New Zealand should take up Australia’s offer of opening up a Trans-Tasman bubble allowing families to reunite, skilled workers in and to boost our ailing tourism sector.
We are a year into the Covid pandemic. I was totally supportive of the blunt boarder closure last year and the lockdown, but we now need a more sophisticated approach.
Australia, like New Zealand has mostly eliminated Covid. Cities like Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth have had fewer recent cases than Auckland and longer periods with no community cases.
It makes no sense to have the same 14 day quarantine rules for people coming from Australia, as for people coming from countries like the US, UK and India where Covid is rampant. We know from the MIQ Covid testing that we are getting lots of cases out of these countries but not out of Australia. We should still require travellers from Australia to have a test before boarding a plane. We can isolate a region or state where needed if there were localised reoccurrences.
A Trans-Tasman bubble would make a huge difference to thousands of families and businesses. I have dozens of heart breaking stories from Nelsonians of family members dying alone, people seriously unwell and families desperate to be reunited.
We have many tourism businesses on the brink of bankruptcy in places like Queenstown and Franz Josef but also here in Nelson and Tasman. Thousands of jobs are at risk. The Government cannot go on borrowing to bail them out and nor should they when there is a safe way to re-open tourism with Australia.
We know a lot more about Covid than a year ago and we have many more tools to manage it. We need to get on with saliva testing, vaccine passports and risk rate our border controls. It is time to take a smarter approach.
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