Ministerial Statements — COVID-19—Greater Wellington Region Change to Alert Level 2 and Australian Travel Bubble Pause

I wish to make a ministerial statement following Cabinet decisions on the alert level in the Wellington region and the travel pause with Australia.

We’ve been at alert level 2 in Wellington for the past week out of an abundance of caution given the large number of highly populated places a recent case visited while potentially infectious with the Delta variant of COVID-19. Given there have been no cases of COVID-19 detected, nearly 2,500 negative results from potential contacts of the case—including repeat negative results from that person’s close contacts—Cabinet has decided to shift Wellington to alert level 1 from 11.59 p.m. tonight. We are confident that the risk of community transmission from that case is low, but I ask all New Zealanders to remain vigilant and stay on high alert until a full 14 days have passed since that Sydney case left New Zealand. Testing centres will remain open in Wellington central, Porirua, Kāpiti coast, Hutt Valley, and the Wairarapa. People who haven’t checked locations of interest should do so, and get a test if they have been to any of those locations within the specified time period; or if they have cold and flu symptoms, any aches or pains, they should stay home, they should call Healthline or their GP, and they should arrange to get a test.

Cabinet’s also agreed to extend the travel pause on trans-Tasman travel for most Australian states. From 11.59 p.m. on Sunday, 4 July, New Zealand will lift the travel pause to allow travel to and from South Australia, ACT, Tasmania, and Victoria. That will be under review until that time. The health advice is that the spread of COVID-19 cases in those parts of Australia has been contained at this point. There’s robust surveillance testing and contact tracing to detect and manage cases and adequate border controls are in place to prevent the spread of new cases. Officials will keep a close eye on the situation in these states. However, Cabinet has decided to extend requirements for people coming to New Zealand to include a pre-departure test. This means that all travellers eligible to fly to New Zealand will now be required to have a pre-departure test within 72 hours of when they are leaving Australia. To be eligible to fly, travellers must not have been in Queensland, the Northern Territory, or Western Australia on or after 10.30 p.m. New Zealand time on 26 June and they must not have been in New South Wales on or after 11.59 p.m. New Zealand time on 22 June.

We want to ensure that New Zealanders aren’t unnecessarily barred from travelling to New Zealand when there is no risk of COVID-19, but we do need to keep monitoring the situation closely. Cabinet carefully weighed up the evidence this morning and we consider a partial lifting of the pause to be a proportionate action when that’s also bolstered by the introduction of mandatory pre-departure testing. Today’s decision gives airlines, passengers, Government officials, and others time to prepare for flights back from those states that we consider to be low risk when that travel pause lifts.

We know how important the travel bubble is—in particular for families and for businesses—but we also want to avoid the situation where we have to respond to cases here in New Zealand. Our system from here of only opening up to states as and when they bring COVID-19 under control will help New Zealand to stay at COVID-19 alert level 1.

Thank you, Mr Speaker, and I thank the Minister for his remarks. I just want to focus on a couple of things, the first is just in relation to the Wellington situation over the last week or so. Obviously we’re very grateful and pleased that New Zealand and Wellington has managed to avoid an outbreak. Will the Government be publishing the contact tracing system metrics and applicable standards identified by Dr Verrall in a previous role before her current role?

Yes, it’s absolutely the Government’s intention to publish those statistics. The metrics are looking very good—they’re ahead of target in terms of those close contacts and making sure that they’re contacted within the required period. I would, perhaps, at this point, because it’s useful to do so, just provide a breakdown of the testing numbers, because I know that people will be interested in those. In terms of close contacts, 957 is the identified denominator there, 905 of those had been returned as of about an hour and a half ago; 1,650 casual contacts, about 1,509 of those returned, like I said, as of a couple of hours ago. So overall numbers: 2,609 is the number of contacts identified, 2,416 are the number of test results back. I should point out that there’s also the closest of contacts, both of those have been tested twice and they’ve both come back negative.

