spread out and younger population than New Zealand—one or two. And there’s a few countries that are richer than us and have a richer civil society and more cooperative people. But I’d challenge the Minister to name one country that could match the suite of advantages that New Zealand had going into the COVID-19 pandemic. If he could answer that, I’m sure we’d all love to know.
Hon CHRIS HIPKINS (Minister for COVID-19 Response): I think the member, to some extent, in his comments around freedoms, highlighted how fortunate New Zealanders have been. When it comes to things like school camps, festivals and events, and so on, we’re one of the only countries in the world that’s doing those things at the moment. We’re one of the only countries in the world that actually has an events industry thriving at the moment. While I’m not saying that it’s not challenging for them—it absolutely is—they are certainly doing a lot better than their counterparts in just about every other country around the world.
In terms of the comparisons that the member makes to other countries, I would simply point out to him that he is wrong, that it is an insult to the people working at our border that he’s putting it all down to the fact that we’re an island country. In fact, we’ve had probably up to about 120,000 people now come back into New Zealand across the border. We’re dealing with a handful of potential cases from that. I think about Air New Zealand—5,500 flights they’ve operated since May last year, and they’ve dealt with three COVID-19 cases out of that. There are people working exceptionally hard to keep COVID-19 out of New Zealand.
DAVID SEYMOUR (Leader—ACT): It was a very simple question: can he name one country that could match New Zealand’s suite of advantages—its isolation, its young and spread-out population, its wealth, the prosperity of New Zealand and our civil society? All he had to do was get up and say, “Here’s a bunch of countries.”, but he couldn’t, because there isn’t one. When the Minister says we should all be grateful and lucky, he’s taking the credit for the Government without acknowledging the simple reality that this Government had a less challenging job than any country on earth going into this pandemic. That’s the truth.
Then he enters into the fallacy that to criticise the response of the Government is to attack the hard-working people at the border and at managed isolation and quarantine facilities. Well, actually, that’s interesting, because I’m not aware of anyone in the ACT Party or anyone on this side of the House who has had anything but praise for those hardworking people. Actually, the problem that the Minister has and this Government has is that they are unable to accept any kind of criticism of the approach that they have taken. I would say to the Government that that is a huge vulnerability for New Zealand, because, actually, in order to get better, we have to be prepared to accept criticism and accept the need to get better.
Here’s a simple question for the Minister. It’s astonishing we haven’t heard anything about the NZ COVID Tracer app during the Valentine’s Day outbreak. Could the Minister tell the House: was anybody traced, two people that scanned in at the same location or were traced person-to-person by Bluetooth? How many people were traced using that technology in this outbreak?
Hon CHRIS HIPKINS (Minister for COVID-19 Response): In terms of the Bluetooth technology, we don’t have that information, because we don’t collect that information. One of the basic things about the COVID Tracer app is that people collect their own data. They get notifications about whether they may have been exposed, and they respond based on that. We don’t collect all that information. Some of the countries the member likes to laud do collect that information, and they use it for a lot more than just tracing COVID-19 contacts, which is not something that the New Zealand Government has been willing to do.
