RNZ MORNING REPORT: Journalism fund for media outlets all around the country – Willie Jackson
• Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters attacks state-funded media independence

“Well, we’ll see the speed at which TVNZ and RNZ — which are taxpayer owned — understand this new message. We’ll see whether these people, both the media and journalists — are they independent?,” he said.

“Well, isn’t that fascinating, I’ve never seen evidence of that in the last three years.” he said.

He then laughed, and said “you can’t defend $55 million of bribery, cannot defend $55 million of bribery. Get it very clear”.

That last remark was a reference to the Public Interest Journalism Fund, a three-year $55m contestable fund for journalists initially set up to shore up public interest media during the covid-19 pandemic, which was wound up in July.

Media jobs, development funded
This included funding for 219 jobs and 22 industry development projects. Political coverage was exempted from eligibility to benefit from it. The fund was administered by NZ On Air.

Jackson, who became broadcasting minister in the Labour government two years after the fund was set up, said it was for media around the country, not just state-funded organisations.

“It was introduced during covid because it was a disastrous time in terms of media and we were pressured by good people out there to say, ‘hey, you support financial institutions so how about supporting local media that’s struggling’.”

It was aimed at supporting New Zealand media to keep producing public interest stories, he said and was “not just for RNZ and for TVNZ”.

“What you saw was a great investment in support of media outlets, Māori, Pasifika, regional [outlets] … Gisborne Herald, Otago Daily Times, Asburton Guardian, they got support and an opportunity to rebuild, reset.

“I’m very proud of what we did.”

Influence denied
He denied the then Labour government had any influence over the media as a result.

“The rules are very clear, we can’t interfere, we can’t intervene . . .  You guys have to have your own independence.”

RNZ’s charter requires the broadcaster to be independent, including providing “reliable, independent, and freely accessible news and information”.

While the organisation is funded by the government, by law no ministers of the Crown or person acting on their behalf may give direction to RNZ relating to programming, newsgathering or presentation, or standards, and cannot have staff removed.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

National Party leader Christopher Luxon made claims about health outcomes that were clearly false. Why was he left unchallenged?

In the TVNZ leaders’ debate last night, Luxon and Labour’s Chris Hipkins had a testy exchange over Māori healthcare.

Hipkins held firm on the creation of a Māori Health Authority, established last year, arguing strongly that the persistent gaps in health outcomes and care justified it.

• READ MORE: NZ election 2023: Hipkins and Luxon in fast-paced debate but fail to excite pundits
• Other NZ election 2023 reports
• Full RNZ data on Māori healthcare

Luxon was equally clear in opposition to it. He framed his critique of the authority around an alleged complete lack of progress on Māori health outcomes. He was very specific.

“Every single health outcome has gone backwards under Chris’s government,” Luxon said.

“Six years, not one has improved for Māori or for non-Māori.”

While sweeping in nature, Luxon’s claim did not get a direct response from Hipkins.

Luxon repeated a similar line later in the debate.

“Gone backwards. Chris, under your government, every single health outcome for Māori or non-Māori [has gone backwards]. You can’t have that.”

Hipkins did push back on this occasion, citing the ongoing reduction in rates of smoking.

Luxon’s claim was far from true — there are a number of areas where health outcomes for Māori and non-Māori have improved while Labour has been in charge.

But it is perhaps understandable that Hipkins was not quick to correct Luxon because the data — even though it’s better in many respects — is still grim. Maybe Hipkins did not wish to dwell on this.

Improved health outcomes
There are a number of health outcomes where, for Māori, statistics have improved.

Perhaps Labour’s biggest boast is their track record on bringing down lung cancer and smoking rates for Māori.

Lung cancer is the second leading cause of death for Māori in Aotearoa. But according to the Ministry of Health, rates of lung disease for Māori have come down.

In 2017, the rate per 100,000 people was 79.9 for Māori. By 2019, it was down to 68.4. This also aligns with smoking rates among Māori dropping.

Pre-colonisation, Māori did not smoke. However, when tobacco was introduced to Aotearoa in the 18th century that quickly changed.

Smoking has been particularly harmful for Māori who have higher smoking rates than non-Māori and experience greater rates of death and tobacco-related illness.

In 2017/18, the smoking rate for Māori adults was 35.3 percent. By 2021/22, it was down to 20.9 percent (approximately 127,000 people).

Rates were falling under National but they have continued to drop under Labour, which has rolled out a number of initiatives in an effort to reduce nation-wide smoking rates.

As part of the Smokefree 2025 Action Plan, historic and world-leading legislation mandated an annually rising smoking age that will mean that anyone born on or after 1 January, 2009, will never be able to purchase tobacco products.

Other cancers
Overall, cancer registrations rates among Māori fell from 416 per 100,000 people in 2017 to 405.7 in 2019.

Breast cancer registration rates for Māori women fell from 140.7 per 100,000 people in 2010 to 122.5 per 100,000 in 2019. Prostate cancer registration rates for Māori fell from 105.5 for Māori in 2017 to 103.5 in 2019.

For non-Māori, overall cancer registration rates increased slightly from 323.2 (2017) to 332.4 (2019).

Life expectancy
The life expectancy gap between Māori and non-Māori may be the most telling indicator of all when it comes to inequities.

According to the latest available data from 2019, life expectancy at birth for Māori men in 2017-2019 was 73.4 years, up 3.1 years from 2005-2007 data.

The life expectancy for non-Māori men is 80.9 years. For Māori women, it was 77.1 years, up 2 years from 2005-2007. Non-Māori women are expected to live to 84.4 years.

While Māori life expectancy has increased over time, the gap to non-Māori persists.

At the current rate of progress it will be more than a century before Māori and non-Māori have equal life expectancy, a study by the Association of Salaried Medical Specialists found in 2021.

Child immunisation
In the debate, after Hipkins raised smoking as an area of improvement, Luxon said child immunisation was a concern. On this, he was correct.

Over the past six years, child immunisation rates have steadily fallen.

In 2017, 86.2 percent of eligible Māori five year olds had completed all of their age-appropriate immunisations. As of last year, the rate had shrunk to only 71.8 percent. That is an alarming 16 point drop in the period Labour has been in power.

In April of this year a report commissioned by Te Whatu Ora’s Immunisation Taskforce found that immunisation failed to achieve “adequate on-time immunisation rates in young tamariki” and to immunise Māori, meaning those who were most susceptible to “vaccine-preventable disease” had the lowest immunisation coverage.

The report highlighted the worst rate in the country — just 34 percent of Māori children in South Auckland were fully vaccinated. It attributed part of the problem to vaccinators being diverted to the country’s covid-19 pandemic response.

“This caused childhood immunisation rates to plummet. These rates are now the lowest they have ever been and ethnic disparities have further expanded,” it said.

The report outlined 54 recommendations covering funding, delivery, technology, communications and governance across the programme.

In the debate, Hipkins suggested the anti-vaccine movement was part of the problem, which he sought to link with National.

National has proposed an immunisation incentive payment scheme. The plan would see GP clinics paid a lump sum for achieving immunisation targets, including full immunisation for two-year-olds, MMR vaccines for ages 1-17, and influenza vaccines for ages 65+.

The clinics would have to either achieve 95 percent coverage for their childhood patients, and 75 percent for the flu shots, or achieve a five percentage point increase for each of those target groups, by 30 June 2024 to receive the payment.

Labour’s Dr Ayesha Verrall said a similar scheme already existed.

Labour has also failed to halt type 2 diabetes, the country’s biggest and fastest growing health condition.

Ministry of Health figures show that in 2021 there were 302,778 people with diabetes, predominantly type 2. Since the Labour government came into power in 2017, the estimated rates of the number of Māori with diabetes per 1000 has risen from 66.4 to 70.1 in 2021.

The rates for non-Māori have also climbed from 27.8 in 2017 to 30.1 in 2021. It is also important to note that the rate of diabetes in Aotearoa has been steadily rising over the past 50 years.

Type 2 diabetes can also lead to devastating health conditions and complications, including heart failure, kidney failure, strokes and limb amputation.

According to Ministry of Health data obtained by RNZ under the Official Information Act, since 2011 there has been a 39 percent increase in diabetic limb amputations across the whole population.

For Māori, the number has more than doubled in the past decade from 130 in 2011 to 211 in 2021. Under Labour, the number of Māori diabetic limb amputations rose by 15 percent.

Māori are still 2.8 times more likely to have renal failure, another complication of diabetes.

Mental health
According to Te Whatu Ora, the rate of suspected suicide per 100,000 Māori population in 2021/22 was 16.1. This is not a statistically significant change from the average of the past 13 years.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

The media sector in the Pacific should be supported with an enabling environment to report “without fear” in the face of ongoing challenges brought about since the covid-19 pandemic, according to a new study.

The paper, titled Pacific media freedom since the pandemic, is published in the latest edition of the Pacific Journalism Review.

As part of the research, the authors hosted an online panel discussion with senior Pacific journalists and news editors from Palau, Solomon Islands, Tonga and Fiji in December 2021 and held a follow-up discussion with those journalists in March 2023.

• READ MORE: Disinformation and climate crisis, governance, training feature in PJR
• The July 2023 PJR table of contents
• Other PJR editions

Researchers from the Australian National University and the University of the South Pacific said there was a need for “ongoing vigilance with regards to media freedom in the Pacific Island countries” post-pandemic.

ANU’s Dr Amanda Watson and USP’s Dr Shailendra Singh, who are the paper’s co-authors, said covid-19 exposed the difficulties faced by media organisations and journalists in the region.

“Covid-19 has been a stark reminder about the link between media freedom and the financial viability of media organisations”, they said, adding “especially in the Pacific, where the advertising markets are relatively small and profit margins correspondingly limited”.

They said media companies “faced challenges during the height of the pandemic due to revenue downturns”.

‘Strives for impartial reporting’
However, the industry “continues to strive to conduct impartial reporting, for the benefit of citizens and the societies in which they live,” they said.

“Media professionals and businesses face various challenges and thus it is important to support their work and ensure that they are able to operate without fear of violence or any other forms of reprisal,” the researchers concluded.

A media study from 2021 found that Pacific journalists were among the youngest, most inexperienced and least qualified in the world.

Dr Singh has told RNZ Pacific in the past that capacity building of local journalists must become a priority for mainstream media to improve its standards and Pacific governments must also play a key role in investing in the industry’s development.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

Former New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern has received one of the top accolades in today’s King’s Birthday Honours.

Ardern, who was prime minister from September 2017 until January this year, has been appointed a Dame Grand Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit.

She received the honour for services to the state.

• READ MORE: King’s Birthday Honours: Kiwis recognised for service across fields from business to sport
• Other King’s Birthday Honours reports

Dame Jacinda declined to speak to RNZ about the award, but said in a statement she was “incredibly humbled”.

“I was in two minds about accepting this acknowledgement. So many of the things we went through as a nation over the last five years were about all of us rather than one individual,” Ardern said.

“But I have heard that said by so many Kiwis who I have encouraged to accept an honour over the years. And so for me this a way to say thank you — to my family, to my colleagues, and to the people who supported me to take on the most challenging and rewarding role of my life.”

Ardern’s official citation listed her leadership in response to the March 15 terrorist attacks and the covid-19 pandemic “positioning New Zealand as having one of the lowest covid-19 related death rates in the Western world.”

It noted she had been named top of Fortune Magazine‘s World’s 50 Greatest Leaders in 2021.

The citation also referenced Ardern’s focus on child poverty reduction and listed several policies her government introduced, including free school lunches in some schools.

Ardern was first elected in 2008 and became leader of the Labour Party in 2017. She became prime minister later that year.

Ardern announced her surprise resignation in January, saying she did not have “enough in the tank” to seek re-election.

Since leaving politics in April, Ardern has become New Zealand’s Special Envoy for the Christchurch Call and trustee of Prince William’s Earthshot Prize.

She has also been appointed two fellowships at Harvard University.

In a statement, Prime Minister Chris Hipkins said Ardern was recognised for leading New Zealand through some of the “greatest challenges” the country has faced in modern times.

“Leading New Zealand’s response to the 2019 terrorist attacks and to the covid-19 pandemic represented periods of intense challenge for our 40th prime minister, during which time I saw first hand that her commitment to New Zealand remained absolute.”

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

Tokelau’s largest atoll, Nukunonu, is now out of lockdown after experiencing its first community cases of covid-19.

In a statement, the government said Fakaofo Atoll has had two cases at the border and Nukunonu now has six positive community cases — all within the same household.

This includes the two new community cases who are children from the same family who have been isolating together.

• READ MORE: Other Tokelau pandemic reports

The two kids were confirmed as covid-19 positive on Friday, May 26.

Tokelau confirmed its first community case on May 21, becoming one of the last places in the world to record community transmission.

Government spokesperson Aukusitino Vitale said they were all in good health and were being taken care of.

Hospital staff continued to manage their situation daily.

Meanwhile, the Council for the Ongoing Government, chaired by the Ulu o Tokelau (head of government), is set to meet on Friday to discuss the next official covid-19 update.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

The World Health Organisation’s decision to remove covid-19 as a global health emergency is the right move, epidemiologist Professor Michael Baker says.

The organisation said the virus was now an established and ongoing health issue that no longer constituted a public health emergency of international concern.

Professor Baker said the global status change made sense at this stage, but it did not impact on whether covid-19 was still a pandemic.

• READ MORE: Covid no longer a global health emergency, WHO says
• Other covid reports

Covid-19 was still New Zealand’s number one killer when it came to infectious disease and people should make sure they were vaccinated and take sensible precautions, he said.

“There might be some scaling down in the international reporting of cases, but really it doesn’t make a difference to somewhere like New Zealand.

“It makes no practical difference whatsoever to how countries manage this infection.”

1000 NZ deaths predicted this year
Professor Baker earlier said that this year covid-19 was on track to kill some 1000 people in New Zealand and hospitalise around 10,000.

The threat of long covid also loomed — with one recent study suggesting as many as one in five New Zealanders reported lingering symptoms after their first infection.

He emphasised the need for caution in easing our few remaining protections.

The latest vaccine was one of the best things people could do to guard against the disease, because it included protection against omicron — the current dominant variant circulating in the community.

“You have to always think why the World Health Organisation assigned it [a global health emergency originally] and it’s really related to these certain criteria.

“It is about how severe and how unexpected [the disease is], but it’s really about whether an international response is needed and whether there’s potential for international spread.”

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

New Zealand is in the grip of a fourth wave of covid but it is predicted to be smaller than previous mass outbreaks.

The most recent analysis from the Public Health Communication Centre at Otago University indicates there could be up to 12,000 hospitalisations and more than a 1000 deaths this year from covid.

Leading epidemiologist Professor Michael Baker said the fourth wave was potentially driven by a rise in the XBB subvariant, which had become dominant in the last two months — exacerbated by waning immunity and people spending more time indoors with the cooler weather.

• READ MORE: Other covid pandemic reports

“This pattern of small to moderate sized waves may indicate what we can expect to see with covid-19 in coming years. But there are still major uncertainties given the potential for this virus to continue to evolve,” he said.

A Flourish data visualization

There was growing evidence that subsequent infections tended to be less severe, which was good news — but there was no room for complacency, Professor Baker said.

“It’s a very different virus to influenza.

“With influenza, you might get it once or twice a decade. But with covid 19, it looks like you might get it once or twice a year.

“And each time you get this infection you’re running all of those risks of getting seriously ill, going to hospital or worse, and potentially developing long-term effects.”

Even those who escaped serious illness could be off work some time, which was having an impact on the workforce.

Covid-19 was still the leading cause of death from infectious disease in New Zealand, with 2419 deaths last year.

“Covid-19 is also a major cause of hospitalisation, with more than 22,000 admissions in 2022… and the virus is a source of inequalities with Māori and Pasifika markedly more likely to be admitted to hospital and die from this infection.”

A Flourish data visualization

Professor Baker and his colleagues have also been examining the multiple monitoring systems for covid-19, and suggest it could be time to transition to a “sustainable and enduring surveillance system” that covers other important respiratory infections, such as influenza and RSE.

This need had become more critical now that the Health Ministry had ditched its plans for covid-19 prevalence surveys, he said.

“A potential alternative is establishing sentinel surveillance of respiratory infections. For example, routinely testing a random sample of people attending specific health care settings such as general practices and emergency departments or community sites such as schools.”

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

Epidemiologist Professor Michael Baker says Aotearoa New Zealand is experiencing its fourth wave of covid-19 infection and warns people to stay vigilant.

He said it was not as intense as the previous waves but it was definite, with a gradual rise in the number of self-reported cases every day, as seen in RNZ’s ongoing database of covid-19 information.

A Flourish data visualization

“It’s the first distinct rise, a sustained rise in cases this year.

• READ MORE: Other covid-19 reports

“We’ve seen that numbers reached a low point in February and have been tracking up since then.”

The average number of daily cases sits at about 2000 at the moment, but Professor Baker said the actual number could be higher with people less inclined to test and report.

He said other indicators including the number of hospitalisations, people in intensive care units, deaths and traces of the virus in wastewater were also pointing to a new wave.

He encouraged people to get the new covid booster, isolate if they were infected, and mask up in poorly ventilated environments.

“It’s really important that everyone who has a position in authority thinks about the health of their workforce and their school population and the social venues that they operate in.”

A Flourish data visualization

Professor Baker also said that the Ministry of Education should provide monitors to reduce transmission in early childhood centres.

He also encouraged people to mask up on public transport.

“If you’re on a bus commuting … or train, you are going to be in that indoor environment for many hours every week and the ventilation is poor, so that would be a situation where I think masks should still be worn by everyone.”

Last week, cabinet decided to keep the few remaining covid-19 restrictions for at least the next two months.

Most pandemic rules have been scrapped, but people still have to self-isolate for seven days if they test positive, and masks must be worn in hospitals in some circumstances.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

Jacinda Ardern’s resignation as prime minister in January was a courageous and pragmatic decision for herself, her family and her party.

Although many said she had done a great job as leader, she rightly reminded us that a great leader is “one who knows when it’s time to go”.

Since hitting stellar heights in mid-2020, Ardern’s Labour Party had dropped significantly in the polls and was trailing the opposition National Party throughout 2022.

• READ MORE: NZ election 2020: Jacinda Ardern promised transformation — instead, the times transformed her
• Anniversary of a landslide: new research reveals what really swung New Zealand’s 2020 ‘covid election’
• Women leaders and coronavirus: look beyond stereotypes to find the secret to their success

The “Jacinda effect” had switched from being a uniting force to a polarising one. With an election coming in October, it was time for a change.

Her decision to stand down was as politically astute and timely as her elevation to leader of the Labour Party in August 2017. After all, Labour is now ahead of National in recent polls.

By the time she gives her valedictory statement to parliament later today, Ardern will have served as an MP for nearly 15 years. While the intervening period has undoubtedly changed her, she remains in many ways the same person she was as a novice backbencher.

In her maiden speech to the House of Representatives in 2008, she expressed the small-town values that got her started:

Some people have asked me whether I am a radical. My answer to that question is very simple: I am from Morrinsville. Where I come from a radical is someone who chooses to drive a Toyota rather than a Holden or a Ford.

She described herself as a social democrat who believed in human rights, social justice, equality and democracy. She spoke especially about work, education, community and the reduction of poverty – child poverty in particular.

All fine aspirations. But back then, Ardern’s Labour Party was looking at nine long years in opposition after Helen Clark’s three-term government lost power.

Unable to break the run National’s John Key enjoyed as prime minister, Labour went through one leader after another while Ardern rose through the ranks.

In mid-2017, despite a mood for change, it still looked like the election wouldn’t go well for Labour, at the time polling down around 25 percent. Then, at the beginning of August, Andrew Little handed leadership of the party to Ardern. With just seven weeks until the election, it was either an inspired move or the ultimate hospital pass.

As history shows, however, Ardern’s elevation immediately energised Labour’s campaign. It also drew international attention to the New Zealand election, as what became known as “Jacindamania” changed the mood on the streets and in the media.

Accidents of history
Critics sometimes labelled Ardern the “accidental prime minister” — a rookie “appointed” by Winston Peters, whose New Zealand First party held the balance of power in post-election negotiations. Conventional wisdom has it that Ardern simply offered Peters a better coalition deal, despite her party having won fewer seats than National.

But Peters gave those critics some more ammunition during a recent TV interview. He appeared to reveal that New Zealand First was forced to choose coalition with Labour when then-National leader Bill English alerted him to a potential leadership coup by Judith Collins.

According to Peters, English had assured him Collins didn’t have the numbers to pull it off. (Collins would eventually become National leader, of course, losing spectacularly to Ardern at the 2020 election.)

This sliding-doors version of events may be conjecture. But Peters can’t have forgotten how Jenny Shipley had rolled previous National leader and prime minister Jim Bolger in 1997.

That ultimately led to the breakup of the National-New Zealand First coalition in which Peters had been deputy prime minister and treasurer.

Perhaps, then, we have Collins to thank for Ardern’s elevation to the top job. We’ll probably never know.

Rise and fall
The “Jacinda effect” wasn’t a flash in the pan, however. Labour’s election support went from 25 percent in 2014 to 37 percent in 2017, and then to an extraordinary 50 percent in 2020. Coming on the back of Ardern’s exemplary leadership through the covid pandemic, it was an unprecedented result under the country’s proportional MMP system.

