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Lake Wanaka from Roy’s Peak on South Island.
Lake Wanaka from Roy’s Peak on South Island. Photograph: Jorge Fernández/LightRocket/Getty Images
Lake Wanaka from Roy’s Peak on South Island. Photograph: Jorge Fernández/LightRocket/Getty Images

‘No roadmap’: New Zealand mulls reopening options after a year of closed borders

This article is more than 2 years old

With international tourism frozen, families separated and expats feeling abandoned, the question of how to reopen is becoming pressing

As vaccination continues around the world, the New Zealand government has begun providing glimpses of how the country will eventually reopen its borders. But there’s no immediate end in sight, even for expats who have received vaccinations overseas.

New Zealand has been closed to most international visitors for more than a year now. Anyone entering the country – except via recently-opened travel bubbles with Australia and the Cook Islands – is required to spend two weeks in government-run isolation. Even those spaces are only open to citizens, permanent residents or essential workers. For those eligible, access is still limited – at times, all spots in isolation have been booked out for months in advance. And while there are now spaces available, the cost of a visit is prohibitive for many: NZ$3,100 for anyone who left the country temporarily, or who is visiting for less than three months, and NZ$5,520 for those on a work visa.

Those strict border protections have kept the country largely safe from incursions of Covid-19. But they have also closed off New Zealand to the world: freezing international tourism, separating families, and leaving some expats and migrants feeling alienated and abandoned. As other countries vaccinate more and more of their people, the question of when and how New Zealand will reopen the border becomes pressing – and there’s still no clarity on a date or re-opening process from the government.

Speaking to businesses on Thursday, the prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, said the travel bubbles represented “a holding pattern”, and would stay in place “while we work on ensuring we lift the numbers of New Zealanders that have the individual armour of the vaccine”.

“In this phase, where vaccine rollout in New Zealand is incomplete, the number of countries we can safely open up to is limited,” she said.

But she said New Zealand would also be looking to the next phase: whether to open out before the full vaccination rollout is complete, or allow “vaccine passport” arrangements. Ardern would not give definitive answers on whether New Zealand would pursue these options.

“The answer is possibly,” Ardern said. The government “will be relying heavily on emerging evidence about how effective vaccines are in preventing not just symptoms of the disease, but transmission between vaccinated individuals”.

Research shows that while Covid vaccines are successful at preventing infection, serious illness and death, some people may still get Covid-19 – and it’s possible infected, vaccinated people could still pass it on, posing a risk to any New Zealanders that remain unvaccinated.

“As we have seen, no vaccine is fail-safe,” Ardern said. “We have had our own recent example of a fully vaccinated border worker contracting Covid-19.”

A shift in mindset

As well as public health considerations, opening up before full vaccination presents a political risk for the government. The New Zealand population has never experienced a widespread Covid outbreak, and seems to have very little appetite for risking a series of cases. At present, any single community case related to the border is treated as critical – even a cluster of cases in the single digits could put entire cities into lockdown.

This approach is appropriate, given New Zealand’s current strategy is Covid elimination, and it has no protective immunity in-country. It’s also been highly successful, with New Zealand often ranked the best place to be during the pandemic, and is a point of pride in-country.

Ashley Bloomfield, director-general of health, says vaccination will be key to the reopening of New Zealand’s borders. Photograph: Marty Melville/AFP/Getty Images

But at some point, the world will switch to treating Covid-19 more like the seasonal flu – a disease to be controlled, rather than eliminated. In a briefing on Thursday, the director-general of health, Dr Ashley Bloomfield, said that in future, Covid-19 would move to being an endemic disease, routinely appearing in countries around the world. Vaccinations would keep the spread in check, but some cases are to be expected. For New Zealanders who have embraced and grown used to a zero-tolerance approach, that requires a significant shift in mindset.

Australia faces similar challenges. In the federal budget released last week, the government indicated borders were likely to remain closed until mid-2022 – a move that prompted some commentators to criticise the country’s “hermit kingdom” outlook. In New Zealand, too, there is no widespread outrage about ongoing border closures. In February, a poll by the Spinoff found 82% still supported New Zealand’s continued “closed border” policy for all but returning citizens.

In his briefing, Bloomfield gave more glimpses of what that border-reopening might look like. “There’s no doubt that having as much of the population vaccinated as possible is key to us being able to open the border,” he said.

But he also mentioned the country may need to raise the overall “baseline” of behaviour, to adopt habits like mask-wearing as the border opens. “It may well be that we need to be more at like a 2.5 level as our baseline, alongside vaccination, as part of the protections we need in place routinely to be able to open the border” Bloomfield said. The ministry later clarified he meant to say 1.5 – New Zealand operates at a series of alert levels, from 1 to 4, depending on the risk of community spread.

Reopening will also depend on the speed of New Zealand’s vaccine rollout. So far, the government is exceeding its self-set targets for vaccination, and hopes to have the entire willing adult population vaccinated by the end of the year. Vaccines for the general adult population will open up in July. But on Thursday, Ardern also flagged the possibility the country could run out of shots in June, before much larger shipments of vaccines arrive in July. “Even with planning in place, there is some risk that we’ll have a period between shipments when we run low, or out of vaccine temporarily,” she said.

For migrants stuck overseas, the uncertainty can be difficult to bear. On Thursday, groups of migrants and their families held a vigil outside parliament and across the country, protesting against the government’s failure to help those stranded offshore, divided from their families, or struggling with visa delays.

“There’s just no roadmap,” said Charlotte te Riet Scholten-Phillips, co-president of the Federation of Aotearoa Migrants. She said the lack of a public plan, or phased re-entry to bring people back into the country left migrant families in limbo.

“No one’s suggesting we just throw the border open and just let everybody in – but people want to know, will it be a month, two months, six months, before I see my family again?”

The borders were currently open to families of citizens and residents, but not to families of those in New Zealand on work visas. Te Riet Scholten-Phillips said this captured some “who have been here for several years, whose families were not here when the borders closed.” They included essential workers like nurses, doctors and supermarket staff who had kept the country running during lockdown.

In countries like India, even citizens and permanent residents are stranded. All flights out of the country have closed, as the Covid-19 death toll passes a quarter of a million. Ardern said on Friday that the government had no plans to facilitate charter flights to return New Zealanders from India.

“It feels a bit contradictory for a government that has a strong focus on kindness,” Te Riet Scholten-Phillips said.

This article was amended on 17 May 2021 to clarify the effectiveness of vaccines against infection, and to correct New Zealand’s alert level range; it is 1-4, not 1-5 as stated in an earlier version.

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