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Collins: Vax mandates must have sunset clause

Henry Cooke

National leader Judith Collins says she would be more comfortable with vaccine mandates if they had a well-defined endpoint.

Her party has rapidly shifted its positioning on the issue of vaccine certificates and mandates in the last 24 hours, after calling for more use of them for months. Collins now says she is worried about the Government creating a ‘‘two-class society’’ that alienates those who choose not to be vaccinated.

She told Stuff yesterday this new positioning was because of a step-up in rhetoric from Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern.

‘‘The prime minister has moved from about – ‘it’s not the people that are the problem, it’s the virus’ – to now basically saying it’s the people that are the problem. I think we need to be very careful about that rhetoric.

‘‘Because the last thing that we want to do is to get people to dig their heels in and say, I’m not going to get it now because Jacinda Ardern has told me to get it.’’

Collins and National have been irked by a comment Ardern made in a NZ Herald video last week after introducing the traffic light system, which allows hospitality and other close-contact venues to operate with more freedoms if they bar the unvaccinated.

Ardern was asked if she was creating a system with ‘‘two different classes of people’’ and replied she was.

Collins said she still supported the freedom of any business to bar people for not being vaccinated, but said that once 90 per cent of the country was double-vaccinated the Government should not be mandating that any businesses do this.

She said these rules should have a set review date when the Government would check in to see if they were not necessary any more.

Personally, she thought the rules should fade away once 90 per cent of each DHB was double vaccinated – which is the Government’s current target to move to the traffic-light system.

‘‘This is the only virus for which there’s going to be any mandating of vaccines. So it’s really important that we have an end date. Is it a date? Is it a time, is that when we get to 90 per cent? Is it when we get to 98 per cent? What is that date? And when does this end? Is it when there is no Covid in the world?

‘‘It’s important to have a time when we look at it – that we do have a sunset clause. If we don’t do that, I think you know, that makes us much more uncomfortable.’’

National News

en-nz

2021-10-28T07:00:00.0000000Z

2021-10-28T07:00:00.0000000Z

https://fairfaxmedia.pressreader.com/article/281651078318361

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