Her belief in “kindness” as a political force appeared to have been vindicated, if not for long. While New Zealand eventually recorded the world’s lowest excess mortality rate during the pandemic, this success was far from cost-free. In particular, there was a human and political price to pay for the lockdowns and border closures.

Businesses struggled, many New Zealanders abroad couldn’t return, and many resisted the pressure to be vaccinated. No nation escaped unscathed, and in New Zealand resistance to vaccine mandates boiled over on the grounds of parliament in early 2022.

Some protesters were angered by Ardern’s trademark empathy and kindness, which they now perceived as a false front. Due to the extremist elements among the protests, she refused to address them directly.

Ardern’s positive leadership reputation was earned on her responses to tragedies: the Christchurch terror attack, the Whakaari-White Island eruption, and the pandemic. But no sane politician would have welcomed such crises.

Nor were they part of Ardern’s social democratic plan. In fact, they hindered it. She did a lot for child poverty and family incomes, in line with her core values. But those achievements were overshadowed by a pandemic response that upended her government’s fiscal policy.

Promise unfulfilled
So, if catastrophes were the making of Jacinda’s career as prime minister, they were also the breaking of it. From her first campaign speech in August 2017, she had created a sense of promise that her government was ultimately unable to fulfil.

She claimed climate change was her generation’s “nuclear-free moment”, and that a decent, affordable home was everyone’s right. It sounded great, but on both counts progress fell short of expectation and need. Later, she would capitulate on a full capital gains tax to help solve the housing crisis. That allowed coalition partner Peters to claim credit for the backdown.

But it would also be wrong if the lasting narrative was one of failure to deliver. Her government’s Child Poverty Reduction Act now mandates reporting on progress towards poverty targets, bringing the problem into the engine room of fiscal policy. The Healthy School Lunches program helped reduce food insecurity.

Future governments will encounter strong political resistance if they try to rescind those measures.

Even those tireless advocates for children, the Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG), gave Ardern qualified approval following her resignation — although the truce didn’t last long. CPAG was back on the attack when Stats NZ reported “child poverty rates for the year ended June 2022 were unchanged compared with the previous year”.

A complex legacy
In the end, Ardern did not use the single-party majority she won in 2020 to fix the things she had wanted to fix. When her government saw a problem, its default setting was to say “let’s centralise it” — as if that would do. Good social democratic government was sidelined by bureaucratic shakeups in healthcare, education and (before the plan was cancelled) public broadcasting.

An elaborate structural reform of water services became mired in controversy over Māori co-governance and loss of local democratic control. The sixth Labour government’s only potentially historic contribution to the development of New Zealand’s social security system — a proposed unemployment insurance scheme — was quietly shelved after criticism from both left and right.

So, will Ardern be remembered as one the great Labour leaders? To do so would put her in the pantheon of Michael Joseph Savage and Peter Fraser, who achieved so much in social security, healthcare and education, and who led the country through the Second World War.

It would also place her next to Norman Kirk, whose 1972-75 government universalised accident compensation, introduced the domestic purposes benefit, and stood against French nuclear testing in the Pacific.

Ardern with baby Neve in 2018, the second prime minister to give birth while in office.
Getty Images

It’s a high bar, but not unreasonable to make the case. Ardern broke through barriers for women, most notably giving birth to her daughter while she held office. She united the country after the mosque shootings, soothing what could have become a divisive moment.

By listening to the scientific evidence and advice about covid, she helped save countless lives.

Ardern will undoubtedly be remembered as one of Aotearoa New Zealand’s outstanding prime ministers. This may not be for reasons of her choosing, though. Once the disaster management is accounted for, there are no major lasting achievements for which her government will be cited in the history books.

What will be remembered is Ardern’s exemplary and highly effective leadership through covid. Yet there is no “kind” pathway through an unkind pandemic.

Nevertheless, Jacinda Ardern is owed gratitude for all that she did — and acknowledgement of all she had to endure — to get her nation through it.

Dr Grant Duncan is associate professor, School of People, Environment and Planning, Massey University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

Travellers from China to Australia will be required to have a negative pre-departure covid-19 test from January 5 — and New Zealand says it is now assessing the health risks.

China has seen skyrocketing covid case numbers, and a range of other countries including the United Kingdom, the United States and France have also imposed testing requirements.

NZ government duty minister Stuart Nash said tonight that New Zealand was currently assessing the situation.

• READ MORE: Other covid-19 reports

“I’ve been informed today that Australia has announced pre-departure testing for travellers arriving from China. This measure is being taken in response to the rapidly unfolding situation in China,” he said.

“New Zealand has a public health risk assessment under way which will be completed in the next 24 hours.

“Our response will remain proportionate to the potential risks posed by travellers and in the context of the international situation.”

New Zealand, to date, had said it has no plans to introduce testing for Chinese visitors, the Ministry of Health said last week.

An ‘abundance of caution’
Australia’s Health Minister Mark Butler said this decision was taken out of an “abundance of caution” and a temporary measure due to the lack of detailed information about the epidemiological situation in China.

“That lack of comprehensive information has led a number of countries in recent days to put in place various measures — not to restrict travel from China, it’s important to say — but to gather better information about what is happening epidemiologically in that country,” he said.

Butler said the government warmly welcomed visitors from China, and Australia was “well positioned right now in the fight against covid”.

“The resumption of travel between China and Australia poses no immediate public health threat to Australians,” he said.

Butler said universities and the tourism industry would also welcome the resumption of travel from China, as would people who had long been separated from their family and friends.

“We know there are many many hundreds of thousands of Chinese Australians who have been unable to see family and friends for months — and, in some cases, years — and their ability to do that over the coming period will be a matter of considerable joy for them, particularly as we head into the Lunar New Year period,” he said.

Butler said that, although the subvariant that appeared to be driving the wave in China was already present in Australia, the situation was “developing very quickly”.

Concerns over new variant
“There are concerns, in an environment of cases spreading so quickly, about the possibility of the emergence of a new variant,” he said.

“Now there’s no evidence of that right now.

“This is a measure taken out of an abundance of caution to provide Australians and the Australian government with the best possible information about a fast-evolving situation.”

Butler said the Chinese government was informed about the measures this morning.

“It won’t come as any surprise to the Chinese government that Australia is putting this arrangement in place, I don’t think, given the broad range of countries that have taken similar steps over the last 48 to 72 hours,” he said.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ. 

RNZ News

Thousands of people will be cancelling their Christmas Day plans thanks to the invisible grinch, covid-19.

Leading epidemiologist Professor Michael Baker estimates 85,000 people will be in isolation by then.

He says gathering outdoors or in well-ventilated spaces is key to limiting the Christmas spread of covid — and testing beforehand.

• READ MORE: Covid-19: Jacinda Ardern defends settings amid wave of reported cases

“No-one will thank you for turning up and infecting other people, particularly if there are vulnerable people there. This is a time to be responsible and test if you have got symptoms, and then act accordingly.”

Crunching the numbers, Professor Baker said we could expect about 12,000 new infections on Christmas Day, based on the daily average of reported cases, plus the same number again of unreported ones.

Covid Modelling Aotearoa programme co-leader Dion O’Neale agreed.

“We’re sitting at the peak of a relatively decent-sized wave at the moment, so definitely lots of people will end up missing Christmas because they’re a confirmed case and will have to isolate.”

He expected reported case numbers to decrease, but reminded people not to rely on that as a signal the wave is over.

“They just don’t report a case when they’re having a fun time, that’s almost certainly happened this week with schools knocking off and a bunch of people leaving work.”

‘We have had to actually cancel Christmas’
One Auckland man, who wished to remain anonymous, said Covid had slipped through the chimney at his house – he had two family members who tested positive this week.

“Sadly we have had to actually cancel Christmas. We had been really looking forward to getting together with my sister and her kids for a big family get-together… and I had to phone her yesterday and say, ‘Look, I’m really sorry we can’t do it, it’s all off’.”

They would take Christmas Day as it came and delay their family gathering.

“We’re just going to have to try and make it as nice as we possibly can, depending how people are feeling. It could be that some people are feeling unwell.”

Auckland woman Melanie Bruges will get out of isolation in time to celebrate Christmas Day with family.

“We’re having family over on Christmas Day on Sunday, so I’m going to keep a really low-profile until then. We’ll probably test on Christmas Day before everybody comes over.”

If her husband or their seven-year-old tested positive, they would postpone.

“We’ve got five grandparents around for Christmas Day and we wouldn’t want them to be exposed to anything just for the sake of a meal. We can always put it off.”

Free biscuit not worth the risk
For the thousands who were flying to their Christmas Day destination, O’Neale said it paid to be cautious and mask-up.

“Is it really diminishing your travel experience if you don’t get your free glass of water and a dry biscuit on the plane? Would you rather have a dry biscuit or covid?”

He and Professor Baker did not want the grinch to steal Christmas.

“It’s absolutely essential for your health, wellbeing and enjoyment of life to get out and reconnect with your family and friends and have an enjoyable summer, that is so important,” Professor Baker said.

“Covid should not get in your way at all, and it’s a matter of making small changes in how you do things just to make it a lot safer for everyone.”

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ. 

With restrictions eased, public health warnings muted and mask wearing now almost non-existent, the risk of contracting covid-19 is still very real, particularly as people come together for Christmas parties and family gatherings.

Daily covid-19 numbers are the highest they have been for four-and-a-half months.

Immunologist Dr Anna Brooks of the University of Auckland says she is gravely concerned at the cavalier approach hundreds of thousands of New Zealanders are now taking to covid, particularly thinking that if they have already had it, they are not at risk of reinfection.

• LISTEN TO RNZ NINE TO NOON: Interview with Dr Anna Brooks
• Other covid pandemic reports

Dr Brooks tells Kathryn Ryan about how New Zealand is coping with the pandemic’s enduring impact and looks ahead to what could be a deadly summer of reinfection.

Kathryn Ryan: What is going on at the moment with this rise in reported cases? Are we in another surge of covid? 

Dr Anna Brooks: Yes, that absolutely seems to be the case.

These variants that are circulating have a better chance of infecting us because they’re evading our immune defences and so reinfections are going to be far more common than we’ve experienced for example, in the second wave.

So, there might be a bit more complacency because we’ve had two waves and people may have thought, “Well, I had it once I didn’t get it again,” and that’s really just not the case.

These variants, there’s a whole bunch of them out there and many of them we actually won’t even know exist because of the low level of data collection and variant tracking.

New subvariants
KR: We’re getting new subvariants; just explain what that means for your existing level of protection, either from previous infection and/or from vaccination — these subvariants will be better at evading than what we had before. 

AB: Exactly. What’s happening is as each new variant or subvariant is evolving, it’s doing so to evade our immune protection.

So absolutely, that can be from the vaccinations and/or previous infection.

What we’ve sort of had in our country, is we had that really large first wave, which was the BA.1 and [BA.2]… then the next wave we had was BA.4 and [BA.5], so we’ve got some what we call hybrid immunity within the community, absolutely. But it’s not enough to stop reinfection when the subvariants are still able to skip round our antibody response and infect us.

And as we know, our vaccinations are a great starting point for preventing severe illness but they’re not great at preventing infection. So, if these variants are capable of infecting any of us, regardless of our baseline immunity, then we’re going to see cases rise, we’re going to see severe illness and hospitalisations and deaths again — that’s the facts.

Impact of reinfection
KR: Can we talk about reinfection? Because I think people have had that sense of, ‘I’ve had it, so I’ve got a few months free now.’ But is there also a sense of, ‘I’ve had it and I didn’t have any major issues, so I’ll be fine next time too.’ Can you explain what we’re learning about the impact of reinfection and what to assume, or rather not to assume? 

AB: I think that’s exactly right. I think there’s a general feel that if you’ve had covid, you survived it perfectly fine, that if you get it again, it’ll be the same.

But what we’re seeing coming through the literature — and these are really large-scale studies that have been tracking reinfections — is that each infection or reinfection is increasing your health harms or your risk of health harms.

So, that’s where we really want to raise awareness right now, that people aren’t complacent about the fact that just because they’ve had at once, they’re not at risk, because everyone is at risk.

What we don’t understand is how long the body takes to get back to what I call a baseline level of [recovery in the body] and you won’t necessarily feel that. You may have had your infection, it may have been very mild and you’re like, ‘Yeah, that was nothing.’ But it’s not really nothing if you then go and get another reinfection, and then another one on top of that.

We don’t really know, especially now there are so many variants circulating, we just don’t know what the risk factors are and even the ability… to get exposure to multiple variants over a short period of time.

The literature is telling us each infection is risky, and reinfections increase that risk. Some of the publications are suggesting that that risk lasts for at least six months and that those are risks of heart attacks, strokes, clotting events, all those things that nobody wants as a risk factor.

Inflammation risk
KR: Just explain again why inflammation, that elevated immune response and why inflammation associated with it is a risk factor for long covid? 

AB: What we understand from all the research that’s going on is that, first of all, this virus is not just a respiratory virus.

That was where the first level of complacency crept in, when we started to see less respiratory failure, and the lung issues, and kicked off with Omicron.

But essentially, Omicron has been a different beast, and remains that way. What we do know is that it still has the ability to impact our blood vessels, our blood vessels feed all our organs.

Part of the immune response when we get infected, we know that the virus can cause clotting issues, and that probably happens in all of us. It’s part of an immune response to form clots to get the infection under control and perhaps what’s going on is that some of us resolve that inflammation and that clotting, and we all go back to normal, and in others, that doesn’t happen.

And that’s just one part of the picture. What I believe a lot of the literature is pointing towards — and it is one of the hypotheses we’re chasing down — is also that your immune system has had a hammering to a certain extent and we don’t know how to actually detect that, we don’t know how long it takes to resolve, but it kind of puts us all in a slightly vulnerable position.

What we are starting to see more coming through, and again, as I say, as part of the research we’re looking into, is that it disrupts our immune control of what we are wandering around with every day and that’s all our microbiome, and including latent or dormant viruses that we got in childhood, that live with us for life.

Some of the research is indicating that we get a reawakening of our viruses and some of the ones that are well known are chickenpox. Many of us get chickenpox, and then we get shingles. When our immune system — our immune control — breaks down, we get an outbreak of shingles because the shingles presentation, if you like, indicated that you had chickenpox as a child.

Epstein-Barr virus
That’s one virus we know, the other one that is kind of front and centre that everyone’s chasing down a bit more is Epstein-Barr virus. So this is EBV, or what we know of as glandular fever, and most of us are exposed to this.

The numbers are around at least 90 percent of us wander around controlling EBV dormantly… but at the same time, we know that not everyone gets severely impacted by EBV.

We’re starting to wonder whether it’s viruses like that, that inhibit us all, that are getting reawakened through a loss of immune control. And that could be contributing to what we now know as post-viral illnesses because, obviously, long covid is front and centre because this pandemic is uncovering that, but it also loops into myalgic encephalomyelitis or chronic fatigue syndrome.

EBV has been a strong contender as being a cause of that illness too, so it’s really showing us that we haven’t done enough research into understanding how our immune systems wonderfully control latent viruses or dormant viruses that we contract as youth, as children, and maybe that’s part of the picture here.

KR: So the question now is, what is it you can do to go forth and have a fabulous Christmas, a good holiday, enjoy life as fully as possible but still manage this continuing risk?  

AB: We all want to have fun in summer and gatherings and all the rest of it. My main message at the moment is that I want to make sure people understand that there is a risk… and we want people to manage their own risk, but not just their own risk, because vulnerable people are getting more and more shut away, because they no longer feel safe to be anywhere because they’re vulnerable to infection.

Those two things coming together, we’re basically in a position where we’re now essentially being told to look out for our own selves, because there’s very little public health messaging about the risks.

It’s two things here. It’s education that the risk isn’t going away, you want to protect yourself and understand those risks, and know that… any infection comes with a risk and there are people out there that are getting more and more concerned about their health not being taken seriously, because people around them don’t care anymore…

Keeping businesses open
I think some simple measures will keep businesses open too… You know, quite often when we’re raising awareness you feel like it’s the economy or businesses that are like, ‘Oh, make covid go away.’ We’re actually raising this awareness to keep businesses open. We want businesses to thrive over summer, but if there are no health protections in place, and you have customers in enclosed spaces, and your staff are getting infected, you’ll have no staff, you can’t open and so on and so forth.

I think the most obvious one is flying and public transport… if we’re not masking on planes, is that a ticking time bomb before there are no staff and you can’t get to your holiday destination?

KR: Back to your other key point, which is that reinfection being the trend possibly of the summer, those rates are getting quite high… are they getting close to a third of new cases being reinfections? 

AB: Yeah, it looks that way. We have to remember that without a surveillance programme of you know, random testing, we have actually very little intel on what that number is going to be.

[If] we’re not collecting random data, then we have no idea how much asymptomatic spreads happening or how many people are getting infections.

We can’t forget about that. We need to remember that that is why we RAT before an event, that is why we RAT before we go to a Christmas function. It’s not just because you’ve got symptoms — we don’t know how many people are getting asymptomatic infections.

That’s now become an individual choice, whether you do that, because it’s not part of any public health messaging that you should check to make sure you’re not asymptomatic.

So, if we don’t know how many people are out there asymptomatic, they’re not going to be testing, they’re not going to be reporting, and then they won’t even know if in a month, two months’ time they get an infection, whether that’s a reinfection.

That’s what we would love to see from a scientific position, and, you know, safety and understanding all of our risks, is actually gathering data so we can understand this and that includes knowing what variants are out there.

Every time around immune system is waning, depending on how long ago we were infected, or boosted or vaccinated, then the chances of our illness…being worse is going to increase as well. So severity, risks increase the further ago your immune response was.

RAT tests and variants
KR: Are the RAT tests just as effective with the new variants? 

AB: We’ve heard that the RATs are picking up the variants. It’s only as good as how good the person is testing as well.

KR: Are the boosters keeping up with the variants? 

AR: Boosting revives your immune system… the data showed any boost is going to give you that little bit more protection, because what it’s doing is training the immune system, and it’s reviving it, it’s waking it up, and you’ve got more circulating antibodies. They might not be perfect at shutting down the variant that you get infected with, but it’s going to do a better job than being completely non-boosted.

But what we’d like see is, there are the bivalent vaccination boosters that will protect you more against the BA.4 and [BA.5] strains. And essentially what we really need is a new generation of vaccines that sterilises and stops infections.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ. 

The parents of a New Zealand baby at the centre of a legal dispute that has made global headlines will not be appealing against a judge’s decision to hand guardianship of the child to the High Court.

The four-month-old — known only as Baby W — requires urgent open heart surgery, with both blood and blood products required for the operation and potentially its aftermath.

Te Whatu Ora/Health New Zealand took the case to court because the parents refused to allow blood transfusions from anyone who might have had the Pfizer covid-19 vaccine.

• READ MORE: Vaccinated donor blood: Parents’ meeting with doctors ‘hijacked’ by anti-vax support person
• LISTEN TO RNZ MORNING REPORT: Interview with University of Otago bioethics lecturer Josephine Johnstone duration

The NZ Blood Service does not differentiate between blood from vaccinated and non-vaccinated people, saying there was “no evidence that previous vaccination affects the quality of blood for transfusion”.

A judge on Wednesday ruled in favour of Te Whatu Ora, allowing the surgery to go ahead with whatever product the NZ Blood Service provides. Doctors, having been made agents of the court for the surgery, said on Wednesday afternoon they would be ready to operate within 48 hours.

The family’s lawyer Sue Grey and high-profile media supporter Liz Gunn said this morning there was no time to appeal against the court’s decision, but they had confidence the child would “get the best possible care with the best, safest blood” because “the government cannot afford anything to go wrong for Baby W as the world is watching”.

“The priority for the family is to enjoy a peaceful time with their baby until the operation, and to support him through the operation,” the pair said in a post on the New Zealand Outdoors and Freedom Party Facebook page.

Grey co-leads the party.

The baby will be in intensive care for up to a week and under Te Whatu Ora’s guardianship possibly until the end of January, allowing time for their recovery. The doctors were told to keep the parents “informed at all reasonable times of the nature and progress of [the baby’s] condition and treatment”.

Te Whatu Ora has been approached for comment.

Judge’s ruling expected
The ruling should not have come as a surprise, University of Otago bioethics lecturer  Josephine Johnstone told Morning Report on Thursday.

“This may seem like a very 2022 case and it is in many ways, but it connects to lines of decision over time where there have been disputes about what’s in the best interests of a child that has very serious medical needs,” she said.

“So this is consistent with previous cases around the refusal of blood products for children whose parents are Jehovah’s Witnesses… or refusal of medical care for cancer treatment for children whose parents have alternative health and science[ views, which is sort of similar to this. In many ways it’s consistent with those decisions. It’s not really a break in that way.”

Johnstone said the parents’ authority over their child’s health and upbringing was being limited in only a very minor way.

“The parents still have all of the other decision-making authority that parents have. And parents do have enormous latitude to make decisions about how to raise their children — what religion to raise them, what kinds of beliefs, what kinds of home to create, what kind of traditions, they have enormous decision-making power about children’s [medical treatment], but it’s not unlimited.

“In very rare cases where it’s a life-and-death situation, we can expect the courts to step in — and that’s exactly what happened.”

