John Key on five ways to leave lockdowns behind

John Key writes:

But here’s a plan that might work:

1. Give Māori and Pacific health providers a financial incentive for every person they get vaccinated in the next six weeks.

2. Give every person aged between 12-29 a $25 voucher of their choice if they get vaccinated before December 1.

3. Allow only vaccinated people into licensed premises (and maybe park the Shot Bro bus outside a few nightclubs as an incentive).

4. Tell New Zealanders when borders will reopen. It might incentivise more people to get jabbed.

5. Stop ruling by fear. Instead, reassure people that living with the virus is possible, as long as you’re vaccinated. Take positive actions like funding Pharmac to invest in therapies proven to help fight the virus, build up our hospital capacity and workforce, use saliva testing for Covid, subsidise home-testing kits for Covid and order booster shots now.

All good ideas. I think giving a date for reopening the borders would definitely lift the vaccination rates.

He also notes that MIQ is inadequate:

MIQ, as our sole quarantine response, is inadequate. Home quarantine should begin immediately.

The South Australian trial already requires those in home MIQ to leave their phone on 24 hours a day and to agree to using face recognition and GPS technology so they can be monitored.

We could throw in the kicker that if you break quarantine you get a $20,000 fine, and time in the clanger.

Additionally, as Act leader David Seymour has been advocating, we need privately-run and purpose-built short-term MIQ facilities for workers and, in time, for tourists.

This is by no means a complete list of what’s possible. It’s simply a few ways to encourage vaccination and to allow New Zealand to rejoin the world that is opening up without us.

And a reminder of the costs of the status quo:

For those who say it’s too hard, or too risky I ask this: one day, when the largest part of the Minister of Finance’s Budget pays only the interest on the debt we are racking up now, and you can’t have the latest cancer drugs, or more police, because New Zealand can’t afford them, what will you think?

Debt attracts interest and interest rates will not remain low.

Key also skewers the current MIQ system:

You also have to ignore the deafening voices of tens of thousands of New Zealanders who are having their citizenship compromised by being stranded overseas. A very few of them manage to get back when public servants in Wellington decide whose plight is desperate enough to be rewarded with a golden ticket to MIQ. How is it that bureaucrats are deciding who gets to come home, while pretending the rest have been on an extended overseas shopping trip so deserve nothing more than being left to the mercy of a lottery?

A lottery is not a public policy. It’s a national embarrassment. Whether you get to see your grandchild, or your dying mother, or your sister’s wedding, depends on whether or not your number comes up. This is a lottery that is gambling with people’s families and futures.

We can, and should, do better.