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Image: Tina Tiller
Image: Tina Tiller

PoliticsSeptember 21, 2022

A report card: Eight charts that show how New Zealand managed the pandemic

Image: Tina Tiller
Image: Tina Tiller

With Joe Biden declaring the pandemic ‘over’ and the last of our major restrictions lapsing, Duncan Greive pulls together some data to compare how Aotearoa’s Covid-19 management compared with some other notable countries.

It’s now been a week since the government elected to let its emergency laws expire, as good a marker as any for the move from pandemic to endemic Covid-19. Last week I wrote about the various profound impacts that linger even as the laws are gone, ending on a note suggesting that, on the whole, we should all be collectively proud of how we confronted this generation-defining challenge. That was by no means to suggest we managed it perfectly, but that we certainly did better than the dire assessment of our preparedness going in.

That’s not just a vibe – there’s data to back it up. I’ve picked eight charts that collectively tell the story of the pandemic through its impact on health and the economy and set us against a basket of similar developed nations to see how we managed. It’s necessarily limited, but illuminates something that it’s easy to forget as many of us return to a different basket of preoccupations: we did pretty damn well.

The point of this exercise is not to gloat – we had a number of very significant advantages, most notably geography. Instead it is to use this moment, the end of a period of highly unusual restrictions, to reflect on what they were for, what they accomplished and get a sense of how the health of our people and our economy survived versus some other nations to which we often compare ourselves.

These charts were generated from Our World in Data or created in Flourish by Ben Gracewood. Roll over individual countries to see them isolated from the pack.

Cases per million people

This chart shows just how infectious the Omicron variant was, with all countries – even those that had lived with Covid-19 in the community since March of 2020 – peaking after it emerged. Of the six countries I picked for comparison, only Ireland ever experienced a higher number of cases per million. Yet our peak came latest, and our experience of Delta and other highly infectious variants was negligible compared to most. Crucially, a large majority of us were vaccinated, and many boosted, by the time Omicron really took hold.

Deaths from Covid-19 per million population

This is perhaps the most stark illustration of what might have been had we not pursued the elimination strategy and kept up a very hard (some might say unnecessarily harsh) border regime. For the past few weeks we have, at times, had some of the highest death rates per million people in the world. However that’s only because Covid has essentially burned to embers in much of the rest of the world, and during those fearsome spikes and prolonged surges in other countries, New Zealand was completely Covid-free.

Excess mortality

An underappreciated dividend of our isolation and lockdowns was a decrease in seasonal influenza and other viruses that tend to impact mortality (translation: kill people). The UK peaked at more than double its normal mortality, while even Australia, which also pursued elimination, was more often elevated above a zero baseline. By comparison New Zealand spent much of the pandemic era experiencing fewer deaths than it would have expected in an ordinary year.

Vaccination rate

One area in which there is a clear and valid critique of our response is vaccination. Today we sit resolutely in the middle of this pack, with slightly more than 80% of our population fully vaccinated. This is partially explained by having a younger population than some in the group – Singapore, for example, has a significantly older (and therefore more eligible) population. But Australia’s is roughly the same age as ours, and after a slow start it has been persistently ahead.

More significant is the lag in getting started in the first place. It wasn’t until July 2021 that we reached even 10% of the population, and due to a focus on older populations we lagged particularly in vaccinating Māori and Pacific communities, with gaps that proved difficult to close. That said, a huge effort over spring saw us surpass the US and UK, and while there are legitimate questions around how long we took to procure the vaccine, its ultimate impact is manifest in the charts above.

Stay at home orders

There is something of a paradox in our lockdowns, in that they were some of the strictest outside China, yet produced long periods in which our population was among the world’s least restricted (notwithstanding closed borders and restrictions on large events). The below map, which can be viewed as a video, illustrates that tension well. It shows while there has been considerable critique of the lockdowns from some quarters, not all of it without merit, when viewing the course of the pandemic as a whole our freedoms were not drastically more impacted than many other nations. The difference being, again, that we were much more likely to survive the pandemic.

Inflation

For some the very idea of comparing health to economic data is odious. Unfortunately it’s something governments do every day, whether it’s deciding which stretch of dangerous road to upgrade, or whether to fund an expensive new cancer drug.

Setting that aside for a moral philosophy major to figure out, it’s worth looking at how New Zealand’s inflation is tracking versus some similar nations. There has been some noise that the combination of loose money from the Reserve Bank and big spending from the government produced a long-lasting (so far) inflationary bomb. And while that certainly has some truth to it, this chart shows that we are ultimately middle of the pack  among similar nations, and significantly below the OECD average. We did what most other countries did, and that plus all the associated supply chain chaos produced similar results.