Johnstone’s view was backed up by Rebecca Keenan, a former nurse who now works as a barrister, specialising in medical law.

Put child ‘firmly first’
“[The court has] put the child firmly first and have gone by the evidence and supported the health board,” she told Morning Report.

“From reading the judgment, you can see that the parents have been taking their baby out of hospital, against medical opinion, and there’s obviously been a real breakdown in the relationship between the parents and the medical staff.”

Wednesday’s judgment outlined a meeting in late November during which the parents’ support person “proceeded to pressurise the specialists with her theory about conspiracies in New Zealand and even said that deaths in infants getting transfusions were occurring in Starship Hospital”.

Johnstone said while having a support person in meetings with medical staff was a right, it was clear in this case they were not helpful.

“One has to imagine that the involvement of some of the anti-vaccine campaigners has escalated not just this case at the national level, but even the discussions between the family and their medical team, so that’s explicitly mentioned in the case and is definitely a factor in how things must have got to the point where a court order would be needed.”

While not an unexpected ruling, Johnstone fears it might further strain the relationship between parents with alternative views on medical matters and their doctors.

“Any family who has these views and has a very sick child, their healthcare providers are going to have to work that much harder to keep them engaged and keep their trust … a big challenge,” she said.

Pleased over care
Speaking to RNZ’s First Up earlier on Thursday morning, Deputy Prime Minister Grant Robertson said he was “pleased” Baby W would soon be getting the care he needs.

“Nobody underestimates the emotion and the challenge and the difficulty here, but we have to do what’s right for the child.”

The case has made headlines globally, with coverage on BBC News, CNN and The Guardian.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ. 

A Pasifika health leader hopes the Royal Commission into the Covid-19 pandemic will look into the equity of the response and resource allocation.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern yesterday announced a Royal Commission into the government’s covid-19 response which will be chaired by Professor Tony Blakely, an epidemiologist working at the University of Melbourne.

He is joined by former National Party MP Hekia Parata, and the previous secretary to Treasury, John Whitehead, as commissioners.

• LISTEN TO RNZ MORNING REPORT: Pasifika Futures CEO Debbie Sorensen on the Royal Commission and the equity of communities
• NZ announces Royal Commission into government’s covid-19 response
• Domestic violence, isolation hit Pacific women during pandemic, says USP survey

Pasifika Futures chief executive Debbie Sorensen said Pasifika people were essentially left to form their own response during the earlier stages of the pandemic.

That was despite Pasifika people working a large proportion of jobs in MIQ facilities and at the airport and other front line locations, she said.

Many affected Pacific families experienced a great deal of hardship, she said.

It was important for the inquiry to look at the covid-19 response in regards to specific communities, she said.

Slowness of response
“We’re really clear that equity in the response and in the resource allocation is an important consideration.”

One issue was the slowness of the government’s response to both Pacific and Māori communities during the height of the pandemic, she said.

“Advice was provided to the government, you know cabinet papers provided advice on specific responses for our communities and that advice was ignored.”

An important aspect of the inquiry should be reviewing how that advice was given to the government, its response to it and how the government’s sought more information, she said.

The inquiry’s initial scope appeared to be very narrow, but it could be broadened as it went along, Sorensen said.

“The impact on mental health and the ongoing economic burden for our communities is immense — you know we have a whole generation of young people who have not continued their education because they were required to go in to work.”

Sorensen said often young people had to work because they were the only person in their family who had a job at that time due to covid-19.

Mental health demand
The pandemic also increased demand for mental health services which were already under pressure, she said.

Anyone who was unwell unlikely to be able to get an appointment within six to eight months which was shameful, she said.

Sorensen would have preferred the inquiry had been announced earlier, but it was an opportunity to better prepare for the future, she said.

But Te Aka Whai Ora, the Māori Health Authority, chief medical officer Dr Rawiri McKree Jansen told Morning Report he had some concerns that the probe into the covid-19 response was coming too soon to gain a full picture.

The pandemic was ongoing and starting the inquiry so early may obstruct a complete view of it, he said.

“I understand that there’s people champing at the bit and [saying] we should’ve done it before but it’s very difficult to do that and adequately learn the lessons.”

Understanding how to get a proper pandemic response was in everyone’s interest, but the pandemic was now still in its third wave, he said.

About to begin
Nevertheless, the inquiry was about to get underway and it could make a large contribution if it was done well, he said.

“I’m sure there will be many Māori communities that want to have voice in the inquiry and you know contribute to a better understanding of how we can manage pandemics really well.

“We’ve had pandemics before and they’ve been absolutely tragic. We’ve got this pandemic and the outcome for us is something like two to two-and-a-half times the rate of hospitalisations and deaths, so Māori communities are fundamentally very interested in bedding in the learnings that we’ve achieved in the pandemic.”

Dr Jansen hoped the inquiry would provide enduring information about managing pandemics with a very clear focus on Māori and how to support the best outcomes for the Māori population.

Inquiry’s goal next pandemic
The head of the Royal Commission said the review needed to put New Zealand in better position to respond next time a pandemic hits.

Professor Blakely said the breadth of experience and skills of the commissioners was welcome, and would help them to cover the wide scope of the Inquiry, ranging from the health response and legislative decisions, to the economic response.

Reviewing the response to the pandemic was a big job, he said.

“There’s already 75 reports done so far, I think about 1700 recommendations from those reports, New Zealand’s not the only country that’s been affected by this cause it’s a global epidemic, so there’s lots of other reports.”

The inquiry panel would have to sit at the top of all that work that had already been done “and pull it altogether from the perspective of Aotearoa New Zealand and what would help best there.

The inquiry needed to make New Zealand was prepared for a pandemic with good testing, good contact tracing and good tools that the Reserve Bank could use to support citizens in the time of a pandemic, Professor Blakely said.

“Our job is to try and create a situation where those tools are as good as possible, there’s frameworks to use when you’ve entered another pandemic, which will occur at some stage we just don’t know when.”

Professor Blakely said he was flying to New Zealand next week and would meet with Hekia Parata and John Whitehead to start thinking about the shape of the inquiry going forward.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ. 

The New Zealand government has announced a Royal Commission into its covid-19 response.

The Commission will be chaired by Australia-based epidemiologist Professor Tony Blakely, former Cabinet minister Hekia Parata, and former Treasury Secretary John Whitehead.

It will start considering evidence from February 1 next year, concluding in mid-2024.

• READ MORE: Other NZ covid-19 response reports

The Royal Commission will look into the overall covid-19 response, including the economic response, and find what could be learned from it.

Some things — like particular decisions taken by the Reserve Bank’s independent monetary policy committee, and the specific epidemiology of the virus and its variants — will be excluded.

Announcing the moves, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said a Royal Commission was the highest form of public inquiry in New Zealand and was the right thing to do given covid-19 was the most significant threat to New Zealanders’ health and the economy since the Second World War.

“It had been over 100 years since we experienced a pandemic of this scale, so it’s critical we compile what worked and what we can learn from it should it ever happen again,” she said.

Fewer cases, deaths
“New Zealand experienced fewer cases, hospitalisations and deaths than nearly any other country in the first two years of the pandemic but there has undoubtedly been a huge impact on New Zealanders both here and abroad.”

One press conference question at a Prime Ministerial summit in Aotearoa New Zealand kicked off a wave of social media scorn this week — and even criticism and international headlines about sexism. But media made a better fist of the awkward questions thrown up by parents withholding consent for the treatment of their sick baby and their supporters.

At a press conference involving Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and her Finnish counterpart Sanna Marin on Wednesday, November 30, a Newstalk ZB journalist unloaded a question which generated an immediate tsunami of criticism.

“A lot of people will be wondering are you two meeting because you’re similar in age and you’ve got a lot of common stuff there, when you got into politics and stuff. Or can Kiwis actually expect to see more deals between our two countries down the line?”

“I wonder whether or not anyone ever asked Barack Obama and John Key whether they met because they’re of similar age. We of course have a higher proportion of men in politics, it’s reality. Because two women meet it’s not simply because of their gender,” she said.

Marin was even more succinct.

“We are meeting because we are both prime ministers,” she said.

After that the criticism started flooding in on social media.

Then it came from those in the wider New Zealand media.

Question’s premise
On Today FM, Lloyd Burr took aim at the question’s premise.

“Just because they’re both young women Prime Ministers? You think that’s why they’re meeting?

“Do you think she’s come all the way to New Zealand to talk fashion and beauty tips, childbearing, menstruation, maybe anti-aging tips,” he asked, sarcastically.

The criticism continued in the international media.

CBS News in the US took aim at the reporter’s “sexist question” in a headline, while videos of the exchange posted by organisations like SBS News and The Washington Post garnered millions of views.

There are questions on why Marin is here, given our two countries are not huge trading partners.

Thankfully she kindly pointed some of those reasons out, saying she was worried about countries becoming dependent on trading with authoritarian regimes and wanted to establish closer ties with democratic allies.

Angle covered
Other reporters, including TVNZ’s Katie Bradford on 1News, covered that angle.

A simple “What are you here to achieve?” would have got a similar response without generating any international headlines about sexism.

Newstalk ZB may have produced a near-global consensus on that poor question to Marin and Ardern, but it did a lot better covering the bulletin-leading case of two parents who had refused to consent to their sick child getting a desperately-needed operation.

They were afraid the baby might receive a transfusion of blood from a donor who hd been vaccinated against covid-19.

Lawyer and Outdoors Party leader Sue Grey is representing the family in court — and in the media.

That was awkward for media wary of giving their platforms to her anti-vax views and it resulted in some on-air flare-ups.

Newstalk ZB’s Heather du Plessis-Allan cut Grey off when she started airing anti-vax talking points.

“I don’t want to go into your beliefs on this,” du Plessis-Allan told Grey.

“I’ve got to be honest with you, I just can’t go there. I just cannot be bothered with this.”

Similar scenario
A similar scenario played out the following day on RNZ’s Morning Report when Corin Dann interviewed Grey.

That devolved into a lengthy oscillation between Grey’s attempts to recite anti-vax talking points and Dann’s increasingly exasperated interruptions.

Predictably, Grey’s supporters have taken this treatment as evidence of a vast media cover-up.

Meanwhile, the out-of-context or inaccurate claims about vaccines she did get to broadcast might have worried some listeners.

But having told listeners to trust experts, and not laypeople, Morning Report and other media also allowed experts airtime.

Dann talked to haematologist Jim Faed later on Morning Report the same day and immunology professor Nikki Turner appeared on Heather du Plessis-Allan’s ZB show and on Three’s The Project. Experts like her provided a useful corrective, but another way to avoid broadcasting misinformation is to just not book people who spread it.

Dann sounded a little agonised over interviewing Grey while previewing Morning Report on RNZ’s First Up with Nathan Rarere.

“We’ll talk to the lawyer of the mother about this,” he said. “This is obviously a very tricky story, a very sensitive story, but nonetheless one that is in the court.”

Led news bulletins
Not only was it a matter before the court — it was a story that led news bulletins and filled front pages, including that of the New Zealand Herald on Thursday.

Sue Grey and conspiracy theorist Liz Gunn featured in the front page photo along with the child in question — all under the headline “We’re not prisoners”.

It was probably not realistic to ban Grey from media appearances under those circumstances.

In The Spinoff, Stewart Sowman-Lund recognised those factors compelling the media coverage, before suggesting an approach for reporters interviewing Grey.

“Those interviewing her should either be fully prepared to counter — in detail — her anti-vaccination rhetoric or — given the likelihood it will quickly descend into conspiracy territory — cut it off early.”

Maybe Dann and Du Plessis-Allan could have been better served committing to one of those two roads.

But at least their questions were incisive and on-topic, even if they weren’t met with useful responses.

If this week’s prime ministerial press conference showed us anything, it is that it is less embarrassing for our journalists to have it that way round than the opposite.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ. 

More than 200 people from Aotearoa New Zealand’s Chinese community gathered for a vigil at Auckland’s Aotea Square last night to mourn the lives lost under China’s stringent covid-19 lockdowns and to call for an end to the country’s “Zero Covid” policy.

The unprecedented display of defiance by a crowd mainly made up of Chinese Kiwis from the mainland came after a lockdown building fire in Urumqi, Xinjiang, last week that killed 10 people.

The Urumqi fire has sparked nationwide protests across China and among overseas Chinese, with vigils and protests building up in major cities including New York, Melbourne, Sydney, Hong Kong and Tokyo.

• READ MORE: China Xinjiang: Urumqi rocked by covid lockdown protests after deadly fire
• China softens covid stance after protests, clashes with police

More than 100 people at the event held up blank pieces of A4 paper as a symbol of defiance against China’s censorship of dissent, and chanted in Mandarin: “We don’t want leaders, we want votes — we don’t want dictatorship, we want citizens”.

“Without freedom, I’d rather die.

“Xi Jin Ping, step down, CCP step down.”

A similar vigil for the Urumqi fire victims was also held in Wellington last night.

Step up after seeing suffering
In an emotional speech, one of the organisers of the Auckland vigil said despite having no previous experience participating in social movements, she had decided to step up after seeing the recent tragedies of Chinese people suffering under the lockdowns.

“There were a series of suicides in Hohhot where I come from, I felt at that time that I can no longer say everything is fine — we can say that for New Zealand, but my family and friends are in China, so I can no longer be silent,” she said.

Members of the Uyghur Muslim community from Xinjiang — where the Urumqi fire happened — also attended, showing solidarity and protesting against human rights violations against Uyghurs.

The protesters also called for the release of protesters arrested in China.

The organiser paid tribute to a list of Chinese citizens who had stood up against authority during the pandemic, including jailed citizen journalist Zhang Zhan and the lone protester on Beijing’s Sitong Bridge who displayed banners calling for people to strike and for the removal of Xi Jinping.

Like her, many at the gathering were first-time protesters emboldened by the recent protests in China.

Another protester said he was also inspired by the man on Sitong Bridge.

‘He gave us courage’
“He gave us a lot of courage. He was a person at the bottom of society, who did what he knew was forbidden, he sacrificed himself to awaken the Chinese people’s desire for a democratic society,” he said.

“I feel like he’s planted a fire in all our hearts, he’s like the Prometheus of our times.”

An international student who had just graduated from high school said she wanted to contribute to ending China’s lockdowns.

“If the protests could work and make all the cities stop the lockdown, I was so happy to come to come here today, hear everyone share their stories and using the A4 paper to show our anger.”

Another said he hoped the protests in China and abroad instilled a sense of what it meant to be a responsible citizen for Chinese people.

“If people want to live with dignity in a fair society, there needs to be a civil society,” he said.

‘Softer’ solidarity
Meanwhile, some at the gathering chose a softer way of showing solidarity with the victims of the Urumqi fire.

Chrysanthemums were laid and candles were lit, and a school aged child accompanied by his parents played “Do you hear the people sing” on his flute.

One attendee told RNZ he was glad that the people who gathered could find something in common regardless of where they were on the political spectrum.

“Some people want to see a revolution in China, others just want something small like for their residential area to come out of lockdown earlier, so that people can freely buy groceries,” he said.

“But people can easily find a common denominator, and that’s hoping things will move forward a little bit, and let friends and family living in China be safer and freer.”

At least two major cities in China — Guangzhou and Chongqing — have eased covid-19 restrictions following a clash between protesters and police in Guangzhou this week.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ. 

The Niue government has confirmed the country is experiencing covid-19 community transmission for the first time since the virus was recorded at the border in March.

“We don’t have additional resources to be finding sources of infection, previously we haven’t done that before.

“This is the first time we have had community transmission in Niue,” Acting Secretary of Government Gaylene Tasmania said.

• READ MORE: Other Niue covid reports
• NZ covid-19 update: 27,076 new cases, 58 deaths and 328 in hospital

Out of the seven cases recorded in the reporting period to November 28 local time, four were listed as covid-19 community transmission.

On November 29, 12 new cases were recorded taking the total number of active cases to 33 and the total number of cases since covid-19 arrived at the border in March 2022 to 136.

Community transmission means a case has not been linked to any other infections, Tasmania said.

“We are unable to link it back and we stopped linking it back because we need to look at containing the spread,” she said.

New Zealand-based public health specialist Sir Collin Tukuitonga said this marked a new chapter in Niue’s covid-19 response,

“You can have a community case that is not from a community transmission, this is a case that is in the community connected to the border but this person is now in the community, that is not community transmission,” Sir Collin said.

What is ‘community transmission’?
There has been confusion around what community transmission means with the term being used by the public.

“You have got to be careful, for public health people like myself, we have a very strict definition of what constitutes a community transmission,” Sir Collin said.

Any case that starts in the community and can’t be linked to the border is called a case of community transmission, according to Auckland University.

“A case comes through the border, negative tests and therefore goes into the community but nobody knows they have covid-19 because they are asymptomatic and they test negative but they are carrying the virus with them.

“So that individual could go home and be with family and be the source of infection,” Sir Collin gives an example of how community transmission can occur.

Tasmania said at the moment Niue residents could assume that there were people in the community that were positive that had not yet been identified.

“People are just picking it up just by being around the community,” Tasmania said.

The cases deemed community transmission were not been able to be linked back to any of the positive cases or any of the close contacts, she said.

New phase for Niue covid-19 health response
As of Tuesday, 29 November, the government covid-19 website is set to change and will not report “community cases” just “active cases”, Tasmania said.

“It is not an unusual response,” Sir Collin said.

He said New Zealand “gave up”, or placed less emphasis on contact tracing when the covid-19 numbers became high and the system was stretched.

“They have accepted the fact that there will be cases. Why would you persevere with all of that if you have changed your focus,” he said.

“Like us they’ll probably see a blip like increasing cases you are seeing here [in New Zealand] but given the high vax status I expect the peak to be lower and not as many sick people.”

No request has been made to New Zealand for support but Tasmania said there were options if needed.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ. 

Since Jacinda Ardern described the state of world affairs as “bloody messy” earlier this year there have been few, if any, signs of improvement. Ukraine, China, nuclear proliferation and the lasting impacts of a global pandemic all present urgent, unresolved challenges.

For a small country in an increasingly lawless world this is both dangerous and confronting.

Without the military or economic scale to influence events directly, New Zealand relies on its voice and ability to persuade.

• READ MORE: Putin plays the annexation card, pushing the war in Ukraine into a dangerous new phase
• How will China interact with the world over the next 5 years? Xi’s new speech holds clues
• Nukes, allies, weapons and cost: 4 big questions NZ’s defence review must address

But by placing its faith in a rules-based order and United Nations processes, New Zealand also has to work with — and sometimes around — highly imperfect systems. In some areas of international law and policy the machinery is failing. It’s unclear what the next best step might be.

Given these uncertainties, then, where has New Zealand done well on the international stage, and where might it need to find a louder voice or more constructive proposals?

Confronting Russia
Strength and clarity have been most evident in New Zealand’s response to the Russian attack on Ukraine. There has been no hint of joining the abstainers or waverers at crucial UN votes condemning Russia’s actions.

While it can be argued New Zealand could do more in terms of sanctions and support for the Ukrainian military, the government has made good use of the available international forums.

Joining the International Court of Justice case against “Russia’s spurious attempt to justify its invasion under international law” and supporting the International Criminal Court investigation into possible war crimes in Ukraine are both excellent initiatives.

Unfortunately, similar avenues have been blocked when it comes to other critical issues New Zealand has a vested interest in seeing resolved properly.

UN vote to ignore human rights abuses in China leaves west in dead end https://t.co/mTWo4ETubU

— The Guardian (@guardian) October 7, 2022

China and human rights
This has been especially apparent in the debate about human rights abuses in China, and allegations of genocide made by some countries over the treatment of Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang.

New Zealand and some other countries correctly avoided using the word “genocide”, which has a precise legal meaning best applied by UN experts, not domestic politicians. Instead, the government called on China to provide meaningful and unfettered access to UN and other independent observers.

While not perfect, the visit went ahead. The eventual report by outgoing UN Human Rights Commissioner Michelle Bachelet concluded that China had committed serious human rights violations, which could amount to crimes against humanity.

This should have forced the international community to act. Instead, 19 countries voted with China to block a debate at the UN Human Rights Council (17 wanted the debate, 11 abstained). The upshot was that China succeeded in driving the issue into a diplomatic dead-end.

Allowing an organisation designed to protect victims to be controlled by alleged perpetrators isn’t something New Zealand should accept. The government should make it a diplomatic priority to become a member of the council, and it should use every opportunity to speak out and keep the issue in the global spotlight.

Ardern’s Russia warning: New nuclear age dawns – countries want to start and win new nuclear war https://t.co/ft03c2FAI5 pic.twitter.com/DRoA4IDRFN

— nzherald (@nzherald) September 23, 2022

Arms control
Elsewhere, New Zealand’s foreign policy can arguably be found wanting — most evidently, perhaps, in the area of nuclear arms regulation.

Advocating for the complete prohibition of all nuclear weapons, as the prime minister did at the UN in September, might be inspiring and also good domestic politics, but it doesn’t make the world safer.

With the risk of nuclear conflagration at its highest since the Cuban missile crisis, a better immediate goal would be improving the regulation, rather than prohibition, of nuclear weapons. This would entail convincing nuclear states to take their weapons off “hair-trigger alert”.

