The Government has released its response to the Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Covid-19 response, accepting all 63 recommendations in some form while quietly declining the single biggest thing the commissioners asked for.
Health Minister Simeon Brown released the response on Wednesday morning, covering both phases of an inquiry that ran for more than four years, heard from over 44,000 New Zealanders and made recommendations touching 23 government agencies. The first phase produced 39 recommendations. The second, which looked mainly at how vaccine mandates and lockdown decisions were made between February 2021 and October 2022, produced another 24.
Of those 63, the Government has accepted 21 in full. Another 36 are accepted “in principle”, which in the response document usually means the recommendation will be implemented in a different form from the one the commission proposed, or only if agencies can find the money inside their existing budgets. The remaining six are partially accepted.
“New Zealanders placed enormous trust in their government and made real sacrifices to protect one another. They deserve a clear account of what happened, and this response is about learning from it,” Brown said in the Government’s media release.
The headline commitment is a transparency rule. Cabinet has agreed that in any future pandemic, the advice sitting behind a major decision that affects people’s individual rights will be published within five working days. A Cabinet Office Circular giving effect to that rule is due by 30 September. The Government has also promised that emergency economic support in a future shock will be, in its words, timely, temporary and targeted, meaning it arrives quickly, goes to the people who most need it and is wound back once the need passes.
All advice from the Covid-19 Vaccine Technical Advisory Group has now been proactively released as well. That followed a long-running dispute over whether ministers were properly told about myocarditis risks before two-dose vaccine mandates were applied to 12 to 17 year olds. The commission found ministers were told of advice against those mandates but not given fuller advice. The Ministry of Health has since told the Government that finding is wrong, and that fuller advice was in fact provided in early 2022.
The most significant refusal is on legislation. The commission’s second phase report, delivered in March, recommended that standing primary legislation covering lockdowns, border closures, quarantine and vaccine requirements be passed before the next pandemic arrives, describing such a law as “the guardrail for fundamental rights and freedoms”. The commissioners were explicit that it should go through select committee scrutiny and public consultation rather than being rushed through under urgency the way the 2020 orders were.
The Government will not do that. Instead it will review the existing Health Act, which Brown said would “ensure any future response balances the protection of public health, the economy, and New Zealanders’ rights”. That is a real difference. A Health Act review keeps pandemic powers inside a general public health statute that was written for a very different set of problems. The commission wanted a purpose-built law, debated in public, in place before the emergency rather than during it.
The second notable departure is about who is in charge. Both phases of the inquiry recommended a permanent central function to coordinate pandemic preparedness, with the second phase suggesting it sit in the Treasury or the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet. The Government has instead handed pandemic coordination to the Ministry of Health, with the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet keeping a broader stewardship role. That puts preparedness back with the agency the inquiry spent a great deal of time examining.
Several of the practical readiness items are also conditional on money. Expanded testing and contact tracing capacity, health data systems and quarantine readiness are all described in the response as depending on funding beyond current agency baselines. The phase one call for comprehensive plans covering lockdowns and border restrictions will instead be met with what the Government calls flexible, principle-based frameworks.
The six partially accepted recommendations sit in health, economic and welfare readiness. The Government partly supported improving ventilation in public buildings outside healthcare facilities, coordinating an economic response and keeping ports running through a shock. It ruled out an economic playbook, fast-tracked value-for-money checks and any single plan for managing trade bottlenecks it says lie beyond New Zealand’s control. It also declined to set formal pandemic-preparedness expectations for public service chief executives, and only partly accepted the recommendation to publish human rights advice on pandemic powers, reserving the right to withhold legally privileged material.
Brown used the release to draw a line under the previous government’s spending. He said the commission had found that more than half of the $60 billion Covid-19 Response and Recovery Fund, spread across more than 800 programmes, was not directly related to the pandemic, leaving New Zealanders carrying higher debt and higher living costs they still feel today.
“Having learnt from the previous Labour government’s mistakes, we are restoring fiscal discipline and making sure that when support is needed it reaches those who need it most, rather than spraying tens of billions of dollars across hundreds of programmes with little to show for it,” he said.
Labour had not issued a formal response at the time of writing. The inquiry has been fought over by both sides of Parliament throughout its life, with each accusing the other of politicising parts of it, and three former Labour ministers declined invitations to appear at public hearings last year.
Most of the work carries deadlines running through 2026 and 2027, which means a good deal of it will land on whoever forms the next government. With the general election approaching, how each party would handle the next public health emergency is worth knowing before you vote. Our voting tool lets you compare where the parties stand on the issues that matter to you.
The full response is on the Beehive website, and RNZ and 1News have also reported on it.
Do you think a purpose-built pandemic law would have made the last four years easier to live through, or is reviewing the Health Act enough? Leave a comment below and tell us what you think.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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