Unemployment

While inflation is bad, new research from the University of Auckland was picked up by the New York Times’ Peter Coy due to its challenging conclusion: unemployment is much, much worse. It was based on long-term data about people’s self-assessed happiness, and while it runs contra to many years of prevailing theory, the approach is compelling.

If you hold that view, the economic response to the pandemic looks pretty extraordinary. New Zealand had by far the lowest increase in unemployment – just 1.2% from trough to peak, versus the OECD average rise of more than 3%. It currently sits at 3.3%, close to full employment. This is actually a problem – labour shortages are currently much more commonly discussed than joblessness, which has essentially vanished – but it’s a much better problem than high unemployment.

Economic growth

Gross Domestic Product is the most commonly-cited measure of a country’s performance, a bundle of signals which collectively suggest how fast your economy is growing (or shrinking, as was often the case during the pandemic). These data are bumpy, and unlike the health impacts it will likely be years before we can confidently assess the pandemic’s long-term impact on countries. Early signs, though, are that New Zealand was pretty middle-of-the-pack, tracking the OECD average reasonably closely over the past couple of years. We spiked higher, exuberant from elimination, in 2020, then dipped more harshly when we endured a lengthy Delta lockdown in spring of 2021.

It suggests that by this crucial measure we basically did fine – neither great nor awful. Yet set it against the other seven charts and there is an overwhelming sense that the sum total of our efforts during the pandemic were easily among the world’s most successful.

As we move uneasily into what some are calling the post-pandemic era, it’s worth reflecting on that with a decent amount of satisfaction.

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two houses sending in voting papers
Ratepayers roll: two votes for one (property-owning) person (Image: Archi Banal)

Local Elections 2022September 21, 2022

How many mayoralty races could ratepayer voters have decided?

two houses sending in voting papers
Ratepayers roll: two votes for one (property-owning) person (Image: Archi Banal)

The ratepayer franchise, which lets some property owners cast local election votes in more than one area, has recently come under scrutiny. But how often might contests for mayor in 2019 have hinged on those extra votes, asks Emma Vitz. 

In 2019, there were 6,066 ratepayers who voted for mayors in areas where they don’t live. This is thanks to the ratepayer roll, which allows ratepayers who own property in a local government jurisdiction in which they’re non-resident to vote in elections in that area, while still voting in the area in which they reside. 

For some people, this is fundamentally undemocratic and represents a flagrant example of the advantages landlords in New Zealand have over those who rent or only own a single property. In this vein, Renters United has launched a petition to abolish the ratepayer roll. Others, however, believe that anyone paying a tax should have a say in how that tax is spent. 

With these competing points of view in mind, I wanted to find out – have ratepayers actually had enough sway to decide local government elections? 

Ratepayer turnout is more than twice as high as residential turnout in local elections. In 2019, 87.7% of eligible ratepayers voted in the mayoral elections, compared to 40.6% of residential electors. However, the absolute number of ratepayer electors is tiny, with 6,915 ratepayers being eligible to vote in contested mayoral elections in 2019, compared to over 3 million residential electors. 

Only three of the 61 contested 2019 mayoral elections could have been decided by the number of ratepayers that voted. The first was Kaikōura District Council, which had 25 ratepayers vote in an election that had a margin of 12 votes between the two frontrunners. The second was Wellington City’s hotly contested mayoral election, in which 196 ratepayers voted and the margin between Justin Lester and Andy Foster was a mere 62 votes. Finally, in the Kāpiti Coast, the 513 ratepayers who voted in that election could have, in theory at least, have swayed that result, assuming almost all of them voted the same way. 

There are, of course, a number of elections down the ballot where results might have been affected. But when it comes to the mayoralty, outside of these three elections, the number of ratepayer votes for mayor made up 5% of the gap between the two most popular candidates, on average. 

In Auckland, where Phil Goff raked in just under 100,000 more votes than John Tamihere in 2019, 351 ratepayers cast votes in the mayoral election. In Christchurch City, where 192 ratepayers voted, there was a gap of just over 18,000 votes between the two most popular candidates.

The Thames-Coromandel District has been flagged as having a particularly high number of non-residential voters, but even here, the 930 ratepayers who voted could not have closed the gap of over 3,000 votes between the two frontrunners. 

I don’t personally have firm opinions on whether the ratepayer roll should exist or not, and the arguments on points of principle are well worth debate. But for those seeking to make councils more representative, removing the ratepayer roll is no silver bullet – a greater impact might be achieved by working to lift turnout levels among residents.


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