The other goals should be the adoption of a no-first-use policy by all nuclear powers (only China has made such a commitment so far), and a push for regional arms control in the Indo-Pacific to rein in India, Pakistan and China.

Pandemic preparedness
Finally, there is the danger of vital law and policy not just failing, but not even being born. This is the case with the World Health Organisation’s so-called “pandemic treaty”, designed to better prevent, prepare for and respond to the next global pandemic.

New Zealand set out some admirable goals in its submission in April, but these have been watered down or are missing from the first working draft of the proposed agreement.

This shouldn’t be accepted lightly given the lessons of the past two-and-a-half years. Transparency by governments, a precautionary approach and the meaningful involvement of non-state actors will be essential.

Similarly, improved oversight of the 59 laboratories spread across 23 countries that work with the most dangerous pathogens is critical. Currently, only a quarter of these labs score highly on safety. The proposed treaty does little to demand the kind of biosecurity protocols and robust regulatory systems required to better protect present and future generations.

As with the other urgent and difficult issues mentioned here, New Zealand’s future is directly connected to what happens elsewhere in the world. The challenge now is to keep adapting to this changing global order while being an effective voice for reason and the rule of law.

Dr Alexander Gillespie is professor of law, University of Waikato. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

Concerns are being raised about the future survival of the iTaukei (Fijian) language as a threat of extinction looms despite its everyday use among its people.

A language and culture scholar in Fiji, Dr Paul Geraghty, said a growing generational gap within the iTaukei language had been detected and caused concern.

Dr Geraghty said the extent of knowledge of iTaukei vocabulary and its diversity through the different dialects had reduced significantly over the years.

• READ MORE:  The origins of the Fijian language – Dr Paul Geraghty
• Other Pacific language reports

“Young people of today, especially in urban areas, do not speak as well as their parents or grandparents. They don’t have the same vocabulary knowledge, so that is something to be concerned about,” he said.

“People are losing their distinctiveness. The language is becoming what I would call standard Fijian or Fijian of the urban centres.”

Dr Geraghty added that the loss of richness within the iTaukei language was rooted in Fiji’s long colonial history.

“The peculiar colonial history that we have is to a large extent to blame not only for the loss of indigenous languages in Fiji or the reduction of the knowledge of Fijian language but also perceptions are an essential thing.”

New Zealand’s influence on Fijian education
Dr Geraghty explained that until 1930 all education was in the vernacular, either iTaukei, Hindi (Fiji’s second largest spoken language) or Rotuman, until it was no longer sustainable and colonial law makers began to look to the region for assistance.

“The New Zealand government began teaching in Fiji, and its education system was not inclusive towards teaching Māori, which is not the case today. But that culture was brought across to Fiji and children were punished for speaking in their native languages.”

The lasting impacts of this event were still actively practised in Fiji, added Dr Geraghty.

“We look up to English as a superior language and make jokes about people who don’t speak English well. That is not funny — English people don’t make jokes about people who can’t speak French. The most important thing in a child’s education is learning to speak their language well.”

Dr Geraghty has advocated the importance of incorporating native language into the education system as a scholar of language.

History has always been a leading guide to the future, and learning not to repeat the past, is what linguists advise.

Importance of sustaining iTaukei language
Dr Geraghty said that multilingualism was vital for a child’s education as it stimulated the mind and opened many other possibilities.

“Bilingualism and multilingualism — speaking two or more languages should be encouraged as it will increase the beauty of diversity in the world and our knowledge of this world and our position in it.”

A call for the Fijian Ministry of Education to act now and implement the compulsory learning of iTaukei and Hindi in schools was paramount.

Dr Geraghty added while the Fijian government and universities had started incorporating vernacular into the curriculum, more needed to be done.

Fijian Language Week celebration

The Fijian community has launched a week-long celebration of the Fijian language, traditions and culture with events across Aotearoa.

The Minister for Pacific Peoples, Aupito William Sio, marked Macawa ni Vosa Vakaviti — Fijian Language Week, welcoming this year’s theme of nurture, preserve and sustain the Fijian language.

Aupito acknowledged the enduring strength and sustainability of Vosa Vakaviti and its importance as the Fijian community navigated its recovery from the covid-19 pandemic.

“Fiji has been hit hard by the covid-19 pandemic and climate change’s ever-increasing impacts,” he said.

“Yet, while it faces a road to recovery, the Fijian people can always rely on their language, traditions and values to sustain them.

“Now more than ever, the Fiji language, culture, and identity is important to uphold both in Aotearoa and Fiji.”

Aupito said the Fijian community in Aotearoa, New Zealand, should be applauded for their tireless efforts in advocating for and strengthening Vosa Vakaviti.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

The Taupulega, or council, on the Tokelau atoll of Nukunonu, has lifted a house arrest order on a family which had refused to get vaccinated against covid-19.

The family was placed under tunoa in August 2021.

A council meeting on Wednesday told family member Mahelino Patelesio that the tunoa was being lifted. However, the family would be updated on restrictions that might apply when a cargo ship drops off supplies.

• READ MORE: More reports on covid-free Tokelau

At the meeting, Patelesio sought forgiveness from the community for any hurt arising from the family’s refusal to be vaccinated and the resulting social media dispute.

He also said he felt sorry about what he claimed was a lack of information that the Taupulega and atolls had about the Pfizer vaccine and felt worse about the children in the community who had had to get the vaccine, again citing claims of lack of information.

RNZ Pacific’s correspondent on Nukunonu said members of the public and Taupulega expressed sadness and disappointment at the meeting over how the family handled this situation on such a public platform — social media — where the depth of the culture was not taken into consideration and was instead damaged.

The general manager for the office of the council of Nukunonu, Asi Pasilio, explained to RNZ Pacific in July why the council of 36 heads of extended families who serve the atoll’s community had decided to impose tunoa.

Decision of local council
“This is a village rule, this is the decision of the local council which runs the island and the community. We have the laws of Tokelau but we also have the local council which has the authority over their village,” Pasilio said.

She said there were no jails in Tokelau, but when there was a serious offence the council could just ask people to stay at home.

Tunoa took the place of jail.

While under tunoa, family members provided shopping for them.

The New Zealand dependency with a population of about 1500 has had no cases of covid-19 since the global pandemic began in early 2020, according to the World Health Organisation.

New Zealand’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade (MFAT) said in July the former Administrator, Ross Ardern, had no say in the implementation of tunoa, and that mandatory vaccination was a decision taken by Tokelau’s village leaders.

At the time about 99 percent of Tokelau’s eligible population aged 12 and over were fully vaccinated.

• Tokelau is a self-governing New Zealand dependency.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

All mask wearing requirements in Aotearoa New Zealand — except in healthcare and aged care — will be scrapped, and household contacts will no longer need to isolate, the government confirmed today.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and Minister for Covid-19 Response Dr Ayesha Verrall confirmed cabinet’s decision to scrap the Covid-19 Protection Framework — known as the “traffic light” system — and the majority of related public health restrictions.

The traffic light system will end tonight at 11.59pm.

• READ MORE: Other reports about NZ and the pandemic
• Covid-19 traffic light system, vaccine mandates and most mask requirements to end – the details
• Covid-19 update: 1149 new community cases, 225 hospitalisations and three in ICU
• Today’s covid health statistics

Today’s media briefing.    Video: RNZ News

They said the changes would include:

• Mask-wearing only required in healthcare and aged care: including hospitals, pharmacies, primary care, aged residential and disability-related residential care
• People who test positive for covid-19 must still isolate for seven days, but household contacts no longer required to provided they take a RAT test every day
• All government vaccine mandates to end on 26 September 26
• Removal of all vaccine requirements for incoming travellers and air crew
• Leave support payments to continue
• All New Zealanders over age 65, and Māori over age 50, to get automatic access to covid-19 antiviral drugs if they test positive for Covid-19
• From Tuesday, case and hospitalisation number reporting becomes weekly, not daily

Ardern said it marked a milestone in New Zealand’s response to the virus.

She said people may still be asked to wear a mask in some places but it would be at the discretion of those managing the location, not a government requirement. Vaccination requirements would also be at the discretion of employers.

‘Claim back certainty’
“Cabinet has determined that based on public health advice we are able to remove the traffic light system and with that decision claim back the certainty we have all lost over the last three years,” she said.

“For the first time in two years we can approach summer with the much needed certainty New Zealanders and business need, helping to drive greater economic activity critical to our economic recovery.

She said there was no question the actions of New Zealanders had saved thousands of lives, but the risks were changing.

“When we moved into our first lockdown the objective was simple: To save lives and livelihoods,” Ardern said.

“I’m sure there will be many who over the years will pore over the details of every nation’s response including ours. They’ll certainly measure the outcomes in different ways but when you look at countries of our size and compare them, they’ll find the tragic loss for instance of 15,500 people in Scotland and less than 2000 in New Zealand.

“The most recent health advice now tells us that with the lowest cases and hospitalisations since February, our population well vaccinated, and expanded access to anti-viral medicines, New Zealand is in a position to move forward.”

New Zealand could move on with confidence that its actions had successfully managed cases down, she said.

‘Never to be taken alone’
“This pandemic was never one to be taken on alone, and it never was. And so today I say again to everyone from the bottom of my heart, thank you.

“I know there will be those concerned by the changes made today. I can assure you that we would not make them if we did not believe we were ready but we also need to remember that not everybody experiences covid or its risk — including to our disability community — in the same way.

“That’s why isolating covid cases to protect our most vulnerable is important, and why treatment is too.”

She said she hoped it would be the first summer where the “covid-19 anxiety can start to heal”.

“As a nation, covid has hurt us in many ways but perhaps the one we talk about less than others is the toll it’s taken on everyone’s mental health. I see that toll — I see it in my colleagues, in my community in Tāmaki Makaurau, and especially I see it in our kids.

“I don’t want people’s wellbeing to be the price of covid, but it is going to take a concerted effort from us as government and others for that not to be the case.”

Ardern said one of the byproducts of the pandemic had been that New Zealand now have some of the most advanced mental health tools in the world, and the government had taken a number of steps to improve mental wellbeing support.

Two apps a highlight
This included two apps she highlighted for anyone who may need them: Groove and Habits.

Ardern finished her statement with a line from when New Zealand first went into lockdown: “‘For the next wee while, things will look worse before they look better’. It turned out to be true, things did get worse, things did get hard, but it’s also true that finally they will and can be better”.

Ardern said looking back, decisions were often being made with imperfect information but the decisions were made with the best intentions and she stood by it.

She said the government had been open to the idea of an independent inquiry into the response but was still getting advice about what that would look like.

“We do want to learn from this period and I think you’ll see that we’ve been taking that approach all the way through.”

Asked if it was the end of the covid response, Ardern said she hoped the change would give people huge confidence and optimism.

“We are moving on because this pandemic has moved on.”

The traffic light system used things like gathering limits but that was no longer fit for purpose, she said.

“We don’t need those extraordinary measures, so we won’t use them.”

Right time to remove ‘traffic lights’
Dr Verrall said New Zealand had succeeded in avoiding the devastation caused by the pandemic overseas, and now was the right time to remove the traffic light framework and begin a new approach to managing the virus.

“Together we have got through this with one of the lowest cumulative mortality rates in the world.”

She announced another 40,000 courses of antiviral medication had also been purchased and would be freely available to older New Zealanders.

“Anyone over the age of 65, and Māori and Pacific people over the age of 50, or anyone who meets Pharmac requirements, can access the treatment in the early stages of contracting the virus,” she said.

“This means more than double the number of New Zealanders will be able to access these medicines if they need them than previously.

She acknowledged that lessening the restrictions caused concern to disabled and immune-compromised people.

“I want to reassure those Kiwis that we are making these changes because risks are lower, in fact cases are more than 10 times lower than what they were earlier in the year and we now have layers of protections in place.”

She said the support was not ending and hoped that removing the remaining vaccine mandates would ease the staffing pressures disability services have been under.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

Despite total borrowings reaching $11.1 billion, the Auckland Council Group’s latest results show it has managed to weather the worst of the storm created by the covid pandemic.

But the super city’s statement to the NZX shows it will face some tough times ahead as it seeks to balance its next budget.

In June the council with New Zealand’s largest Pacific population — almost 250,000, more than 15 percent of the city’s total of 1.7 million — agreed to defer $230 million in capital works over the next three years to address a $150 million per annum shortfall in its operating costs.

• READ MORE: Other reports on Auckland’s covid recovery

South Auckland projects affected included a new Flat Bush multi-use centre, the upgrade of the Papakura park and ride and the Ōpaheke Park sports fields.

Auckland Council finance and performance committee chairperson Desley Simpson said a number of projects were impacted on by the cutbacks, but increases in revenue and operational savings meant it was now in a stronger position.

“The key point we considered when preparing our Recovery Budget last year was to provide significant support to the economic recovery of Auckland,” Simpson said.

“This proved to be crucial, with our ongoing capital investment programmes helping to counterbalance some of the anticipated economic pressures in Auckland, as well as supporting future infrastructure growth needs for the region.”

Council’s results ‘positive’
The council’s debt increased $757 million to $11.1 billion in the 12 months to June 30, while its revenue grew by $361 million to $5.7 billion.

Manurewa-Papakura ward councillor Angela Dalton said the council’s latest results were positive.

“I think considering the last few years we’ve had, they are pretty good,” she said.

“But I think the future budgets are going to be really tough for us and we are looking at some challenging times ahead.”

Dalton said the results need to be looked at in the context of the Auckland Council Group’s total asset base, which grew by $9.7 billion to $70.4 billion in the past year.

“Considering the huge drop in revenue we’ve faced we’ve still been able to build our city and work on capital projects like the Central Interceptor and City Rail Link. They are the big game changers for Auckland.”

Some council projects were delayed, but it still spent $2.3b on capital works, including over $1b on transport-related assets, $815m on water, wastewater and stormwater and $384 million on other assets.

Climate change funding juggle
Simpson said whoever won Auckland’s mayoral race would have to juggle funding for climate change initiatives, infrastructure and transport spending, community facilities and parks and reserves.

She said while some projects that were deferred might be brought back from the brink, some may be consigned to political history.

“We’ve come through the worst period any Auckland Council has had to deal with. But it’s not going to get any easier.”

Auckland mayor Phil Goff’s final budget was announced in June and included $600 million for new bus services, funding for electric ferries and buses and completion of key links in the city’s cycling network.

The budget’s climate change package will be funded by a targeted rate, generating $574m over 10 years, with plans to seek a further $482m in funding from the government and other sources.

• The political campaign for mayor is being keenly contested with a Pacific candidate, Fa’anānā Efeso Collins, narrowly leading opinion polls for the October local body elections.

Local Democracy Reporting is Public Interest Journalism funded through NZ on Air. Asia Pacific Report is an LDR partner.

United States-based medical doctors have praised the Marshall Islands for an “unprecedented” response to its first covid outbreak, as the positive case numbers declined dramatically this week after a record-setting first two weeks.

“The Marshall Islands has exceeded most expectations to deliver testing and treatment for large numbers of people, and to provide care for those with covid,” said Dr Richard Brostrom, the US Centers for Disease Control Field Medical Officer who arrived in Marshall Islands last week to assist the Ministry of Health and Human Services.

Brostrom has been engaged in the US response in all US-affiliated islands, including most recently in the Micronesian states of Pohnpei and Kosrae.

• READ MORE: Other reports on the Marshall Islands covid outbreak

The Marshall Islands was seeing above 1000 positive cases daily last week, but those numbers dropped to the low hundreds by Monday this week as the omicron BA.5 variant appeared to peak and drop off quickly.

Last week, Johns Hopkins University, which tracks covid cases globally, reported that the Marshall Islands set a seven-day all-time record for the rate of positive cases of covid.

“But what the data also shows is a jurisdiction that is able to test, treat and provide access to healthcare,” said Dr Brostrom.

“BA.5 will behave the same everywhere,” he said. “The Marshall Islands had access points for people to get tested and treated, it was prepared and it handled thousands of people in a short period of time.”

14 died in two weeks
No deaths have been reported since last Friday. During the first two weeks, 14 people died of covid. The majority of the deaths were among people who were not vaccinated or partially vaccinated, the ministry reported.

Health authorities put the low number of deaths down to widespread use of PaxLovid, a five-day treatment that Dr Brostrom said was 90 percent effective in reducing symptoms of covid.

“The use of PaxLovid in Marshall Islands is appropriate, by the book, and unprecedented,” Brostrom said.

He said PaxLovid had been well used in all US-affiliated islands with covid. But uniquely in the Marshall Islands, more people sought healthcare and didn’t stay home when they got covid, he said.

“It was an opportunity for the Ministry of Health to deliver PaxLovid,” he said.

‘One of the best responses to this pandemic the world has seen’
Health Secretary Jack Niedenthal praised health workers and community volunteers for their response under pressure when more than 200 were initially sidelined by covid in the early days of the outbreak.

“As this current outbreak of covid-19 begins to lessen, the facts say, even with the complicated logistical issues and limited resources that we have in the Marshall Islands, and even though we have a very immuno-compromised population, we have had one of the best responses to this pandemic the world has seen,” said Niedenthal.

“Our goal from the beginning has been resolute: Let the science catch up to the virus, and now we are seeing the result of over two years of diligent prevention and preparation.”

Among unprecedented events in the Marshall Islands, Niedenthal said the nation was the “only country in the world to have been able to offer people of all ages vaccines before we had community spread of the virus”.

He added: “Our current fatality rate of 0.1 percent of covid-19 cases ranks as among the best in the world with only Palau having a similar fatality rate for this virus.”

Dr Brostrom was part of a “surge support medical team” involving CDC, WHO, Taiwan and other medical officials that arrived during the second week of the outbreak.

What the visiting doctors have seen in the first two weeks of the outbreak was “an amazing delivery (of services) that we haven’t seen elsewhere,” Dr Brostrom said.

Speed in setting up care sites
Dr Brostrom said the Ministry of Health’s speed in setting up the alternative care sites in the community was key to dealing with the BA.5 variant that is in Marshall Islands. BA.5 is milder in its effect than earlier variants but much more contagious.

“It is so fast that if you spend a week to get sites set up, you missed the boat.”

He said the country had seen a five-day surge in cases, a further five days at the peak number, and now five days of numbers dropping down.

“It is most certainly going down,” he said.

“It’s amazing to see how the Ministry of Health has responded — not just now, but for two and a half years,” said Dr Sheldon Riklon, one of two Marshallese US-trained medical doctors working at rural clinic in Majuro.

“The Marshall Islands has done well. The Ministry of Health leadership prepared the Marshall Islands for this.”

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

A documentary from Stuff Circuit this week delved into Aotearoa New Zealand’s growing extreme far-right and anti-vax movement.

Why did the makers of Fire and Fury decide to platform a group of conspiracy-minded idealogues, and what did it get right that others got wrong?

In February, Newsroom’s Melanie Reid travelled to what was then called “freedom village” to interview some of the people behind the occupation taking place on Parliament grounds, Voices for Freedom leaders Alia Bland, Claire Deeks, and Libby Jonson.

“You guys started it yeah? The three of you?” Reid asked. “Three mums.”

“Three mums,” they agreed in unison.

The video feature was part of a wave of press that Voices For Freedom and its allies attracted in recent months.

Altruistic posture
Nurses For Freedom, a group founded by Voices For Freedom local coordinator Deborah Cunliffe, featured recently on Three’s The Project.

“Healthcare clearly matters to New Zealand. Our nurses want to help,” she said.

Cunliffe’s altruistic posture in the interview jarred a little with calls in the Nurses For Freedom Telegram group for Nuremberg 2.0 to be carried out on public figures who backed vaccination and covid-19 health measures.

At the end of that interview, presenter and former Black Cap Mark Richardson pointed out that the healthcare workers in question could get their jobs back with one simple step.

“Get the jab and go back,” he said. “I don’t care what your rationale is.

“Your country needs you. It’s like me fielding under the helmet. I didn’t want to do it but I did it for the good of the country.”

Other coverage was more sympathetic to the anti-vax cause.

Fire and Fury – the documentary.                    Video: Stuff Circuit

An uncritical eye
A story by Evan Harding in Stuff’s Southland Times cast an uncritical eye over Nurses For Freedom’s claim to represent 700 nurses just waiting to return to work.

But according to figures from the Ministry of Health, only about 500 nurses have been suspended for failing to meet covid-19 vaccine requirements.

Stuff’s article has since been removed, replaced by a message saying it failed to meet the company’s editorial standards, and another article by Harding on vaccinations has received the same treatment.

Stuff wasn’t the only news organisation to pull a story after giving an uncritical platform to an anti-vaxxer.

Last month, The New Zealand Herald carried an article by the Northern Advocate about Brad Flutey, who was protesting against the closure of the Marsden Point refinery.

The story didn’t mention that Flutey is an anti-vaxxer who called for the Parliament protesters to shift their focus to Marsden Point as a way of retaining momentum after their occupation was broken up, nor that he had repeatedly called to overthrow the government, and had faced charges for refusing to comply with covid restrictions and wear a mask while shopping.

After receiving criticism, The Herald took the article down and later replaced it with a rewritten version headlined “Marsden Point Oil Refinery protest passes 100-day milestone in Northland – take two”.

The Platform platforming
While some organisations seem to have elevated these figures either by accident, or in contravention of their own editorial standards, broadcaster Sean Plunket’s platform The Platform has platformed a succession of anti-vaxxers and extremists on purpose.

