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Image: Tina Tiller
Image: Tina Tiller

PoliticsFebruary 15, 2022

NZ’s move to phase two explained 

Image: Tina Tiller
Image: Tina Tiller

At midnight on Tuesday, the next phase of the government’s response to the omicron outbreak kicks in. Here’s what that means.

Wait, I thought we were in red? What happened to the traffic light system?

Yes, we’re still in red. The traffic light system (Covid-19 Protection Framework) remains.

So we’re going to level two, like the good old days of the alert level system?

Certainly not. The alert level system remains kaput. 

I see. So… what is this phase two of which you speak?

Glad you asked. Back at the end of January, a few days after it became clear omicron was circulating in the community, the government announced a new three-phased approach to dealing with the pesky variant. 

At phase one, which we’ve been in up until now, the “stamp it out” approach was the modus operandi – essentially, following the same rule book we did for delta. Phase two means moving to “slow the spread” mode.

Hold on, ‘Stamp it out’ sounds suspiciously like ye olde elimination strategy. I thought we ditched that way back in ’21? 

Elimination was “phased out” from October, when restrictions began loosening for Aucklanders despite rising case numbers. 

In terms of the approach to omicron until now, suppression might be a better word than elimination. “Our objective is to keep cases as low as possible for as long as possible to allow people to be boosted and children to be vaccinated without omicron being widespread,” is how the government put it.

Right. So this move to phase two can be seen as the absolutely final, no-more-chances, all-elimination-must-go deathblow to the elimination strategy?

Pretty much. 

How do things actually change?

Phase one has meant the same contact-tracing efforts, isolation and PCR testing requirements that have been the order of the day for much of the pandemic. 

In phase two, the aim of the game switches to preventing a blowout, with the focus moving to vulnerable communities – those at greater risk of severe illness should they catch omicron – and critical workers, to keep those supply chains pumping. 

In broader terms, the management of cases and contacts moves to a more automated, non-personal approach. Household contacts of cases will continue to be “actively managed” by contact-tracing services, but if you test positive, the news will be broken via text message rather than phone call, and you’ll be directed to an “online self-investigation tool” focusing on high-risk exposure, and then sent some information via email.

“Phone-based interviews will still take place where it’s required,” however.

In phase two, the isolation period for people who test positive shortens from 14 days to 10. Household contacts will also need to isolate for 10 days, the prime minister announced at a post-cabinet press conference this afternoon, and this can be served concurrently – which “removes the potential for people in the same household to have to isolate for long periods of time unless they test positive themselves”, Jacinda Ardern said. In recent weeks there has been criticism of household contacts of positive cases having to isolate for up to 24 days.

This decision was made based on research that shows 90% of household contacts who test positive do so in the first 10 days, said Ardern.

Close contacts who don’t live in the same household as a case will now have to isolate for seven days, a decrease from 10. This will also apply to arrivals from Australia when the border opens to them from midnight on February 28.

Rapid antigen tests (Image: Tina Tiller)

Is phase two where those RAT tests I keep hearing about come into play? 

To an extent, but PCR testing will remain the go-to for symptomatic people and close contacts. Where rapid antigen tests make an appearance is in the close contact exemption scheme, AKA the  “test to return” policy, whereby asymptomatic contacts in critical workforces can return a negative RAT to get the all-clear to go back to work, without the need to isolate. Today, Ardern said people who are part of the scheme will be able to pick up a pack of 10 RATs from their local vaccination centre.  

If the labs get overwhelmed, the government’s official Covid website suggests RATs may get a wider rollout under phase two. “RATs will be integrated into our testing system at this phase and will work alongside PCR tests. They will be useful when the laboratories cannot provide PCR results within a useful timeframe because of large volumes or because of transport delays.”

Who’s considered critical? 

Businesses can register online if they think they can meet the criteria, with sectors including food production and its supply chain, key public services like health and emergency services, lifeline utilities such as power and water supplies, transport, critical financial services, news media, social welfare, plus human and animal health and welfare. As of this afternoon, there have been 5,624 applications for the close contact isolation scheme. 

Is there a phase three? 

There is. It’s previously been said that we’ll move to it when cases are “in the thousands”, and in this afternoon’s press conference, Ardern indicated a 5,000 daily tally might be the threshold for change, but said “we’ll be keeping a watching brief on whether it needs to be sooner”.

For most people, the changes at phase three will be subtle, said Ardern: the definition of contact will move to household and “household-like” only, and those contacts will be notified by the cases themselves. RATs will be rolled out more widely.

Is there a phase four? 

Mercifully no, and fingers crossed it stays that way.

Keep going!
Barry Manilow, Trevor Mallard and a trench. Photo: Marty Melville/ AFP/Getty
Barry Manilow, Trevor Mallard and a trench. Photo: Marty Melville/ AFP/Getty

PoliticsFebruary 14, 2022

What is Trevor Mallard playing at?

Barry Manilow, Trevor Mallard and a trench. Photo: Marty Melville/ AFP/Getty
Barry Manilow, Trevor Mallard and a trench. Photo: Marty Melville/ AFP/Getty

The speaker of the house spraying anti-mandate protesters with water and Barry Manilow is funny. That doesn’t make it a good idea.

I cannot lie: I laughed. News that the speaker of the House of Representatives ordered a sound system to be wheeled out to parliament’s forecourt on a rainy Saturday night and blast Barry Manilow and the Macarena at anti-mandate protesters occupying the grounds below is, well, funny. It came roughly 24 hours after his last intervention – flicking on the garden sprinklers, dousing the makeshift campsite in water. 