Thank you for that and thanks for the illumination. In relation to the decision around the trans-Tasman bubble, can the Minister advise the House what the public health advice was going back to when the bubble was opened in April in the first place? Was the public health advice to open the quarantine-free travel zone—otherwise known as the bubble—with pre-departure testing or without it?

There was considerable debate around the issue of pre-departure testing at that time and a variety of views around the Cabinet table. The official health advice was not to have pre-departure testing at that point.

Thank you for that. There will be people out there who are contemplating travel to Australia or potentially are even in Australia now who are contemplating what the new requirements will be for people coming from Australia to New Zealand. Will the New Zealand Government accept antigen tests or non-PCR or RTPCR tests as an alternative to the traditional PCR tests? And the reason I ask that is that those are acceptable forms of pre-departure testing for people coming from countries to New Zealand right now, other than high-risk destinations and Australia, and so there is an argument, I think, as a matter of logic, that if you’re coming from the United States, for example, and you can have an antigen test and that’s accepted as a negative pre-departure test, that should be the same for Australia, which has been identified as being of lower risk than other countries.

I think one of the key things that we need to differentiate around pre-departure testing for Australia versus the rest of the world is those who are getting pre-departure testing around the rest of the world still go into two weeks of managed isolation when they arrive in New Zealand. So therefore the risk tolerance around those different testing methodologies can be a little bit more lenient than for those coming from Australia, when, really, it’s our last line of defence before they get to New Zealand and are out in the community in New Zealand. So we are requiring a PCR test at that point, but I do want to acknowledge that the testing technology and the accuracy of some of those other testing methods is improving all of the time, and so we are monitoring that very closely. I wouldn’t rule out using other forms of more rapid testing at the border as one of our future interventions. We’re not at that point yet, but we are getting regular updates and regular advice on that and monitoring that very closely. Where we start to see that those more rapid test methods are more broadly available and are accurate and providing us the level of reassurance that we want, I certainly wouldn’t rule out them being used in the future.

Thank you. Just as a follow-up, something that I know people will raise as well is, in Australia right now, the way the pre-departure tests have worked in the last month or so since we’ve had the issues with the bubble, if you rock up to a publicly funded or provided testing centre in Sydney or Victoria, for example, you can get a pre-departure test and you get a text message saying you’ve had a negative test or positive, and that is not accepted by the New Zealand Government when you turn up at the airport. And I am aware of people who have turned up with the text message saying, “I’ve got a negative test.”, but you’ve got to have the “dated report”, to use the language on the COVID-19 website. So now that we are going to be making it a mandatory requirement for everyone coming from Australia to come back to New Zealand within 72 hours, is the Government going to look at a slightly greater tolerance for text message updates, rather than the dated reports, which I understand you have to go to a private clinic for and it can be quite cumbersome to get, particularly on the weekend?

Not at this point, but what I would indicate is that we’re working very closely with the airlines, with the World Health Organization, and so on around travel passports and the ability to share this information digitally much more readily, so that includes vaccine information and testing information. I think everyone would be of the view that the sooner globally we can get to the point where we can share this information more readily without people having to carry around pieces of paper—I think we would all like to get to that point. We’re not at that point at this stage. One of the risks with text messages is that they are easily invented, and so it is more easy for people to present what appears to be a legitimate text message that isn’t.

As a follow-up to that, has he had any communication or discussions with his state or federal counterparts in relation to Australian states or the Federal Government doing the converse—so requiring pre-departure testing from people who travel to New Zealand and go to Australia? And I suppose the follow-up to that is—which you can answer at the same time—if Australia is looking at that or he’s had an indication that Australia’s looking at that, what provision is the New Zealand Government making to allow Australians in New Zealand or New Zealanders going back from New Zealand to Australia to have a pre-departure test?

No, we haven’t had that conversation particularly. I would, perhaps, at this point note that that’s not really the nature of the relationship. I think there is a lot of good will there. I don’t think that there’s sort of a tit for tat type of relationship there. And they would be looking at New Zealand at the moment and making decisions around the risk profile in New Zealand where there aren’t COVID-19 cases in any part of the New Zealand community at this point.