This week, presenter Michael Laws talked to Counterspin Media host Kelvyn Alp, who once told Act leader David Seymour he was lucky protesters at the Parliament occupation hadn’t strung him up from the nearest lamppost.

An extrajudicial execution would seem like the most extreme possible form of deplatforming, but an association with intolerance does not appear to be a deal-breaker for The Platform, which has the tagline “Open. Tolerant. Free”.

The station had also aired long interviews with leaders of groups like Voices For Freedom and NZ Doctors Speak Out With Science in recent months, some of them not exactly neutral.

The Platform host Rodney Hide put his cards on the table before an interview with Alia Bland, revealing himself to be a member of her group:

“I am a very very very proud member of Voices For Freedom. This is my disclosure. I’m not having someone along that I’m neutral about. I am a fan of Voices For Freedom.”

After his interview with the well-known Facebook anti-vaxxer Chantelle Baker, Plunket was so moved that he even offered her a show.

“Do you want a weekly show on The Platform?” he asked. “I would be happy to have you on board on the strength of the open conversation we’ve had today.”

Personal platform clipped
But today The Herald reported Baker’s personal platform had been somewhat clipped, with her own Facebook page newly deactivated. Though the report said she was operating another page, just not under her own name.

The reason Plunket was making that offer, and interviewing Baker in the first place, was because she had just been featured in a documentary which painted her and other leading anti-vax figures in a less than flattering light.

Fire and Fury by Stuff Circuit came out last Sunday, and features clips taken from conspiracy and anti-vax groups on platforms like Telegram, which show the violent elements of the movement.

“You gotta love that sound of execution. It’s gonna happen,” one clip begins.

“The media in this country need burning. They really seriously need burning,” another voice continues.

The doco also showed a darker side to Voices For Freedom.

Far from just being — in the words of that Newsroom video — the project of “three mums”, Fire and Fury portrays a group which puts up an approachable, folksy front to draw people into a more radical, potentially violent agenda.

‘Fascistic’ ideas lurking
In an interview with host Paula Penfold, The Disinformation Project director Kate Hannah points out potential fascistic ideas lurking beneath some of the group’s messages on vaccines and health.

“The role of women and wellness in fascist and proto-fascist movements has always been really significant. Even in Italy and Germany in the 1920s, a lot of proto-fascist ideas came from or were augmented by ideas around health, well-being, rejection of modern medicine, because obviously if you are an uber-race, you don’t need modern medicine,” she said.

“All of the different groups that we see in New Zealand at the moment have features of fascistic ideas around power and control.”

The documentary also homes in on chat transcripts from former National Front leader Kyle Chapman identifying the “dark-haired” lady from Voices For Freedom as a potential political leader.

Penfold told Mediawatch the Stuff Circuit team decided to do the documentary after watching the Wellington protests and seeing talk on associated social media channels about making the country “ungovernable”.

They wrestled with how to to shine a light on what goes on in the shadier corners of the internet without giving further oxygen to dangerous figures.

“There were many many, many editorial conversations about how we should do that,” she said.

Guided by researchers
Those conversations were guided by groups who had studied the New Zealand far right.

They helped convince the team not to interview some of the people at the centre of their documentary, including Kelvyn Alp, former AUT law lecturer and conspiracist Amy Benjamin, and fellow conspiracy theorist Damien De Ment.

Penfold also cited a 2017 report called The Oxygen of Amplification by US-based independent nonprofit organisation Data & Society.

“We drew most of our guidelines from that on what we should and shouldn’t do,” she told Mediawatch.

That approach was criticised by some journalists, including Plunket, but Penfold said it was necessary.

“They’ve had their say. They have so many hundreds, thousands of hours of material on the internet already, and also the guidelines we were reading said it was dangerous to give them a platform that’s equal to the hate they’re already disseminating. And so this is not your ordinary right of reply situation. In a way it’s like we were giving our audience the right of reply to what’s already been said.”

Different approach
Stuff Circuit took a different approach in an earlier documentary on the conspiracy theorist Billy Te Kahika, where Penfold sat down with him for a long-form interview.

Penfold said the team was also careful then not to platform “dangerous” content.

“We didn’t let him platform any of his conspiracy theory views. That was an important distinction. We were challenging him on things he had said and things he had done and misrepresented in his career,” she said.

“In this instance we just didn’t want to give them an opportunity to revoice the conspiracies they already had voiced. Sitting them down and giving them that right of reply risked re-platforming their dangerous speech and we just didn’t want to do that.”

The question of whether to cover the extreme right, and how to do it, has been a vexed one in the media as conspiracy movements have grown noisier and more influential.

In a recent column for The Herald, Matthew Hooton warned of a “monstrosity” emerging on the right, and concluded with this conundrum for the media:

“Is it best to ignore these extremist movements for fear of giving them a platform? Or is it more important than ever to bring to public attention the true nature of their agenda?” he wrote.

Pacific Journalism Review paper
Disinformation researcher Byron C Clark has looked at that issue in a paper on the media’s coverage of the Parliament occupation for the Pacific Journalism Review.

#PacificJournalismReview #FRONTLINE3: The #NZ #media and the occupation of #Parliament by @byroncclark #altright #antivaxxers #citizensarrest #conspiracytheorists, #Counterspin #disinformation #harassment #mediacoverage #Parliament #qanoncult #Violence https://t.co/vW3VauXZgn pic.twitter.com/mVy6sBjBCR

— David Robie (@DavidRobie) August 21, 2022

Clark said Fire and Fury succeeded where some other attempts to cover the anti-vax extreme right had fallen down.

Though some far-right figures were hoping the publicity they received from the documentary would help grow their movement’s numbers, the documentary’s framing and editorial decision-making should make that unlikely, he said.

“They’re hoping they can use this to bring more people into the fold with their beliefs, but I think that’s going to be difficult to do because it’s put some of the more violent aspects of their beliefs out there and that’s probably for a lot of people going to be the first thing they know about something like Counterspin — that they’re calling for the violent overthrow of the government.”

Clark said the documentary’s approach could help dissuade some vulnerable people from joining conspiracy movements by inoculating them against some of the more pervasive forms of false information being peddled.

He backed Stuff Circuit’s decision not to interview the conspiracist figures they were covering.

“I think rather than giving them more oxygen by covering them in news articles or a documentary like this, it’s providing some of that balance that’s lacking in their own channels.

“It’s really more restoring balance to some of these ideas rather than giving these ideas oxygen.”

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

One year on from Aotearoa New Zealand’s longest covid-19 lockdown, an epidemiologist says further lockdowns cannot be ruled out, instead preparing to do them better.

On 17 August 2021, New Zealand went to alert level 4 because the deadly delta variant had arrived.

Aucklanders had no idea that day that they would still be in lockdown until December, and that after 18 months of trying to keep covid-19 out, it would be here to stay.

• READ MORE: Covid-19 update in NZ: 16 further deaths, 4489 new community cases
• Other NZ covid reports

The city was asked to hold the line so the country could get vaccinated, something critics said should have happened much earlier.

Auckland University epidemiologist Professor Rod Jackson was vocal in urging the country to aim high and vaccinate more than 95 percent of eligible people.

Reflecting back, he said New Zealanders responded well, with most areas hitting that mark or higher by the measurements at the time.

Much had been learnt about the virus — and how to respond to it — since then, with the highly contagious but less harmful omicron variant changing everything at the start of this year, he said.

But the danger was not over.

Random severity of variants
“I think there are a lot of people who think, ‘oh look, it’s getting less severe over time so we’re fine,’ but it’s pretty random whether the next variant is going to be less severe or not,” he said.

Either way, it would need to be at least as spreadable as omicron to take over, he said.

The government has said lockdowns are not part of any future covid-19 plans, with the traffic light system taking its place.

But Professor Jackson said that may not “cut the mustard” if the worst happened.

“If we get a new mutation that is more severe, that kills more people, then we’ve got something huge to worry about,” he said.

“If that happens, if people start dropping dead in the street like the original version of covid, we will have little choice but to lock down.”

That was why the country still needed to be prepared for the worst, he said.

Frontline of delta outbreak
As an Auckland GP and co-leader of Te Rōpū Whakakaupapa Urutā, Dr Rawiri McKree-Jansen was at the frontline of the delta outbreak and lockdown and the vaccine rollout.

Some Māori and Pacific health teams had initially struggled to be given the resources they needed, or to be listened to.

The work they were able to do for their communities and the country showed what they were capable of and should be a lasting legacy, Dr McKree-Jansen said.

They were crucial to the vaccine roll out and helped the most vulnerable, especially those isolating.

“The mobilisation was impressive, relentless and co-ordinated,” he said.

“Those features are remarkable and give us a great sense of optimism about the contribution that Māori communities and Māori health professionals can make and I hope that is enduring.”

When it came to new variants, he said while it was important to be vigilant about what may come next, it was also important to focus on what was happening now.

“Omicron’s not done with us yet … I’m keen that we don’t forget the lessons we’ve learnt from the Delta and Omicron outbreaks – and supporting communities is fundamental to that.”

Both Professor Jackson and Dr McKree-Jansen acknowledged the people who had died since pandemic began, many more since the omicron outbreak that reached so many people.

But they said they were also grateful that many were protected by the lockdown and the vaccine rollout.

16 more people die
RNZ News reports that another 16 people with covid-19 have died and there are 4489 new community cases today, according to the Ministry of Health.

There are 496 people in hospital, 13 of them are in a high dependency unit

Yesterday the ministry reported another 21 people with covid-19 had died and there were 533 people in hospital, including 12 in intensive care or a high dependency unit.

Deputy Director-General and Public Health Agency head Dr Andrew Old told media this afternoon that modelling from Covid Modelling Aotearoa showed New Zealand was continuing to track at the lower end of what was expected in terms of a second wave this winter.

“We passed a peak in cases earlier that the modelling suggested and now hospitalisations are also declining suggesting these too have peaked. It’s sitting somewhere between 800 and 850 occupied beds across the country in late July,” he said.

Te Whatu Ora-Health New Zealand interim national medical director Dr Pete Watson said the recent drop in covid-19 cases was an encouraging trend.

“By each one of us sticking to public health measures we are making a difference,” he said.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) has declared the covid outbreak in the Marshall Islands a Public Health Emergency.

A total of 571 new omicron cases of the virus were recorded in the latest 24-hour reporting period.

Three people have died and more than 10 percent of the population in the capital Majuro have tested positive, according to the Marshall Islands Ministry of Health and Human Services.

• READ MORE: Marshall Islands covid spread demonstrates super variant
• Other Marshall islands public health reports

The WHO has declared the outbreak as a Public Health Emergency of International Concern.

All schools will be closed for the next two months, just one of the measures under the government’s disaster management plan.

The number of positive cases has skyrocketed from a handful on August 8 to more than 1000 by the weekend.

RNZ Pacific’s Marshall Islands correspondent Giff Johnson said the outbreak had led to staff shortages at many businesses.

“Everybody’s operation is affected. I went next door to buy some drinks and the owner is doing the cash register … all cashiers are out of action with covid. The Post Office had to close down because so many people came down with covid.”

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

The Marshall Islands is a live demonstration that the omicron BA.5 variant is the most contagious covid variant yet to appear.

In the first five days of the outbreak in the Marshall Islands, more than 10 percent of the population in Majuro, the capital, has tested positive, reports the Ministry of Health and Human Services.

From initial confirmation of a handful of positive cases in the community on August 8, the number of positive cases skyrocketed to the one-day total of 1064 testing positive on Saturday, August 13, at the three community-based “alternative care sites” established to test and treat local residents.

• READ MORE: Other public health reports in the Marshall Islands

This brings Majuro’s total in the wake of the outbreak to more than 2000 cases in a population estimated at 20,000. There were nine early hospitalisations, with most reported to be recovered by Sunday.

President David Kabua on Friday signed a proclamation of a “State of Health Disaster,” which outlines duties of all ministries and government agencies to respond.

It also gives the government the power to access emergency funding for the response to the initial outbreak.

Health authorities reported two deaths in the first week — both men. The first was a 23-year-old man, the second a 69-year-old.

Both pronounced dead
They were both pronounced dead on arrival at Majuro Hospital’s emergency room, Health officials said. Their vaccine status was not announced.

Majuro experienced a chaotic first couple of days as alternative care sites (ACS) were rolled out at two local schools and at an outdoor sports court, with thousands of islanders crowding in to get tested.

By Friday the influx of hundreds of volunteers to support the Ministry of Health and Human Service in managing the flow of people led to improvements in the service.

“What we are seeing at these sites is what we expected, the ACS sites are getting better and more organised as we go along,” said Health Secretary Jack Niedenthal Sunday.

“Much of the chaos is beginning to die down, though it is still there for sure, but this will continue to get better.”

Spread was not contained to Majuro Atoll, the capital. Within a day of the initial confirmation of positive cases in the Majuro community last Monday, the first case was identified on Ebeye, the densely populated community next door to the US Army’s Reagan Test Site at Kwajalein Atoll.

In addition, several isolated outer atolls at week’s end were reporting multiple residents with covid-like symptoms.

All remote island flights suspended
All flights on Air Marshall Islands and all government ships to remote islands were suspended August 9 in an effort to contain the spread. But travellers from the previous week to remote islands unwittingly caused the spread.

August 12, a special Air Marshall Islands flight took a health team to Wotje Atoll, confirming multiple positive cases, training the local health aide to conduct further testing, and leaving a supply of PaxLovid and other therapeutic medicines for islanders, according to health officials.

RMI COVID-19 Update eo in an 08-12-2022. pic.twitter.com/lsjjXfWVin

— V7AB Radio Marshall Islands (@v7abradio) August 11, 2022

Health teams were attempting to visit other remote islands for similar follow up Sunday, but all AMI pilots reportedly tested positive, putting flights in limbo.

Although the government did not require a lockdown, most churches cancelled in-person services Sunday and the one main road in the capital atoll was unusually quiet as people appeared to be staying home.

Restaurants also saw the number of customers decline dramatically, although most continued to see ongoing demand for takeout meals.

“We at the Ministry of Health and Human Services are very proud of the response that has come in from all corners of our country to help us deal with the health crisis,” said Niedenthal.

The ministry struggled in the initial phase of the outbreak with more than 200 of its staff, including many doctors and nurses, testing positive for covid — many exposed before they knew it was circulating in the community.

Covid-free success
Until last week the Marshall Islands had successfully employed some of the world’s strictest quarantine rules for people entering the North Pacific nation. This had kept it covid-free for the first two-and-a-half-years of the covid pandemic.

A reduction of quarantine time in recent weeks, coupled with unprecedented numbers of people coming in through the managed quarantine process is suspected to be the cause of the outbreak.

The government had earlier announced it was going to eliminate the managed quarantine requirement and open the borders on the October 1.

“As expected, the outbreak continues to gain strength,” Niedenthal said on Sunday.

“We had over 1000 cases in Majuro yesterday, almost double from the previous day. About 75 percent of the people we test are positive, which is an incredibly high positivity rate.”

Outbreak escalating
Last week, as the outbreak was escalating, Majuro traditional leaders sent a letter to President Kabua calling for the borders to be closed and opposing the announcement that medical teams arriving this week would not be required to quarantine.

The medical surge support teams are from the US Centers for Disease Control and other agencies. Niedenthal emphasised the importance for delivering services to the public by these medical professionals.

He described these as “boots on the ground medical support professionals” and said they would be tested on arrival and then sent right into the field to support ongoing services by local Health authorities.

“As a country we have moved from prevention to mitigation because we are now fighting this disease,” he said.

“The days of quarantine upon arrival are now over. I know some people are nervous about this, but we at the Ministry of Health are not and we are the ones on the frontline,” Niedenthal said.

“Please respect these public health decisions. We knew this would have to be a fast shift in strategy that would trouble some people because we had been working so hard (and) successfully to prevent the disease from coming into the Marshall Islands.”

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

The P&O Pacific Explorer has docked in at Queens Wharf in Auckland from Sydney, the first cruise ship to arrive in Aotearoa New Zealand nearly two and a half years.

New Zealand Cruise Association chief executive Kevin O’Sullivan told RNZ First Up that being the first back in the country’s shores, it was a symbolic event for New Zealand.

“It’s going to be a very exciting day and it will be very exciting for the guests coming ashore as well.”

• LISTEN TO RNZ MORNING REPORT: ‘Cruising back to New Zealand and the Pacific will be ramping up over the coming months’

P&O spokesperson David Jones told Morning Report cruising back to New Zealand would be ramping up over the coming months.”

Twenty ships were due to dock in the country before Christmas, he said.

Its arrival also marked the reopening of cruising to the Pacific, with the ship on its way to Fiji next.

About 2000 people — including crew and 1200 passengers — were on board.

Below occupancy
‘We’re actually deliberately operating below occupancy because we’ve really only been back in business for a few months.”

“Cruising is the same but different,” he said.

“You’ve still got the same experience, the relaxation, being taken to great destinations but the changes are the protocols.”

The Pacific Explorer was based in Australia and followed Australian covid-19 rules, Jones said.

“The protocols are probably tighter than any land based environment.”

Passengers and crew need to be fully vaccinated, wear masks when they embark and disembark and when they cannot easily isolated on board.

If there was a covid-19 case onboard, the person and those occupying the same cabin would go into on board quarantine facilities, O’Sullivan said.

Up and running globally
Cruising had been up and running around the world for a long time, he said.

“We’re last really to get cruise ships back so all the hard work’s been done on the cruise ships a long long time ago and we’re getting the benefit of it.”

The last season before the pandemic arrived had an economic value of $550 million, and was on it’s way to being a billion-dollar industry, he said.

“For Auckland alone, the value of that last [truncated] season was around about $200 million.”

Retail NZ said the arrival of cruise ships was welcome news after the long winter of Covid-19.

The next cruise ship would arrive in October.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

Protesters blocked roads in central Auckland this afternoon for the second time in two weeks, marching past the main entrance to the city’s hospital.

The Auckland motorway onramp used by protesters two weeks ago was closed ahead of another rally at the Auckland Domain today.

Aucklanders were warned to prepare for traffic disruption in the central city.

• READ MORE:  Covid-19 update: 25 further deaths in NZ, 4790 community cases, 648 in hospital
• Other NZ protest reports

The Brian Tamaki-led Freedom and Rights Coalition gathered at the Domain for a “Kiwi Patriots Day and March” before a crowd of about 1000 marched out onto the streets about 1.30pm.

After passing Auckland City Hospital and over the Grafton Bridge, the protesters turned up Symonds St, before heading down Khyber Pass Road past the closed on-ramp and back towards the domain, where the crowd dispersed.

Auckland City East Area Commander Inspector Jim Wilson said it was a “peaceful protest, which police monitored accordingly”.

He said while there were no arrests or incidents of note, a review phase in the coming weeks will determine if any follow-up action is required.

‘Balancing the safety … with protest’
“The police focus today remained on balancing the safety of all protesters and the public, while acknowledging the right to protest peacefully and lawfully,” he said.

“We note the activity did disrupt traffic in central Auckland where some motorway on and off-ramps were temporarily closed by Waka Kotahi to minimise further disruption.

“These have now reopened and there are no further network issues.

“We would like to thank the members of the public who deferred their travel through the affected areas today and acknowledge those that were inconvenienced.”

Counter-protesters were also in the area today.

Two weeks ago, about 1000 coalition members swarmed onto Auckland’s southern motorway, causing significant problems for traffic.

Ahead of today’s protest, Waka Kotahi closed both the Khyber Pass on/off-ramps — used by the protesters last time — and the Symonds St on/off-ramps, although these have now reopened.

Protesters were demonstrating over a range of anti-government issues, including against public health measures in response to the covid-19 pandemic.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

Late last month, New Zealand Health Minister Andrew Little stated what most who work in health already know.

Healthcare is all about people – the people being cared for and the people doing the caring.

Population growth, ageing and a pandemic mean there is no shortage of those needing care, but in New Zealand and globally, there is a chronic shortage of healthcare workers.

• READ MORE: Nurses are leaving the profession, and replacing them won’t be easy
• A burnt-out health workforce impacts patient care

Little stopped short of calling it a crisis, but researchers and international agencies alike agree with a survey of New Zealand doctors that the health workforce is in crisis.

In 2016, the World Health Organisation (WHO) projected a global shortage of 18 million healthcare workers by 2030. That was before the covid-19 pandemic. Between 80,000 and 180,000 healthcare workers have died globally during the pandemic’s first 16 months, according to the WHO’s conservative estimate.

“Public statements from political leaders that there is ‘no crisis’ in the health system have seemed increasingly out of step with doctors’ experience over the past year” https://t.co/dXMhA38XIO

— Emma Espiner (@emmawehipeihana) July 11, 2022

Add to this the impact the pandemic has had on the mental health of frontline health staff, including reports of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and a healthcare workforce seven times more likely to have severe covid and now carrying the burden of long covid.

It’s clear healthcare is no longer the attractive sector it once was.

A highly mobile workforce and a global shortage
Like the cost-of-living crisis, the health workforce shortage is not unique to Aotearoa New Zealand.

This year’s budget included NZ$76 million for medical training and primary care specialists, but doctors who started training this year will not be specialists until 2034.