Trevor Mallard’s justification for the tactics? They’re not on the grounds legally; let’s make the Book-a-Bach a little less comfortable. Petulant? Yes. Peevish? Of course. But let’s keep it in perspective – there was something charmingly New Zealand about it all. In many capital cities, the reality would be water cannons instead of garden sprinklers, rubber bullets rather than the Copacabana. The protesters might like to imagine themselves bravely confronting some despotic regime. What they got was a cantankerous suburban homeowner out front in his dressing gown, cup of piping hot tea, hollering Get Off My Lawn. Instead of taking orders from some deadly tyrant, Mallard was taking requests, including from James Blunt, who generously suggested that he play some James Blunt. 

But that doesn’t quite make it a good idea. Very predictably, Mallard only emboldened the protesters, helping to galvanise a group of people that has no obvious leader and an inchoate set of demands. Inspired by Canadian truckers, the New Zealand Convoy effort has at times looked like it might tear itself apart amid internecine, factional squabbling. It’s not as though Mallard’s stunts dramatically changed things; they’d be there with or without the rotation of Baby Shark, pipe music and public health advisories. But he fed many of their most distorted perceptions by engaging in – to quote numerous of their social media messages – “psychological warfare”. He bumped the story up the news sites and bulletins, and not just in New Zealand. He inspired them to dig trenches (no doubt feeding the fantasies of some that this is just like the war) and dance in formation to The Macarena, like participants in the weirdest scout camp ever. 

It is wrong, of course, to dismiss all the protesters as conspiracy theorists, but they’re all conspiracy-adjacent. Nuremberg codes, global government, a hoax virus, human microchips, genocidal bioweapons – the language is sprinkled across the signage at parliament and online. The man behind the protesters’ media channel of choice, Counterspin, propagates all of those brain worms. He took a moment yesterday to say that the moon landings were a hoax. On the outer fringes, a handful of protest supporters postulated that the New Zealand government had engineered the weather in order to unleash a tempest at parliament. 

‘This is no coincidence … This is weather modification being used’ – a Facebook post on Cyclone Dovi and the Convoy protest

Trevor Mallard is a very capable man, and it is true he has flirted with the idea of bringing back the moa, but he cannot divert cyclones. If he could, Wellingtonians might reasonably ask why he hasn’t fixed the weather more often. What he did do, however, is provide a kind of lightning rod, both a motivational tool and a target of upset for the muddied fields of parliament. It confirmed in the minds of the crowds that the 122 arrests made on Thursday, in a police action that was abandoned and now looks like a clear mistake, was at his urging.

What was Mallard doing, then? There may be method in the Manilow. It could be he’s quite nobly made himself the centre of attention. Many MPs, parliamentary staffers and media have felt terrified over recent days, weeks and months. For good reason, too: the same people that insist they come in peace brandish images of nooses and guillotines. Death threats have become a depressingly routine feature of politician and journalist inboxes. “Hang em high” was chalked on the parliamentary forecourt for all to see. The charitable reading is the speaker’s intention was to distract, deflect, soak up the deranged fury, at the same time as puncturing any tinfoil hats with ridicule. 

All the quote and question marks in the world don’t change Counterspin’s message.

Whether the intention was honourable, satirical or simply irascible, the question is this: in a febrile situation, now accepted by everyone to be unprecedented, was that really a smart thing to do? When that was put to Corrie Parnell, the Wellington police commander overseeing the operation, last night, he said Mallard’s sprinkler-and-music offensive was “certainly not a tactic we would encourage [or] endorse but it is what it is”. Translated from superintendent-speak, I think what he’s saying is: For Christ’s sake, Trevor, you’re not helping, will you bloody well give it a rest. 

Water off Mallard’s back: Protesters attempted to mock the speaker with ornamental ducks. Photo by Marty Melville/AFP via Getty Images

As for the challenge before them now, Parnell raised concerns around vulnerable children and a lack of sanitation as the protest enters its sodden seventh day, with Portaloos overflowing and puddles flecked with human shit. Inexplicably, protesters appeared to have been allowed to bring whatever they please on to the grounds: hay bales, power tools, gazebos big enough to contain dance floors, even stacks of patio heaters. Police are finding it impossible to set up a line of communication to discuss options with the group, largely because there are no obvious leaders who can speak on their behalf. Police say some of those encamped have weapons – though not as far as they know firearms – on the site. White nationalist groups have confirmed their presence. Violent extremism and far-right ideology have been revealed to pervade the template abroad. Anything that slows a resolution is a problem.

If you wade through enough livestreams and comment threads you’d think the leader of the anti-mandate convoy gathering is Joe Rogan or Tucker Carlson, so desperate are the convoy crew to be noticed by their American broadcast heroes. For his part, Trevor Mallard looks like he’s trying to get noticed by Stephen Colbert. The Copacabana strategy came directly from Twitter; “Play them Barry Manilow all night,” was a friendly suggestion from someone with the username “Feijoa_Chutney”, to which Mallard replied with a winking-face emoji. These are some times we live in, and I can’t pretend I’m not captivated. But the Speaker of the House of Representatives holds a weighty office, constitutionally the third most important in the country. And right now it seems like his preoccupation is parliamentary process, representative democracy, faves and retweets.


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