Peta Barker, Secretary, Eastern BOP branch, NZ Labour Party

There has been a flurry of opinions on our Covid-19 response recently.

I’m reminded of earlier comments from the respected epidemiologist and academic, Professor Sir David Skegg, quoted in the NZ Herald.

He thinks the previous Government’s handling of the Covid response was one of New Zealand’s greatest achievements, pointing out that had National not done away

with the Pandemic Response Committee set up by Labour in the early 2000s, we would have avoided lockdowns in the way Taiwan did and saved ourselves the $61 billion of borrowing required to keep the economy working.

And now New Zealand has become one of very few countries in the world, the US among them, to reject post-pandemic changes to international health rules agreed to by the World Health Organisation.

When questioned, Winston Peters and Simeon Brown gave inconsistent and unconvincing reasons for doing so.

Short-term, ideological and knee-jerk decisions can have long, damaging and costly consequences.