Meanwhile, Labour’s solution is to undertake an international recruitment drive. It is hailing New Zealand as one of the easiest places in the world for healthcare workers to come to. But are our newly opened borders attractive enough?

Overseas recruitment drive for nurses gains ‘good response’ https://t.co/RZrM4fW67L

— RNZ News (@rnz_news) July 13, 2022

In my health economics lectures I often use an anecdote about the Indian doctor who gets a job in the UK (colonial ties and a multicultural society), the British doctor who moves to Canada (less administration and more family friendly hours), the Canadian doctor who moves to the United States (specialists have much higher earning potential), and the US doctor who undertakes missionary work in India.

This highlights two issues: the health workforce is highly mobile and employment isn’t always about money. Aotearoa New Zealand is competing in a global health workforce market, and minister Little recently acknowledged the health sector as “fiercely competitive”.

But this isn’t a new phenomenon for New Zealand.

The health workforce in New Zealand has one of the largest shares of migrant workers, with 42 percent of doctors and almost 30 percent of nurses foreign-born (second only to Israel and Ireland, respectively). This is much higher than the aggregate estimates showing one in six doctors practicing in OECD countries studied overseas.

The OECD estimates the number of foreign-born doctors and nurses in OECD countries has increased by 20 percent, twice the growth rate of the overall increase across the workforce. This is what is most concerning.

The health workforce is not equally distributed. Migration of workers from low- and middle-income countries to high-income countries like Aotearoa New Zealand is a real threat to achieving universal health coverage and sustainable development goals.

New Zealand needs to be mindful that promoting our open borders is not at the expense of under-performing health systems with much greater need.

Losing healthcare workers to Australia
Outflow is also a problem in New Zealand, with New Zealand-trained doctors and nurses crossing the Tasman every year. Add to this the international recruits leaving New Zealand for Australia and there most definitely is a health workforce crisis.

As our nearest neighbour, Australia is aggressively recruiting staff. And like pavlova and Phar Lap they are happy to claim what is ours as theirs. An easier route to citizenship and voting rights will make Australia even more desirable.

How can New Zealand compete in this market? Minister Little refers to encouraging New Zealanders to return home, including lifting their pay. Research shows it’s not all about income. Location and professional development opportunities are important factors when choosing career moves.

The healthcare reforms helped tempt me back to New Zealand after 22 years away. Perhaps working in a system which has equity as its focus may encourage those who are clinically trained to return as well.

There is considerable research to inform policies around retention and recruitment. The New Zealand Ministry of Health may wish to look to the UK, which was historically dependent on EU health and care workers and now has a health workforce depleted by both Brexit and the pandemic.

In the recent LSE-Lancet Commission on the future of the NHS, British scholars argued a sustainable workforce needed integrated approaches to be developed alongside reforms to education and training that reflect changes in roles and the skill mix, and more multidisciplinary working.

The LSE-Lancet Commission authors flagged the need for better workforce planning. New Zealand’s approach to workforce forecasting has also been criticised previously.

Planning aside, a possible solution worthy of discussion is the required skill mix of the workforce, particularly with technological advancements and changing health needs. For example, the introduction of non-medical prescribers has improved job satisfaction, released clinical time and increased patient access.

New Zealand’s once-in-a-generation health reforms offer a logical time to undertake workforce reforms. We need to learn from our own historical mistakes and avoid disconnecting the workforce from the policy reforms.

If minister Little and the ministry are to solve this, he will first need to admit there is a health workforce crisis.

Aotearoa New Zealand is unfortunately not alone in its quest to adequately staff healthcare, but the transformation of the health sector to create a more equitable, accessible, cohesive and people-centred system means New Zealand is uniquely placed to put those people who deliver care at the centre.

Dr Paula Lorgelly is professor of health economics, University of Auckland. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

On Friday I watched Ashley Bloomfield’s last afternoon health update. After all we’ve been through over the past couple of years, and the major role he had in communicating to us and keeping us safe, I’ve got to say I felt a bit emotional.

The end not of an era, sadly the virus is still very much with us, but in a way a part of what has been one of the major events in all of our lives.

His humble, calm, well informed voice was a great antidote to some of the stupidity that we saw overseas in the early days of the pandemic, I’m looking at you America, but sadly we see more and more of that here in Aotearoa.

• READ MORE: Other Nick Rockel articles at Asia Pacific Report

Maybe it was always there; I guess you’d have looked pretty stupid slagging the guy off in the comments section two years ago.

Not anymore apparently.

I was going to include some of the negative comments here from during his last briefing to demonstrate how full of hatred, conspiracy theories, and misinformation these people are. But when I went back and looked at them they just made me feel sad and I decided I didn’t want to repeat any of them even to mock them.

Of course the poisonous hatred and stupid fuelled negativity aimed at Dr Bloomfield on social media is minor compared to the Tsunami of Bile frothed by those attacking Jacinda for things like — it being her Birthday the other day.

Rewinding back
Isn’t it reassuring to know we live among people who see red fury at people wishing the Prime Minister a Happy Birthday, or a Doctor giving medical advice?

What must celebrations be like at their place?

“Don’t say Happy Birthday to that little bastard he hasn’t even finished putting 100 pins in his Jacinda and Ashley dolls yet”

“C’mon Kev he is only four!”

But let’s rewind back to the beginning, the early days of the daily update…

We were listening to scientists not business people. The messages were clear about putting our lives, our family’s lives, and the lives of those around us in the community first; the message wasn’t filtered through what CEOs or corporate sponsors wanted.

We were told saving lives mattered, washing hands mattered, and commerce would just have to wait for once as much of it was put into an induced coma until it was safe to listen to business people, or certain politicians, again.

The cryogenic switch
And who was flicking that great cryogenic switch, who was saying “don’t go to work stay at home and chill, if you’re able work online in your underpants” as if some deadbeat mate you knew in high school had turned up to stay indefinitely.

It was Dr Bloomfield.

Who told us of each new outbreak, scientific break through, the vaccine rollout, or sadly life lost?

It was Ashley. I’m sure we can all remember certain updates, I particularly remember the spread in a West Auckland old peoples home, which wasn’t far from us and brought it very close to home.

The youngest member of our household would listen to the updates hoping there would be an increase in numbers, not too many he didn’t want people to be ill, but just enough to keep schools closed a bit longer. Funnily enough he was less enthusiastic about the restrictions applying to football and dance classes.

Dr Bloomfield called those making racist comments about people infected with covid “gutless” — could he have been any more awesome?

And who could forget the day we went to zero community cases – what a day! It was like we had won the World Cup except it was something that actually mattered.

The Vaxathon spirit
A little later there was the Vaxathon that made those of us of a certain age fondly remember Telethons of old. It even remarkably captured some of that same spirit in the age of everything on demand — or maybe it was just us oldies that thought so.

We had this guy telling it like it is, the Doc was giving it to us straight. Of interest especially to we middle aged white guys was the fact here was a guy capturing the nation who if push came to shove and he had to take to the dance floor he’d probably dance a lot like us.

So what turned people?

Was it the positivity, the being well informed and not putting up with any nonsense? He didn’t outright mock “alternative theories” but it was pretty clear what he thought of them.

Was it standing alongside The Prime Minister the two singing in unison how we could all be kind in our socialist utopia that put people first?

Was it having certain media people and opposition politicians finding any angle to criticize the approach we were taking and attacking Dr Bloomfield for his performance? I remember one of the reporters at a press conference even asked him if he should offer his resignation.

Or was it having a nerd tell them whether they could go out and play with their friends and their toys or not?

The silent majority
It struck me, as it often has looking at comments; surely the silent majority are decent people grateful for how well we have been served by Dr Bloomfield. Is it really possible that this many people are filled with anger and disinformation, or are they just the loudest and actually mainly fake?

We saw people opposing health measures increasingly of course. First they were anti the vaccinations, then anti the mandates that were there to keep people safe and could so easily be avoided with a little prick.

Now that life is by and large back to normal, albeit with a disturbing number of daily cases and deaths, they are anti any ongoing measures — anti the wearing of masks!

People who genuinely believe, or at least claim, that masks not only don’t inhibit the spread of disease but will actually say until they are blue in the face that masks make the spread worse!

The mind goggles. Imagine if the anti-mask crowd took that approach to other areas of life?

“Don’t you throw that water on me everyone knows it only makes being on fire worse!”

What else do people decide — meh I’ve been doing this a couple of years I can’t be bothered any more?

Seat-belt lessons
We didn’t decide a couple of years after seat-belts were introduced that, you know what, people are still dying in car accidents so I’m not wearing one any more — in fact if you do your research you’ll find seat-belts make car crashes more dangerous!

People don’t say you know when I’m driving home tonight in the dark I’m going to go with Natural illumination – the light from the moon. No more artificial illumination for me, everyone knows this has worked for thousands of years.

Walking on the footpath instead of the road or wearing a parachute jumping from a plane? Not for them, you can only hope they’re wearing condoms.

Have these people always been around? Will they always be like this? Is this Darwin at work?

Evolution is painful to watch.

For the rest of us Covid hasn’t actually gone away but could it be that some us are already looking back to the height of the pandemic, the lockdowns as inconvenient as they were on occasion, as a better simpler time?

Getting our priorities right
A time when we got our priorities right of family and caring for each that doesn’t always occur?

A time of people over profits – it was a bit of an adventure – it didn’t feel much like it queuing in the rain for groceries, but in hindsight….

Didn’t he do well – Ashley, there he was yesterday getting a standing ovation, still smiling, still calm – he really did us proud!

Thank you Dr Bloomfield, we will remember what you did.

Nick Rockel is a “Westie Leftie with five children, two dogs, and a wonderful wife”. He is the publisher of The Daily Read where this article was first published. It is republished here with the author’s permission.

The government of Niue has announced the country will move to covid-19 alert level red after it recorded nine new cases of the virus in the past 24 hours.

After recording its first cases of the virus in the community today, Niue’s government now says growing case numbers indicate community transmission is possible.

In a statement, Niue’s Minister of Health and acting Premier Sauni Tongatule said: “These cases are from different households and four of the cases are not linked to the border. This indicates the possibility of community transmission of covid-19.”

• READ MORE: NZ covid-19 update: 4238 new community cases, number of attributed deaths rises to 1502
• Other Pacific covid-19 reports

Tongatule announced the country would move immediately to its highest Covid-19 alert level but stopped short of an enforced lockdown

“Following the Niue National Covid Emergency Response Plan, where there are local cases that exist in the community, and with the high possibility of community transmission, we will move to Covid Alert Code Red. This will take effect immediately.

“However, there will be no lockdown in place as we take action to mitigate or minimise the impact of the disease in our communities as much as possible,” Tongatule said.

Close contacts and persons of interest associated with positive cases had been informed to get tested, he said.

Tongatule said Niue’s public service and essential government services would continue to operate.

He advised the public to limit their movement and interactions outside of their households this weekend and asked that they practice social distancing, mask wearing and hand hygiene.

Director-General for Social Services Gaylene Tasmania said anyone with covid-19 symptoms should go to the drive-through testing service at the Niue Foou Hospital which will be open from 9am to 6pm local time tomorrow.

NZ covid-19 deaths top 1500
In Wellington, the New Zealand Ministry of Health reported today that the number of cases confirmed as attributable to covid-19 had risen above the 1500 mark, as 4238 new community cases were reported.

The ministry said in the statement that there were 1502 deaths confirmed as attributable to the coronavirus, either as the underlying cause of death or as a contributing factor.

It said the average increase in deaths each day attributable to covid-19 over the past week was now 19.

Another 23 deaths of people with covid-19 were also reported today.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

From 1949 to 1996 more than 300 nuclear devices were detonated in the Pacific. In the mid-1990s a generation of political leaders had the foresight, wisdom and courage to support a civil society initiative that led to an International Court of Justice advisory opinion on the legality of the threat or use of nuclear weapons.

The resultant 1996 decision became a legal landmark.

Today we face another threat just as grave – the climate crisis. The risks and threats to peace and security posed by the climate emergency are as real and as avoidable as those posed by nuclear weapons.

• READ MORE: The insecurity legacy of the Rainbow Warrior Affair: A human rights transition from nuclear to climate-change refugees – David Robie
• US Vice-President Kamala Harris pushes for unity at Pacific Islands Forum
• Other Pacific climate change reports

And while here in New Zealand we’re only just seeing the first fires from the climate crisis today, the Pacific has been experiencing the impacts of climate destruction for decades.

Top of the agenda at this month’s Pacific Islands Forum meeting in Fiji was, of course, climate change. Specifically, states have been asked to support an initiative to take climate change directly to the International Court of Justice (ICJ).

The ICJ will be asked for an advisory opinion on the legal obligations of states. Although non-binding, an advisory opinion from the court can trigger positive legal change.

Pacific youth are putting their faith in the ICJ — just like New Zealand did with its nuclear-free moment — to demonstrate what responsibility for future generations actually means. They are asking our government to help, but will New Zealand remember its history and answer the call of a new generation?

Youth inspired Vanuatu
Pacific youth inspired the Vanuatu government to lead a formal state process involving a United Nations General Assembly resolution.

They chose well. Vanuatu has dedicated significant political and diplomatic effort to the initiative. Caribbean states are on board too.

But to get it across the line, New Zealand’s active support and leadership is critical. A unified position in the Pacific (including Australia) will greatly bolster international support. This week’s Pacific Islands Forum meeting is the place to get it.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern is well aware that climate change is the No 1 issue for the Pacific, in both socio-ecological and geopolitical contexts. Thus far, the government has accepted an advisory opinion on climate change as a “constructive proposal” with potential for creating “significant legal development” and has said it is willing to “engage” with partners.

While this is a good start, it is now time (as a matter of urgency) for New Zealand to significantly step up its support for the ICJ move. It can do this now by actively and openly backing the Vanuatu government and others to build a coalition of supportive states in the region and internationally.

Better still, why not become a co-sponsor of the UN General Assembly resolution?

This is exactly what Ardern’s government is now being called upon to do. An open letter from prominent New Zealanders, including Māori and Pasifika leaders from academia, civil society, such as Oxfam Aotearoa, and scientific and spiritual communities urges the government to take leadership.

Reminds government on kaitiakitanga
The letter reminds the government of its commitment to the values of intergenerational justice and kaitiakitanga, both for the peoples of the Pacific and Aotearoa New Zealand. Critically, it reminds today’s leaders of New Zealand’s history.

The Power of the People.

The democratic deficit in international policy and law is well known. Youth do not have a seat at the table, and they know it. Their futures are negotiated behind closed doors where intergenerational justice is a political slogan at best.

I have personally seen the injustice of this many times at international treaty negotiations on climate change and the oceans.

In the face of this hard reality, the world’s youth still show up and speak up with passion and commitment. They remain committed to being constructive.

Pacific youth see an ICJ advisory opinion on climate change in exactly these terms. However, they need the help of our political leaders at the table, and they need it right now, to acknowledge climate change as real and immediate.

To deny them this vital legal opportunity is both immoral and brutal.

So will New Zealand show real solidarity with youth and peoples of the Pacific?

Will it honour its own history and reputation as an independent leader on global issues critical to the future of humanity and all life?

Or will this legacy be sacrificed on the altar of expediency and short-term national interests?

If youth are to keep their faith in us, then we must act urgently and decisively in their best interests.

Prue Taylor is a senior lecturer in environmental and planning law at the University of Auckland. This article first appeared on Stuff and is republished here with the author’s permission.

After guiding New Zealand through two and a half years of a pandemic, Dr Ashley Bloomfield’s time as Director-General of Health has come to an end.

We look back on some of the key moments during his time in the role:

• READ MORE: Dr Ashley Bloomfield steps down – he has earned his knighthood!
• Other reports on Dr Ashley Bloomfield

22 May 2018
Dr Ashley Bloomfield was named as the new Director-General of Health while he was serving as the acting chief executive of Capital and Coast District Health Board.

2019
The health system faced some big challenges in 2019. Dr Bloomfield fronted health responses to both a measles outbreak and the Whakaari/White Island disaster.

27 January 2020
“Kia ora koutou katoa, welcome to the Ministry of Health, thank you very much attending this briefing this afternoon. My name is Dr Ashley Bloomfield, I’m the Director-General of Health.”

After two and a half years of a pandemic, it is probably hard to remember a time when Dr Ashley Bloomfield needed to introduce himself.

Before New Zealand had its first case of covid-19, back when it was referred to simply as a coronavirus (WHO would name it covid-19 on 12 February 2020), Dr Ashley Bloomfield and Director of Public Health Dr Caroline McElnay held a media stand-up.

Like most of the early briefings, it was held at the Ministry of Health.

It was two weeks after the first confirmed case outside of China had been identified and across the ditch, Australia had four cases. There had been 56 deaths worldwide.

28 February 2020
Almost exactly one month later, New Zealand’s first covid-19 case was confirmed in someone that had returned from overseas.

Reminiscent of a format we would come to know more intimately as time went on, the evening news would cut to a live press conference where Dr Bloomfield and then-Health Minister David Clark would provide more details of New Zealand’s first case. (Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern was in Australia at the time.)

The following day, supermarkets would see a rush of customers buying up toilet paper, hand sanitiser and tinned food.

March 2020
We would start to hear a lot more from Dr Bloomfield as the second, third and fourth (who had been at a Tool concert) cases of covid-19 were confirmed in early March.

By the end of the month New Zealand would be in lockdown and Dr Bloomfield had become a daily part of our lives.

“It did feel a little bit like I was having a performance review at one o’clock every day, broadcast live on television. But that’s as it should be — your job is to ensure that we’re being held accountable for our response,” he said.

Daily cases had jumped to numbers in the eighties and the briefings had shifted to the Beehive, against a backdrop of yellow and white striped Unite Against Covid-19 branding.

On 29 March, during the 1pm briefing, Bloomfield would announce New Zealand’s first covid-19 death.

4 May 2020
“No new cases”. For the first time since New Zealand went into level 4 lockdown on 25 March, Dr Bloomfield announced there were no new cases of covid-19. It would be a phrase we would hear more of as the first community outbreak would start to slow.

And it evoked such emotion that “There are no new cases of covid-19 to report in New Zealand today” came second place in Massey University’s Quote of the Year.

August 2020
In an effort to encourage people to test for covid-19, Dr Bloomfield had his first covid-19 PCR test while filmed at a community testing site.

“It was much less painful than tackling Billy Weepu on the rugby field a couple of weeks ago.”

*Raises eyebrows
With millions of people stuck at home in isolation watching daily media briefings, it was no surprise that Dr Bloomfield would find himself in meme-territory.

This was Dr Bloomfield’s response when he was asked about 5G in 2020:

And a year later when Covid-19 Response Minister Chris Hipkins said people should go outside and “spread your legs”.

Festival debut
Who would have thought Dr Bloomfield would grace the main stage at Rhythm and Vines festival?

December 2020
Dr Bloomfield was awarded the New Zealand Medical Association’s highest accolade — The Chair’s Award

17 August 2021
The prime minister announced another nationwide lockdown after a case, assumed to be the delta variant, was detected. That meant the 1pm briefings, and daily doses of Dr Bloomfield, were back too.

22 September 2021
As New Zealand tackled the delta outbreak, Dr Bloomfield broke the news that we may never get to zero cases of covid-19.

A portrait pie of Dr. Ashley Bloomfield. Photo: Supplied / Devoney Scarfe

October 2021
During Super Saturday, Dr Bloomfield was caught on camera busting a move at one of the community events.

Dr Ashley Bloomfield’s dance moves.

6 April 2022
Announced he was stepping down.

“It seems we’re at a good point in terms of the pandemic, the response is shifting, I’m also confident that the system is in good hands with the changes that are afoot, and most certainly my family will be very pleased to have a little more of my time,” he said.

May 2022
Dr Bloomfield tested positive for covid-19 while he was at the World Health Assembly in Geneva, Switzerland.

Professional history

• In May 2018, Dr Bloomfield was appointed the new Director-General of Health.
• Dr Bloomfield was the acting Chief Executive for Capital & Coast District Health Board from 1 January 2018.
• From 2015-2017, he was chief executive of the Hutt Valley District Health Board – the first clinician to lead the Hutt Valley District Health Board.
• In 2017 Dr Bloomfield attended the Oxford Strategic Leadership Programme.
• Prior to becoming chief executive at the Hutt Valley DHB, Dr Bloomfield held a number of senior leadership roles within the Ministry of Health, including, in 2012, acting Deputy Director-General, sector capability and implementation.
• From 2012-15 he was Director of Service, Integration and Development and General Manager Population Health at Capital & Coast, Hutt and Wairarapa District Health Boards.
• From 1999-2008 he was a Fellow of the Australasian Faculty of Public Health Medicine. Since 2008 he has been a Fellow of the NZ College of Public Health Medicine.
• In 2010-2011 he was Partnerships Adviser, Non-Communicable Diseases and Mental Health at the World Health Organisation, Geneva.
• Dr Bloomfield obtained a Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery at the University of Auckland in 1990.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

The Federated States of Micronesia will reopen its international borders on Monday.

President David Panuelo said anyone wishing to travel will need to be fully vaccinated, including boosters, against covid-19 and have had a PCR test 72 hours prior to departure.

The moves comes despite the country discovering its first case of covid on July 19.

