Hooton on why MIQ must end
Matthew Hooton writes:
New Zealand citizens have learned a valuable lesson that the Wellington bureaucracy will lock us up not just because we have been sentenced by a court or on public health grounds, but just because they can. …
The latest case to reach the media is Shelley Grierson, a 30-something New Zealander currently living in the UK, who tried to get home to be with her dying sister, Rebecca, who has days or weeks to live.
As Shelley says, this isn’t an 80-year-old grandparent, or even her parents, whose passing is part of life. It is her older sister, to whom she is close. Like my friend and her husband of 56 years that I wrote about in August, who were prevented last year from being with one another as he died, neither Shelley nor Rebecca has Covid.
But unlike my friend and her husband, this latest monstrosity is playing out despite vaccines now being available. Shelley is not just double-vaccinated but consistently tests negative for Covid. Yet Wellington bureaucrats have so far turned down four applications to leave MIQ early, so that she can be sure of being with her sister as she dies. This is despite work by no less than professors Michael Baker and Nick Wilson and their epidemiology colleagues from the University of Otago’s medical school advising that New Zealand now represents greater Covid risk to people like Shelley than they do to New Zealand. That is, there is no public health justification for Shelley continuing to be detained by the state against her will.
The way the Ardern Government is treating Shelley is the polar opposite of kindness. It is maximally cruel and it is impossible to imagine a court thinking it is consistent with her citizenship rights under the Bill of Rights Act. After all, under our legal system inherited from England, it has been unlawful since the 12th century for the state to detain someone without good reason.
Matthew is dead right. Maybe why Shelley and others should do is file writs of habeas corpus ad sub judiciem, which are designed to secure people’s release from unlawful detention.
Shelley would almost certainly be set free if she had the resources to judicially review MBIE’s decisions, or even if she threatened it. Our lawmakers have provided for an exemption system. If the bureaucrats won’t apply it in Shelley’s case, what possible case would they ever apply it to?
If a dying sibling isn’t grounds for a early release, what is?
Ironically actual prisoners are probably more likely to get compassionate early release than MIQ detainees.
As of Wednesday, Wellington bureaucrats were allowing 2119 people in Auckland who are positive with Covid to self-isolate instead of being confined to MIQ, plus another 2616 who may have Covid. There are another 91 people with Covid self-isolating in the Waikato, plus a further 153 possible cases.
Yet Shelley and tens of thousands of double-vaccinated, Covid-free New Zealand citizens like her are either being confined to MIQ or are being prevented from exercising their citizenship rights to even get that far. It is a disgrace not just to Ardern’s regime but to all of us.
MIQ made sense a few months ago. It makes zero sense for vaccinated NZers who have tested negative when 2,000 Covid positive people are self-isolating at home.