Having said that, though, I think that issue around access to pre-departure tests for other countries’ requirements, whether it’s Australia or anywhere else, is something that we are aware of. We are doing that now. Our testing is available to people travelling further afield where they’re required to get pre-departure tests, so they can do that at the moment.

Tēnā koe, Mr Speaker. I thank the Minister and reiterate the Green Party’s support following the health advice and, obviously, all New Zealanders keeping vigilant, keeping up good hygiene practices, wearing masks when appropriate. I just wanted to ask the Minister if he or Cabinet had requested any analysis or advice on whether the benefits of the trans-Tasman bubble do outweigh the risks, particularly considering that a number of states and major cities have had some community spread since we opened the bubble, have had to go into lockdown, and that has created a lot of uncertainty for travel backwards and forwards.

Overall, I think the economic benefit to New Zealanders of having Australians coming here and spending their money here is quite a significant one. We are not seeing the volume of Australians coming to New Zealand post-bubble as we were before COVID-19 lockdown. It’s not even close to the sorts of numbers that we were seeing before, but I think for some of our industries, particularly in tourist hotspots, it has been a bit of a lifeline for them. I think the risk would be if we saw COVID-19 take off in any part of the country and we had to do more dramatic lockdowns. That’s something that we’re acutely aware of. That’s one of the reasons why we made a quick decision around Wellington, to make sure we minimise that risk as much as possible, and why we also made the quick decisions around the pause across the border in terms of trans-Tasman for a period while we get further information and get that extra pre-departure layer of assurance in place.

Just wondering if there’s been any specific quantification of economic benefits, whether they actually have flown through from the bubble, and just noting that, obviously, when we have to go into a lockdown and where casual contacts are required to isolate for potentially two weeks following exposure, such as happened in the previous week—have those been looked at in any detail?

Yes, they have been, but I don’t have access to those, so probably not the right Minister to ask that question of.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I just had to chuckle briefly at the Minister referring to the volume of Australians coming across the Tasman being “lower than expected”. I think he must have meant “the number of Australians”—we don’t want to commodify our cousins across the Ditch into some sort of continuous amount to be measured in volume.

This will be something that many New Zealanders will be very much relieved for a number of reasons: in Wellington people will be relieved that they can return to alert level 1, particularly the hospitality industry who find it easy to open but not make money. New Zealanders up and down the country, and having been in Auckland over the weekend, will be relieved that we have dodged a bullet, that we’ve had a person in New Zealand with the Delta variant of COVID-19 but it has not spread the way that we might have expected. Indeed, New Zealand, I think, is in an extraordinarily fortunate position; we say Australia’s the lucky country—how many potential outbreaks have we had now with an individual who seemed to be infectious and yet failed to infect even those very close to them, let alone many people beyond it?

It’s also been very heartening to see the Government take an approach that is closer to the risk proportionate response that this country—in fact, all countries are going to need as COVID becomes more complex, as the world reopens and reconnects. The way that the Government has chosen to differentiate between Australian states represents a large advance on the way that they were talking about different Australian states, even just earlier this year. That has to be exceedingly welcome.

But then we turn to the Government’s response to this potential outbreak, and it is so revealing that the Government’s basic ability to respond still relies on locking down, locking ’em out, and hoping for a good dose of luck. When it came to testing, we didn’t see anything different, anything better or faster. In fact, it seemed like they were moving in slow motion in the early days, stacking up and standing up the testing capability required. When it came to contact tracing, the Minister is now reporting that 93 percent of contact tracing has been done end-to-end, but that appears to be over about six days. The funny thing is, when I asked him in his ministerial statement last week was he confident that the contact tracing regime would meet Ayesha Verrall’s gold standard of 80 percent, he would not express confidence in them. I wonder if he will now, having seen the results come through. Or will he claim that the results are really as good as supposed—did they really occur in just four days?