• READ MORE: Other covid-19 reports in the Pacific

Panuelo said community spread is increasing, and thousands of people are already infected.

In an address to the nation, he said he would soon issue a decree requiring everyone to wear masks in public places.

“I will require all persons who feel sick to get tested and to stay home,” he said.

“I will request that all citizens stay home unless it is essential for them to go to work, to go shopping, or to otherwise conduct necessary errands.”

Hard lockdown ruled out
But he has ruled out a hard lockdown to tackle the outbreak.

“The advice I have received from our Department of Health and Social Affairs is that the initial transition period from being covid-19 free to covid-19 infected will take about one to two months for each State.

“We will see cases rise, plateau, and then lowered in our country. Afterwards, we should be fully emerged into our new status of covid-19 protected.”

Starting on Friday, July 29, vaccines for infants aged between six months and four years old will be available across the country.

Panuelo said the FSM had “significant supplies” of the antiviral drug Paxlovid, and monoclonal antibodies to treat people.

“What is needed now is for all of us to work together in practising peace, friendship, cooperation, and love in our common humanity with each other,” Panuelo said.

“We need to get vaccinated. We need to get tested. And we need to stay home if we are sick or if our family is sick. These are dark days, but we will endure beyond them. The sun will rise tomorrow, and, God willing, we will adapt to and overcome covid-19.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

Plans are underway to help Tokelauans stuck abroad, mostly in New Zealand and Samoa, to return home.

The general manager for the office of the Taupulega (council of elders) of the atoll of Nukunonu, Asi Pasilio, said borders had been shut for more than two years with the country maintaining its covid-19 free status.

Pasilio said no firm date had been set just yet because it depended on the reopening of Samoa’s border.

• LISTEN TO RNZ PACIFIC WAVES: Lydia Lewis’ story on Tokelau
• Tokelau family under house arrest for nearly a year over vaccine defiance

She said officials were working towards being ready for the first repatriation flight, with quarantine restrictions to take place in late August or early September.

“Currently in Nukunonu and Tokelau we are preparing for our first repatriation flight in a few years, mostly in New Zealand and Samoa,” she said.

“We have essential workers that need to return home. But to do that we need to prepare this by making sure we have the quarantine houses are well set up and the support for their arrival making sure that we have enough health staff to look after the quarantine services for when our people arrive.”

Family again refuses to get vaccinated
A family that has been under tunoa — effectively house arrest — on Nukunonu in Tokelau for the past 11 months has once again refused to get vaccinated.

Vaccinations are mandatory in Tokelau and local councils and village elders are making sure the rules are kept.

Mahelino Patelesio, his wife and two adult children, have been placed under tunoa, to protect the community.

He said it had been a struggle since they refused the vaccination and have been confined to their property on the beach.

Tokelau’s government says it was maintaining tough measures to keep the territory covid-free.

The Taupulega in Nukunonu has not ruled out loosening restrictions and the Patelesio family is expected to be discussed again next week.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

The covid-19 pandemic has already generated its own mythology. In Britain, they talk of the “myth of the blitz” – the idea of a society that pulled together in the Second World War to withstand the bombs dropped by the Luftwaffe with pluck, bravery and humour.

In Australia, our covid-19 myth is about a cohesive and caring society that patiently endured lockdowns, border closures and other ordeals. Like many myths, ours has some foundation in reality.

It might be a poor thing when considered alongside wartime Britain’s wartime sacrifices, and you have to ignore the empty toilet paper shelves in the local supermarket, but it still has its own force. It might be especially potent in Melbourne, where the restrictions were most severe and prolonged.

• READ MORE: We lost the plot on covid messaging – now governments will have to be bold to get us back on track
• Grattan on Friday: Albanese needs to step up (and mask up) to help create a new mindset to meet the covid crisis

The covid-19 myth is now presenting its puzzles to true believers. If you imagined we all pulled together for the common good, and because we have the good sense to look after our own health, you are likely to find it strange that we are now apparently prepared to tolerate dozens of deaths in a day.

Australia’s total covid death toll is now above 11,000 – New Zealand’s has topped 2000.

More than tolerate: there has been a preparedness to pretend nothing out of the ordinary is happening.

All of this seems a far cry from those days when we hung on the daily premiers’ media conferences and experienced horror as the number of new infections rose above a few dozen a day, a few hundred, and then a thousand or so. Have our senses been blunted, our consciences tamed?

A product of power
Public discourse is never neutral. It is always a product of power. Some people are good at making their voices heard and ensuring their interests are looked after.

Others are in a weak position to frame the terms of debate or to have media or government take their concerns seriously.

The elderly — especially the elderly in aged-care facilities — have carried a much larger burden of sacrifice than most of us during 2020 and 2021. They often endured isolation, loneliness and anxiety.

They were the most vulnerable to losing their lives — because of the nature of the virus itself, but also due to regulatory failure and, in a few places, gross mismanagement.

Aged Care Minister Anika Wells has provided @abcnews with new details on COVID cases in residential aged care homes:

983 current outbreaks
6000+ residents infected
3250 staff are positive

ADF support for aged care homes will be continued until the end of September.

— Henry Belot (@Henry_Belot) July 24, 2022

Casual and gig economy workers, too, struggle to have their voices heard. On his short journey to an about-face over the question of paid pandemic leave, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese at first said the payment was unnecessary because employers were allowing their staff to work from home.

Yet the conditions of those in poorly paid and insecure work have been repeatedly identified as a problem for them as well as for the wider community, because they are unable easily to isolate.

Up to his point, however, our democracy has spoken: we want our pizzas delivered and we want to be able to head for the pub and the restaurant. And we are prepared to accept a number of casualties along the way to have lives that bear some resemblance to those of the pre-covid era.

The “we” in this statement is doing a lot of heavy lifting. There is a fierce debate going on about whether governments — and by extension, the rest of us — are doing enough to counter the spread of the virus.

Political leadership matters
Political leadership matters enormously in these things.

In the years following the Second World War, Australia’s roads became places of carnage, as car ownership increased and provision for road safety was exposed as inadequate. It peaked around 1970, with almost 3800 deaths — more than 30 for every 100,000 people.

Road fatalities touched the lives of many Australians. If not for the death of my father’s first wife in a vehicle accident on New Year’s Day in 1954, I would not be around to write this article today.

In the 1960s and 1970s, the coming of mandatory seatbelt wearing and random breath-testing helped bring the numbers down. Manufacturers made their cars safer.

Public campaigns urged drivers to slow down and stay sober. These were decisions aimed at avoiding avoidable deaths, despite the curtailment of freedom involved.

A British seat belt advertisement from the 1970s.

These decisions were also in the Australian utilitarian tradition of government, “whose duty it is to provide the greatest happiness for the greatest number” – as the historian W.K. Hancock famously explained in 1930.

The citizen claimed not “natural rights”, but rights received “from the State and through the State”. Governments made decisions about how their authority could be deployed to preserve the common good and protect individuals — from themselves as well as from others.

Pragmatic position
Governments have during the present surge so far been willing to take what they regard as a pragmatic position that the number of infections and fatalities is acceptable to “the greatest number”, so long as “the greatest number” can continue to go about something like their normal lives.

But this utilitarian political culture also has its dark side. It has been revealed persistently throughout the history of this country — and long before anyone had heard of covid-19 — as poorly equipped to look after the most vulnerable.

The casualties of the current policy are those who have consistently had their voices muted and their interests set aside during this pandemic — and often before it, as well.

These are difficult matters for governments that would much prefer to get on with something other than boring old pandemic management. The issue is entangled in electoral politics — we have just had a federal contest in which major party leaders studiously ignored the issue, and the nation’s two most populous states are to hold elections in the next few months.

Governments also realise that restrictions and mandates will meet civil disobedience.

But covid cannot be wished away. At a minimum, governments need to show they are serious about it to the extent of spending serious money on a campaign of public information and advice on issues like mask-wearing and staying home when ill.

They usually manage to find a sufficient stash of public money ahead of each election when they want to tell us what a beaut job they’ve been doing. They might now consider whether something similar might help to save lives.

Dr Frank Bongiorno is professor of history, ANU College of Arts and Social Sciences, Australian National University.  This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

After leading the Aotearoa New Zealand’s covid-19 response for the last two years, Dr Ashley Bloomfield is stepping down from the role of director-general of health at the end of this month.

The softly spoken public servant became a household name early in the pandemic, his image gracing T-shirts, tote bags, mugs and even tattoos.

Having been appointed to the director-general role in mid-2018, Dr Bloomfield was officially set to finish his five-year tenure in June 2023 — but decided to resign from the “complex and challenging” role early.

• LISTEN TO RNZ SATURDAY MORNING: Kim Hill talks to Dr Ashley Bloomfield
• READ MORE: Other Dr Ashley Bloomfield reports
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His last day on the job will be on Friday, July 29, at which time Dr Diana Sarfati will be acting Director-General of Health until a permanent appointee takes up the position.

Covid-19 cases have been inching upwards over the last several weeks but Dr Bloomfield said he was optimistic the wave will recede.

“We’ve seen over the last week it’s levelled off which is great,” he told RNZ Saturday Morning’s Kim Hill.

His plans for an epic “karaoke party” farewell were already derailed by the recent rise in Omicron cases, but he said caution is the way to go until things settle down.

Pandemic legacy
“I didn’t want my legacy in the pandemic to be taking out some of our tip-top politicians and the leadership of the health sector at a super-spreader event.”

But while Dr Bloomfield is leaving, the crisis he presided over is very much ongoing.

It was announced Friday that primary schools are expected to move from encouraging mask wearing to enforcing it again when Term 3 starts Monday.

While the change may be frustrating for some, covid-19 requires flexible responses, he said.

“I think there will be a high level of general acceptance of the role [masks] will play, especially through winter in the future.”

Dr Bloomfield himself caught covid-19 in May at a World Health Organisation conference in Switzerland, where he said he was surprised at the low level of mask wearing.

“There’s this talk about the rest of the world has moved on. Well, they might have moved on in terms of what they’re doing, but the virus hasn’t moved on. It’s creating just as much havoc as it has in the past.

Higher infection rates
“To think in the UK, they’ve got higher rates of infection and hospitalisation than we do even in the middle of summer, that’s something to worry about.

“There is a general commentary — not just in New Zealand but elsewhere — that we’re moving on, we’re living with covid.”

That’s premature, he said.

“The virus isn’t done with us yet. We’re still in a pandemic. The WHO [World Health Organisation] hasn’t withdrawn that categorisation and the virus continues to evolve,” he said.

“We’ve just got to keep our wits about us.”

Pressures ‘always there’
There have been many stories about the strain on emergency rooms and doctors and nurses the past few weeks, but Dr Bloomfield defended the response.

“The pressures that are on the health system now are always there and they’re not unique to New Zealand,” he said.

“I would say we were better prepared this winter than we’ve ever been any winter.

“We also knew that after two years of no flu, we would have a heavy flu season.”

Dr Bloomfield rejected claims that the health system was caught by surprise by the omicron surge.

“We certainly had time to prepare and did. But you can’t suddenly magic up a new workforce from somewhere, certainly not in a situation where a lot of that time the borders were closed, although we were getting new workers in from overseas.”

“Some of the commentary has suggested there are less staff now than there were,” but Dr Bloomfield said there had been a big increase between 2021 and 2022, including nursing and medical staff.

Shortages very localised
Dr Bloomfield said he did not dismiss the views of people on the ground, but said shortages were sometimes very localised.

“I might have a different view from the clinicians on the ground … What one particular clinician or service or institution or organisation might be experiencing might not be reflecting the experience across the system, which is the view I have.”

Dr Bloomfield said for example in the case of PPE, the problem was not supply but in getting the equipment to where it was needed.

“We also responded where we heard, ‘look, we can’t get this PPE here or there,’ then we made sure we would follow those particular problems up.”

There have also been concerns that Māori and Pasifika were not prioritised properly in the vaccine rollout.

Dr Bloomfield said border and health care staff and those over 65 were the first priority for the vaccine drive, but many Māori and Pasifika were also included in that uptake.

“For our first two months of the rollout of the over-65, our highest rates of vaccinations in that group was among Māori and Pasifika. It was ahead of non-Māori, non Pacific.

Younger Māori rates
“We knew that the group that would take the longest, probably because it required repeated effort to build trust, the longest to get higher rates among was our younger Māori. … And that’s the group where we had to put in a lot of extra effort and it took longer to get the rates up, but we did get there.”

That outreach had hopefully led more young Māori to take part in the health system, Dr Bloomfield said.

“There’s now over 100,000 people who previously were not in contact with the health care system who are now on the books because of the efforts that went in through that vaccination programme, so that’s a great legacy.”

Dr Bloomfield has stood at the podium dozens of times in the past couple of years, facing the country’s press as he updated the state of the pandemic for the nation. While at times it hasn’t been easy, he said he respects the media’s role.

“I have to say I’m a big fan of the media being able to do its job properly. It’s a fundamental pillar of strong democracy and it didn’t always feel that way when you were up there facing the music and something had gone wrong, which I had to a few times.

“But they’re doing their job and a big part of their job is making sure the government, including the public services, is accountable to the population.”

‘I was asking, why me?’

As his term as director-general ends, Dr Bloomfield said he’s not interested in becoming a thorn in the government’s side. He’d like to continue to work to improve deficiencies in the system, however: “In my mind the currency I’m interested in is influence.”

If he had known what the last few years held, would Dr Bloomfield have taken the job back in 2018?

“I have to say there were a few moments early on in the pandemic, I really questioned myself on that. I was asking, why me?

“This is a one-in-100 year pandemic and I’ve only got a five-year contract … bad timing,” he joked.

“You quickly forget the parts that were really tough and really challenging,” he noted.

“My abiding memory will be of what a privilege it was to be in this role at this time in this country. I have great hope for the future of this country based on my experience the last four years.”

But he’s still leaving the job a year early, although few would say he hasn’t put in the hard yards.

‘Given my all’
His last child recently left home, and he said: “I feel like I’ve given my all the last four years.”

With big changes happening in the structure of New Zealand’s health system, it seemed a good time to leave.

‘Very exciting’ time for health changes
Health NZ Te Whatu Ora replaced the country’s 20 district health boards at the start of July.

It’s one of the biggest overhauls in Aotearoa New Zealand history. Dr Bloomfield said he was hopeful for what it might bring.

“There are features of the change that I think are very exciting,” such as the establishment of the Māori Health Authority.

That said, he believes the DHBs served an important role in healthcare.

“The big challenge in any health system is getting this right balance between what’s done at a national or regional level and the responsiveness to local communities, and the DHB model allowed that in some part, that responsiveness to local communities.

“But it was very hard at times to get unity around things that were good for the system. I guess ultimately you’re looking for a system that’s unified but not uniform.

“Certainly Health New Zealand, in the way it’s been set up, is designed to try to get a better balance between that national and local delivery — and that’s a good thing.”

Optimistic about reforms
Dr Bloomfield said he was ultimately optimistic about the reform.

“There’s a risk that you can move the deck chairs around but nothing really changes. The reform has been carefully thought through.

“The proof’s always in the eating of the pudding, so it will be interesting to see how it plays out over the next few years.”

So if Ashley Bloomfield had not been a doctor, what might he have become?

“I always joke with my kids I would have been a police detective. Maybe that would’ve been another career direction.

“I really enjoy observing little bits of information and putting them together to create a picture.

“It served me well in my current career,” he said.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

Why did criticism of a modest sum spent on a single mini-documentary made two years ago suddenly spring up in the news in two national networks this week — and then disappear?

“I’m just so sick of everything getting taxpayer money for these projects. Why can’t people just pay out of their own pocket?” Newstalk ZB deputy political editor Jason Walls asked on air last Tuesday.

“I just keep seeing these things crop up time and time again, when we have hospitals overwhelmed. Twenty thousand dollars is not tons of money in the grand scheme of things, [but] that sort of stuff keeps adding up,” he added, noting Three’s latest Masterchef series aired and screened without draining the public purse.

More public money than ever is being spent on media content these days — and the spending does deserve scrutiny.

But the single project that triggered his concern this week was not a costly one — or especially newsworthy.

Siouxsie and the Virus is a short online video shot in March 2020 and it has been online for almost two years now, with its sources of public funding noted at the end. It snapshots Dr Siouxsie Wiles’ life in “fly-on-the wall”-style as New Zealand went into Level 4 lockdown.

It was made for the online platform Loading Docs which describes itself as “a launchpad for New Zealand documentary shorts.”

Enables short documentaries
It enables local makers to produce short documentaries which are then available to other media outlets. It is backed by the NZ Film Commission, the government broadcasting funding agency NZ On Air and Māori broadcasting funding agent Te Māngai Pāho.

Walls’ objections were rushed out as a news story online by Newstalk ZB and its sister paper The New Zealand Herald. The stories were shared on social media with the claim “the amount spent has left some gobsmacked.”

“Would you pay $20,000 for a documentary about ‘science superhero’ Dr Siouxsie Wiles? Because you already did,”  the Herald’s story began.

On the air Walls had referred to $20,000 of Film Commission funding but said he wasn’t sure how Siouxsie and the Virus had been funded.

It turned out that sum relates to a different project yet to be made.

Loading Docs producer Julia Parnell told Mediawatch that Loading Docs provided $6000 in production finance and $2000 towards the post-production for Siouxsie and the Virus.

The funding model requires filmmakers to raise other funds themselves via crowdfunding.

Parnell told Mediawatch that Siouxsie and the Virus raised $7685 through the crowdfunding platform “Boosted”.

Boosted by The Herald
Ironically the mini-doco was also boosted by The New Zealand Herald back in 2020.

“It was launched in partnership with The New Zealand Herald on their platform, along with a high-profile story in [Weekend Herald supplement] Canvas. It then went on our platform, TVNZ On Demand, RNZ, PlayStuff and The Spinoff. It has had over 200,000 views and it has been so appreciated by audiences,” Parnell told Mediawatch.

Initially the director, Gwen Isaac, was funded to make a completely different film about a Kiwi MMA fighter in Japan.

“When the covid lockdown happened, we had to pivot and find something else. The director was able to get that access (to Dr Wiles) in that week prior to covid. It was a society-changing moment and we were able to capture it. I’m very proud of that,” Parnell told Mediawatch.

“Loading Docs has a platform-agnostic approach which means that more New Zealanders can connect with our work and the work of our documentary makers,” she said.

On social media, Dr Wiles pointed out on Thursday she made nothing from the mini-doco, and $20,000 would have cost each New Zealanders about half a cent.

She also pointed out NZME — the owner of Newstalk ZB and The Herald  – received $9 million in covid wage subsidy in 2020 that would have taken $2.25 out of the pocket of every Kiwi.

LOL I just found out how much taxpayer money NZME who owns the NZ Herald and Newstalk ZB got in the first half of 2020. $8.6 MILLION! If you are a taxpayer, that’s $2.23 you paid. Oh, and their net PROFITS after tax rose by $1 million to $7.8 MILLION. https://t.co/pq6WhvnXyO pic.twitter.com/kOxQk0v5yM

— Dr Siouxsie Wiles (@SiouxsieW) July 21, 2022

Wage subsidies repaid
Some media companies  — including Stuff and The Spinoff – repaid wages subsidies received in that year when business subsequently stabilised.

NZME has not, even after profits and revenue increased in 2021.

NZME CEO Michael Boggs told Mediawatch in April they used the wage subsidy for the intended purpose of retaining jobs and NZME declined the second tranche of wage subsidy when it was on offer.

Dr Wiles’ observations would have been relevant additions to The Herald and ZB online news stories highlighting the “gobsmacking” Film Commission funding decision, but by this time anyone who went looking for that would only find that those stories were not online anymore.

The Herald‘s link yields an error message that says, “Oops, looks like a dead end”.

The stories have been scrubbed from The Herald and ZB social media feeds without explanation.

Thanks @MediawatchNZ for looking into the dangerous hitjob Newstalk ZB and NZ Herald did on me last week. This was never about asking questions about the use of taxpayer funds. I honestly believe it was about stoking outrage, attacking the arts, & undermining & harming me. https://t.co/SdwWwF90z1

— Dr Siouxsie Wiles (@SiouxsieW) July 23, 2022

First funding questioning
Loading Docs’ Parnell said this was the first time the funding of any production had been questioned in the media.

But it’s not the first time ZB’s Walls has criticised public spending on media content.

Last year he labelled a range of arts projects bankrolled with covid recovery funds “a smorgasbord of abject waste” under the headline: Not a single cent more for podcasts, poetry and picture books in the name of ‘covid recovery.’ He wrote:

“It’s easy to take aim at the Creative NZ funding and to poke holes in what the government’s decided to fund through its $55m Public Interest Journalism Fund.”

Last year NZME secured up to $2995,702 from the PIJF to employ 15 reporters “to fill gaps in court reporting” in 11 of its publications — as well as two national reporting roles.

In 2020 — the year Siouxsie and the Virus was made — the PIJF allocated up to $200,280 to NZME for “a kaupapa editor and an audio innovation editor to improve access to news for blind and low vision New Zealanders.”

NZME also received up to $940,188 over two years “to retain reporting roles in its free community newspapers across Rotorua, Napier, Hastings, Whanganui, Manawatū, Taupō, Horowhenua, and Kapiti.”

