We need more candour and less moral sanction

Before the Covid-19 pandemic, borders had fallen out of fashion. With the exception of Trump and Brexit, the line of both free marketers and an internationalist left favoured the idea that borders were little more than made-up lines on a map, at worst immoral and at best imaginary.

That, of course, all changed. The border was where we first encountered Covid and where the first concessions were made that we no longer lived in normal times. The idea of an island nation, one of whose chief export earners was tourism, shutting off travel, even from countries in the throes of the virus, was unthinkable at the beginning of March 2020.

It was the border, too, that defined the Team of Five Million as it rallied to stamp out the virus in the first protracted lockdown: the one-million-odd New Zealanders living outside the country found themselves off the team. The porous border, which made Sydney or Melbourne more accessible than many small towns, hardened and closed.

Then more borders returned. Iwi and hapū in the regions set up checkpoints to safeguard communities from incursions of the virus through travellers fleeing the cities. The uncertain legal status of these posts quickly gave way to cooperation and support from police, and in essence the quasi-endorsement of the state.

Auckland has had both a ‘‘hard border’’ of police checkpoints through its isolated lockdowns, and itself serves as a hard, wide barrier separating Northland from the rest of the country. Much of Waikato remains isolated from its neighbours, a kind of demilitarised zone between the free lands of level 2 and the pandemic in the Queen City.

Some residents of the South Island, unhappy with even this buffer, demanded a hard border to keep the dismal gravity of community transmission down through the North Island at bay.

In that light the idea of vaccine passports (or certificates), which in the new ‘‘traffic light’’ will allow the fully vaccinated safe passage without delay at bars, gyms and hairdressers, could be seen as simply the continuation of a now familiar theme. And yet they strike a discordant note.

If many of the unvaccinated are outsiders, it is not by their actions. While many of the small core of hardline anti-vaxxers are contemptible charlatans and conspiracy theorists, the fact is that the greater part of the unvaccinated eligible population are simply those groups the Government got to last in its rollout: younger Mā ori, under 30, an age group that was actively dissuaded from seeking vaccination until the latest outbreak had already started and become embedded.

Whether intentional or not, a tone of moral sanction has crept into the prime minister’s pronouncements on the differing treatment for vaccinated and unvaccinated people that will accompany the traffic light system: a tone that doesn’t fit well with the Government’s own part in the slow rollout to these age groups and previous undertakings that vaccines would not be mandatory and those who opted out would not face penalties.

It adds to an unfortunate developing tic of the Government’s Delta response: a refusal to confront issues head on, like the abandonment of elimination, the move to opening up, and vaccine mandates, until they are a fait accompli, at which point the public is expected to catch up to the new status quo it was previously assured was not happening. It’s a testament to the prime minister’s enduring popularity, and the trust her Government earned in 2020, that this approach is even remotely sustainable.

If many of the unvaccinated are outsiders, it is not by their actions.

Vaccine mandates, whether simply backing up employers to allow the market for Covid-safe environments to work properly, or at the other extreme of the de facto compulsion signalled this week, were inevitable in some form. But instead of being braced for the bad news, some vaccine-hesitant people felt blindsided and, worse, targeted.

The Government needs to be more up front, and more direct. Saying that it is ‘‘allowing’’ people to have haircuts is like your parents wrapping up things you already own and giving them to you for Christmas. It fundamentally misunderstands the relationship of the state to its citizens, but it also misjudges the nature of the pandemic.

The virus is not a moral agent. Old people were not shielded by checkpoints in remote communities before vaccines because they had done anything wrong; the immune-compromised were not being sanctioned with tougher restrictions in the alert system.

Lockdown was not a punishment, and opening up is not a reward. Lockdown was a public health tool; an unthinkable imposition that we may not even be able to comprehend ourselves, like a strange dream, in a decade’s time, but necessary for the strange and exceptional times we lived in.

The same goes for gathering limits, for vaccine mandates, for vaccines themselves. The past is always a different country, and we will at least have our passports stamped.