Then you get to the greatest vulnerability of all, which is what has hampered Australia as well, to be sure, but the almost total lack of vaccination. The fact that we who were once at the front of the queue now find ourselves at the bottom of the OECD. Then there’s the complacency around digital contact tracing: 415,000 scans was the nadir for scanning just last week; now it’s popped up a bit because there’s been a scare. The Government will no doubt talk about complacency, but it’s difficult to escape the conclusion that they have been affected by it in their own response too.

The best that can come out of this scare is that it’s a wake-up call for the Government, and it is finally driven to take on some of the ideas that have been recommended to them time and time again—by ACT and others since last July—that we need to start getting better at managing risk. We need to start augmenting our response with better technology. We need an epidemic response unit that’s multi-disciplinary and can actually work with business as partners. Those are the kinds of innovations that we need as the COVID world gets more complex, and I really hope that the Minister is about to stand up and say that what’s just happened is not good enough, we need to be better next time. Thank you, Mr Speaker.

I seek leave of the House to give a short call on behalf of Te Paati Māori on this ministerial statement.

💬 SPEAKER: Is there any objection to that process? There appears to be none.

Thank you. My thanks to the House. Last week, we acknowledged the decision to move Wellington into level 2. We supported this as we also support the extension of that into this week. However, we note tangata whenua know that during pandemics we are often those who bear the brunt of viruses. We therefore have a few questions to the Minister around how we prevent this and improve the situation for the future.

Dr Rawiri Jansen predicted that we would have a low uptake of Māori getting vaccinated due to a range of factors, including age eligibility. What is being done to address this and who in Government is overseeing it? What is the Minister doing to secure more vaccines more quickly so that we are not so vulnerable as a nation? Despite promises made over many months, we’ve yet to see either a Māori pandemic response plan or a full Māori vaccination plan released by the Government. Why is this and when can we expect to see these released? Does the Minister think it’s acceptable and in line with the Crown’s obligations as Te Tiriti partner that after 16 months they still haven’t released a comprehensive Māori pandemic response plan? Kia ora.

💬 SPEAKER: Has the member finished?

Yes.

💬 SPEAKER: The Hon Chris Hipkins in reply.

I was interested in David Seymour’s comments—that he didn’t suggest that we should adopt the risk management approach of Taiwan and Singapore, which has previously been the argument that he’s put forward in this House. Both of those countries, of course, have experienced outbreaks and have had to impose restrictions. I think it is wrong for David Seymour to continue to assert that our success in containing COVID-19 is down to luck. It is absolutely not. In fact, it is the hard work of the people working at our border and in our public health units, and I think all New Zealanders are grateful to them for their contribution.

In terms of our contact tracing indicators, I would point out that one of the reasons Dr Verrall and I have been actively discussing this is the original indicators were based on the notion that there could be 15 to 20 contacts per COVID-19 case. In this particular case we have now contact traced 2,609 potential close or casual contacts for one single case. That is not what the performance metrics were designed to be based on when that report was first adopted.

In terms of the vaccination of Māori—and I thank the Māori Party for their questions—around 10 percent of our vaccine doses so far have gone to Māori. The supply of vaccines is constrained. We are getting bigger supplies of vaccines arriving in the country from next week onwards, but at this point supply is still very constrained. We are working very closely with Māori health providers to make sure we’re getting out there in amongst those communities.

Actually, in communities with high concentrations of Māori, and I think particularly of Northland and the Tai Rāwhiti areas, there has been a whānau-based and a community-wide approach taken, which is actually, I think, reflected in the fact that we’ve still got a reasonable number of group 4 people who are not yet eligible being vaccinated. That’s often happening in those communities where they are taking that kind of more clusters—you know, doing whole communities at the same time. That will be capturing some of those Māori communities, but there’s no question there is more work to be done there and we are seeing really good shifts in the attitude of Māori and Pacific communities where vaccine hesitancy has been higher. We are seeing that really coming down and I think that’s really encouraging.