More funding
An interactive NZME project exploring “how and when land became part of the Pākehā property system in Aotearoa New Zealand” got a further $80,500.

And just this month, the PIJF fund announced $255,000 of taxpayers money for a Herald series called Unraveling Anxiety.

This is based on a series of videos for The Herald’s website showing how people from different cultural backgrounds coped with anxiety disorders during covid-19 lockdowns and after.

It’s the kind of idea you might expect to find on a platform like Loading Docs, but so far The Herald and ZB have not aired any views on whether that is unjustifiably draining money from the public purse at a time of stress in our hospitals.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

Watch Siouxsie and the Virus on YouTube

Samoa’s Ombudsman Luamanuvao Katalaina Sapolu says the human rights effects from the covid-19 pandemic have been catastrophic.

She has just submitted Samoa’s eighth State of Human Rights Report to Parliament.

Luamanuvao said that over the past two years families had lost loved ones, businesses suffered, unemployment rates increased, and freedom of movement was restricted.

• READ MORE: Other Pacific covid-19 reports

She said there had also been a grave impact on children’s right to education, and the right to health continues to be challenged with resources stretched to the maximum.

But she said human rights principles continued to play an important role in addressing discrimination and inequality and providing inclusion of everyone in the prevention of, and recovery from covid-19.

The report provided an analysis of the impact of the pandemic and government measures on the rights and freedoms of Samoans, especially on the most vulnerable groups.

The report also included recommendations for the government to ensure its covid-19 measures were consistent with the constitution, domestic laws, and policies safeguarding human rights, as well as Samoa’s international human rights obligations.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

A family has been under house arrest in Tokelau for almost a year after they refused to get vaccinated against covid-19.

The tunoa — house arrest — was imposed on the family of four by the Taupulega (council) on Nukunonu, one of the three atolls that make up Tokelau.

The New Zealand dependency with a population of about 1500 has had no cases of covid-19 since the global pandemic began in early 2020, according to the World Health Organisation.

• LISTEN TO RNZ PACIFIC WAVES:  Tunoa in Tokelau
• Other Pacific covid-19 reports

However, there are strict protocols in place to prevent the spread of the virus.

The general manager for the office of the council of Nukunonu, Asi Pasilio, explained to RNZ Pacific why the council of 36 heads of extended families who serve the atoll’s community, decided to impose tunoa in August 2021.

Culturally complex
“This is a village rule, this is the decision of the local council which runs the island and the community. We have the laws of Tokelau but we also have the local council which has the authority over their village.”

Pasilio said there were no jails in Tokelau, but when there is a serious offence the council can just ask people to stay at home. Tunoa takes the place of jail.

She said it was a culturally complex issue.

“It will take someone to come here and live our life here, to understand what we mean by house arrest and council authority and communal living.

“Yes, of course, you make your own decisions here, but doing things in a communal manner is very common.”

Family claims they have been left voiceless
In a video posted on social media on July 3, the father, Mahelino Patelesio, said he has felt silenced.

He said he was a member of the council before the tunoa was imposed.

“Before we were placed under house arrest, I explained my stance and I wasn’t allowed to speak at that particular meeting, I actually went there to resign. I wasn’t allowed to do that so I was voiceless.

“From August 3 [2021] three of us adults above 16 years old were placed under house arrest, our daughter was placed under house arrest with us about four months later, towards Christmas,” Patelesio said.

RNZ Pacific has also contacted the family directly but has not received a response.

Asi Pasilio said that while the family is in tunoa they are being supported by the community.

“Their house is right beside the sea so they can go for a swim, they can move around their area but not outside their home boundary.

“They have family members who do their shopping for them.”

Pasilio said the family has been told they have another opportunity to get vaccinated this week following the arrival of more doses.

She said the family had not informed the council of their decision as of Tuesday but if they do choose to get a jab, the tunoa will be lifted.

If they do not, the council will meet again to review the situation.

Matter up to Tokelau, says NZ
New Zealand’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade said the former Administrator Ross Ardern had no say in the implementation of tunoa, and that mandatory vaccination was a decision taken by Tokelau’s village leaders.

“Home-isolation has been authorised under the Tokelau customary practice of tunoa, a practice over which Aotearoa New Zealand has no direct authority,” its statement said.

“Aotearoa New Zealand officials have engaged extensively with Tokelau’s leaders to encourage them to strike a balance between the rights of the majority to remain safe from covid-19 in their villages and the rights of the individual.”

“Some 99 percent of Tokelau’s eligible population 12 and over is fully vaccinated (two doses of Pfizer for 12 to 17-year-olds, and three doses for those 18 and over).

“Both doses of paediatric vaccines have been completed, with 99 percent uptake. Boosters for 18+ were successfully administered in Q1 2022 with 99 percent uptake,” MFAT said.

Asi Pasilio said of the three atolls, Fakaofo is fully vaccinated, Atafu has had less than 10 unvaccinated people, and on Nukunonu just the family of four is unvaccinated.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

Covid has now killed around 1700 people in New Zealand, but much of our news reporting and commentary has focused on how we’re moving on from the pandemic. Why is there such a mismatch between that media coverage, and the reality of a virus that’s inflicting more suffering and death than ever before?

On her show last week, Newstalk ZB’s Heather du Plessis-Allan made a momentous announcement in an almost blithe, off-hand manner.

“The pandemic’s over for all intents and purposes but we’re still having to deal with this nonsense. Isn’t that ultimately why we’re feeling miserable because we all want a break? If I was in government what I’d do right now is ‘green setting guys, go for your life, party party, whatever’. Just for the mental break of it.”

The announcement that the pandemic is over would have been news to the families of the eight people reported to have died with covid-19 in New Zealand that day.

But du Plessis-Allan is far from an outlier in wanting to place a still raging pandemic in the rearview mirror.

Recently a senior Stuff executive sent staff a memo telling them their audience is “over covid” and has “actively moved on from covid content”.

It implored them to find cracker non-covid stories on topics including cons, crime, and safety, the cost of living, NZ culture, and stuff everyone is talking about.

Much wider group
Stuff’s audience is part of a much wider group that’s actively moving on from covid.

National leader Christopher Luxon just returned from a whirlwind overseas tour with the news that most people he met were no longer even talking about covid.

“It’s interesting to me I’ve just come back from Singapore, Ireland, and the UK. In most of those places we didn’t have a single covid conversation. In places like Ireland there’s no mask wearing at all.”

Luxon is right. Many places around the world have dropped their covid restrictions.

But even if we’re determined to ignore it, covid has remained stubbornly real, and is continuing to cause equally real harm.

In the United States, hospitalisations and reinfections are rising with the increasing prevalence of the BA.5 strain of omicron.

In the UK, about 13,000 hospital beds are currently occupied by covid patients. Hospitals are dealing with staff absences, exhaustion, persistent backlogs and problems discharging patients, and the UK government is considering bringing back restrictions if the situation gets any worse.

Same story as here
If that all sounds familiar, it’s because pretty much the exact same story is playing out here.

Association of General Surgeons president Rowan French delivered some dire news to RNZ’s Morning Report about hospitals’ current troubles with scheduling elective surgeries.

“It’s the worst I’ve ever seen it,” he said. “We don’t say that lightly but I think it is the worst we’ve ever seen it, particularly with respect to our ability to treat our patients’ elective conditions.”

French said those issues were exacerbated by a wave of covid-19 and winter flu.

Covid patients were taking up a lot of the beds that would normally be used by people recovering from surgery, and he couldn’t see an end in sight to the crisis.

There’s a jarring mismatch between that kind of interview and the concurrent harping about the need to move on from covid.

That’s producing cognitive dissonance, not just in the public, but among media commentators, some of whom are now bobbling between berating our minimal remaining efforts to mitigate covid-19 and lamenting the damage being caused by the uncontrolled spread of the virus.

Mental oscillations
In some cases, these mental oscillations can take place in mere hours.

On the morning of July 6, Newstalk ZB Wellington host Nick Mills had harsh words for the epidemiologists urging caution over covid.

“Michael Baker, let us get on with our lives. You go back to your lab. Do some intelligent work. Get paid truckloads of money doing it, and live in an extremely flash house. But for me, I don’t want to hear from you anymore. I want to get on with my life and our life.”

On du Plessis-Allan’s panel show The Huddle later that day, he had a different message about the severity of the latest wave.

“I’m absolutely terrified because it could be the straw that breaks the camel’s back,” he said. “If we have to go back [to a red setting] – and it will all be based on hospitals gonna have to be overcrowded — these numbers are terrifying.”

Maybe if Nick Mills had listened more closely to Professor Michael Baker, his research on BA.5 wouldn’t have come as such a nasty surprise.

To be fair to these hosts, their contradictory approaches to covid are pretty relatable.

Sick of the sickness
Even without any hard data to hand, it’s safe to say many people are sick of the sickness, and some are prepared to live in a state of suspended disbelief to act like that’s the case.

But covid isn’t over, and now many leading experts are saying it may never be.

Last week The Project commissioned a poll which showed 38 percent of people agree with those experts. They believe covid is here for good.

Afterward presenter Kanoa Lloyd quizzed epidemiologist Dr Tony Blakely about whether those respondents were right.

“It’s possible,” he said. “It’s rolling on. Remember influenza in 1918, we still get influenza every year. This is a coronavirus. It could keep coming up every year.”

Dr Blakely is among a number of epidemiologists and healthcare workers who have gone to the media lately to deliver the message that there is still a pandemic on.

On last weekend’s episode of Newshub Nation, the aforementioned Professor Michael Baker compared covid to the “inconvenient truth” of climate change — a global threat that demands real change and ongoing action to mitigate.

Common sense safety
He went on to link covid precautions to another common sense safety measure.

“If you go out when you have this infection and infect your friends and family, you are going to be killing some people — just like drinking and driving,” he said.

At The Spinoff, microbiologist Siouxsie Wiles stuck with the driving metaphor, imploring people to make popping on a mask as natural as clicking in your seatbelt.

This recent flurry of cautious messaging stands in stark contrast to much of the media coverage over the last few months.

Despite the fact 10 to 20 people per day have been dying of covid-19, that is had a muted response outside of the pro-forma coverage of the Ministry of Health’s 1pm press releases.

When covid-19 has been covered, the death toll has usually been superseded in the news by complaints from businesses about the few restrictions that remain.

Maybe that’s not such a surprise. News organisations have a powerful commercial incentive to give their customers what they want, and as Stuff’s executive said, audiences have moved on.

Like drunk party guest
But, like a drunk party guest at 3am, coronavirus does not care that you’re tired of it and you want it to leave.

A month ago, Newsroom’s Marc Daalder made that point in a prescient piece headlined “Covid isn’t over, it’s just getting started“.

He said the media needed to adjust from covering covid as a crisis to seeing it as an ongoing concern like the road toll or crime.

“It’s no longer temporary. It’s here to stay with us. And I don’t think that journalists have really figured out how to cover it as a daily issue, just like we cover all of the other daily issues that are really problematic,” he said.

“In some respects, it’s a bit bigger because it has a much more serious burden in terms of deaths and hospitalisations and long covid than something like the road toll, but just because it’s not a temporary crisis anymore, doesn’t mean that we should be ignoring it.”

Daalder said reporters could reorientate their coverage, writing more human interest stories on issues like the impact of long covid, and looking forward at how the virus and the fight against it will evolve.

“I think we are poorly served by media coverage, after the peak of the first omicron wave, in which there was no looking forward to what’s going to be happening in the short term or the long term.

Omicron peaked … and then?
“There was just this all this focus on what would happen when omicron peaked, and then it did, and, and nothing filled the void after that. And so I think it’s quite natural for people to assume that covid is over.”

Journalists could also apply more pressure to the government over the continuing levels of preventable suffering and death being caused by cmicron’s spread, Daalder said.

He has advocated for the return of the alert level system, which he believes was much more simple and comprehensible than the traffic light system implemented late last year.

“There’s not really very much accountability journalism that looks at holding the government accountable for essentially abandoning vulnerable people to the whims of the virus,” he said.

“You have this sort of very strange juxtaposition in the [parliamentary] press gallery where the covid minister will be asked by one person: ‘Are you concerned about BA.5? It’s starting to spread in New Zealand. Should we be increasing our restrictions?’

“And then in the next breath, the question is ‘Why aren’t we in green? When will we ever get to green?’.

Better balancing
“I’m not sure that either of those get to the heart of the present issue, which is that the current settings aren’t aren’t even aligned with a non-BA.5 world.”

Daalder said news organisations should find ways to balance their commercial incentives and the public interest role of journalism when it comes to important, but not always clickable, stories like covid or climate change.

“There’s an extent to which you should follow what audiences want. And you shouldn’t necessarily be trying to force something down their throats that they don’t want.

“But with something like covid, where it’s such a huge, important thing that’s happening, and that’s going to keep happening, regardless of whether you write about it or not.

“I think that’s where you know that that mission of journalism to tell the truth really comes in and overrides maybe some of the audience imperatives.”

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

A prominent New Zealand epidemiologist is calling for much wider mask mandates, saying the roll-out of free masks, while positive, will make a “fairly small” difference to the covid-19 outbreak.

The government yesterday announced masks and rapid antigen tests would be made freely available while the country battled a resurgence of covid-19 and other winter illnesses.

University of Otago’s Professor Michael Baker told RNZ News much more was required to prevent the worst outcomes of a “really grim winter”.

• READ MORE: Covid-19 update: 11,382 new community cases and 23 further deaths
• Other covid-19 reports

“We are missing the fundamental measure to stop sharing this virus widely and that is universal mask use indoors.”

23 more deaths
The Ministry of Health reports there were 11,382 new community cases of covid-19 yesterday and a further 23 deaths with the virus.

In a statement, the ministry said a child less than 10 years old had died, while five other people who died were in their 70s, nine were in their 80s and eight were aged over 90. Of these people, 11 were women and 12 were men.

All the deaths being reported occurred in the past seven days, the ministry said.

That takes the total number of publicly reported deaths with covid-19 to 1760 and the seven-day rolling average of reported deaths is 20.

Dr Baker said New Zealand needed to shift to becoming a “mask-using society”, which he believed could be achieved only through mandating their use in most indoor environments.

“The very ad hoc approach to requiring mask use is eroding the social licence for them,” Dr Baker said.

“You go to one social event, and everyone’s wearing a mask, and so you feel comfortable. Next day, you go to a different one, and no one’s wearing a mask, except you, and that feels a bit odd. We need to get rid of those inconsistencies.”

Fear of political backlash
Dr Baker said he believed the government had opted for a greater focus on personal responsibility for fear of a potential political backlash.

“Unfortunately, we’ve politicised this issue too much and politics is starting to take over from the science.”

But, speaking to RNZ Checkpoint, Covid-19 Response Minister Ayesha Verrall said it was “not simple” to implement mask mandates.

“It impacts the running of many businesses and we need people to take a pragmatic approach to this.”

Dr Verrall said, however, she would encourage everyone to wear a mask while indoors as much as possible.

She rejected the suggestion the government’s approach to tackling rising covid-19 cases was based on politics over health.

Dr Verrall would not say if the predicted peak of 1200 hospitalisations a day would be a crisis, but said the government was doing everything it could to avoid the scenario playing out.

‘Real health pressures’
“I think it’s really important we respond to the very real pressures in our health system, and I’ve been in close contact with healthcare workers, as well as following the statistics we get to make sure we know what the facts are, and that we respond to them and fix the problems that exist,” she said.

“A lot of what we set out today is designed to do that.”

Green Party MP Teanau Tuiono said the development was “about time”, but he would have liked to see masks made mandatory in schools.

“We’re all over it, we’re all tired… but it’s just no excuse to drop the ball because here’s the thing: there are people still in hospital, people dying from covid,” he said.

“The numbers are going up and we are in the middle of winter, so what we need here is that leadership.”

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

Pacific Peoples Minister Aupito William Sio will attend the Pacific Islands Forum in Foreign Minister Nanaia Mahuta’s stead as she recovers from covid-19.

In a statement confirming the move this afternoon Aupito, who is also the Associate Foreign Minister, said he looked forward to the opportunity to talanoa with Pacific Island counterparts at the forum in Fiji next week.

“This will be the first in-person meeting of Forum Foreign Ministers since 2019,” he said.

• READ MORE: Other Pacific Islands Forum reports

“It has been challenging to bring all ministers together given the impact of the global pandemic and a number of national elections under way in the Pacific, but this talanoa is essential for our region.”

Mahuta said the forum was at the heart of New Zealand’s engagement with the Pacific, and this meeting came at a “critical time” considering the climate change challenge.

She confirmed over the weekend she had tested positive for covid-19, and would be unable to attend.

Aupito said the response to broader security challenges — including maritime surveillance and illegal fishing — economic resilience, and natural disaster response were also pressing issues that would be discussed.

The Forum will also be attended by heads of state, including Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern.

Leaders’ meetings will take place from Monday to Thursday next week, July 11-14.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

Labor’s win in Saturday’s election heralds real change in health policy. Although Labor had a small-target strategy, with limited big spending commitments, its victory represents a value shift to a party committed to equity and Medicare, and, potentially, a style shift to a hands-on, equity-oriented health minister.

Labor’s health spokesperson, Mark Butler, is expected to be the new health minister, subject to a reshuffle caused by two Labor shadow ministers losing their seats.

Butler is very different from his predecessor. He was Australia’s first minister for mental health and ageing in the Gillard government.

• READ MORE: Scott Morrison defeated – Labor to govern in minority or majority
• Other Australian federal election reports

He also held the equity-focused ministries of housing, homelessness, and social inclusion. He has written a book about ageing in Australia, published by Melbourne University Press.

The new minister faces two urgent policy priorities: primary care and covid.

Fixing primary care
Outgoing health minister Greg Hunt released an unfunded strategy paper on budget night. It aimed to improve primary care — a person’s first point of contact with the health system, usually their GP or practice nurses. The paper had languished on his desk for months and was the result of years of consultation and consensus-building.

One of the largest and most important Labor commitments during the campaign was almost A$1 billion over four years for primary care reform, about A$250 million in a full year.

The funding commitment is cast broadly, promising to improve patient access to GP-led multidisciplinary team care, including nursing and allied health and after-hours care; greater patient affordability; and better management of complex and chronic conditions.

Presumably, a key way this will be effected will be through voluntary patient enrolment. A patient would enrol with a practice, and the practice would get an annual payment for that enrolment. This was promised for people over 70 in the 2019–20 budget but not delivered.

This new policy is a welcome start for reform in primary care and signals the importance that a Labor government attaches to the sector.

The Strengthening Medicare Fund was only sketched out in broad terms before the election, and provides insight into the new ministerial style. The details of the policy will be thrashed out in a taskforce which will include key stakeholders.

Most importantly, the taskforce will be chaired by the minister — no hiding behind consultants; he or she will hold the hose.

Reducing covid deaths
Another crucial early challenge for the minister will be addressing the continuing covid pandemic.

Covid deaths continue: three times as many people have died this year than in the previous two. The Coalition delegitimised any form of action, including mask wearing and vaccine mandates, as part of its undermining of state public health measures, especially action by Labor states.

The prevalence of third dose vaccinations, necessary for adequate protection from omicron, sits at about two-thirds of the over-16 population, much lower in the under-16s, meaning that many in the population are not protected.

Public hospitals are bursting at the seams, with staff overwhelmed. This needs urgent attention, and the Coalition strategy of ignoring it and saying it was someone else’s problem, must be dumped.

Labor vowed to “step up the national strategy” late in the election campaign.

“The Australian people have voted for change.”

Labor leader Anthony Albanese told his supporters in Sydney on Saturday after leading his party to victory ending nearly a decade of conservative gov’t https://t.co/ufTwpZ1FXA pic.twitter.com/YdEqshEWRC

— Al Jazeera English (@AJEnglish) May 21, 2022

Aged care support
Hopefully Labor’s shadow aged care minister, Clare O’Neil, will continue in this role post-election. She proved more than a match for her hapless opponent, Richard Colbeck.

Labor made big commitments in aged care, creating a significant point of difference with the Coalition, despite the Coalition’s investments in the 2021–22 budget.

In addition to the Coalition commitments, Labor promised 24/7 registered nurse coverage in residential aged care facilities, and to support a wage rise for aged care workers. The latter is particularly important because without a wages uplift, the staff shortages in the sector will continue.

A new approach
Labor won’t engage in climate denialism or use climate policy as a political wedge.

Recognising and addressing climate change is an important issue for the health sector and, of course, the community more broadly as the teal surge and the Greens’ wins demonstrated.

Labor has committed to establishing a centre for prevention and disease control, which should provide a framework for addressing social and economic determinants of health.

Potentially as important in terms of policy style are Labor’s public service policies. The “consultocracy” which thrived under the Liberals will be shown the door, replaced by public servants doing the job the public service has always been available to do.

Obviously, a new Labor government will not be able to be meet all the community’s pent-up aspirations in a single term.

Nevertheless, it is disappointing Labor did not commit to phasing in universal dental care – the crucial missing piece of Australia’s universal health coverage.

Butler and his colleagues have a huge agenda on their plates. Starting with primary care is a good first focus, as without those foundations in place, the whole system cannot work well.

Dr Stephen Duckett is honorary enterprise professor, School of Population and Global Health, and Department of General Practice, The University of Melbourne. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.