Quick decisions show Govt warts and all

What has the pandemic taught us about the capacity to reach legitimate decisions? The everyday decisionmaking around responses to COVID-19 highlights many difficult trade-offs that must be managed: in developing managed isolation and quarantine systems; economic stimulus packages; vaccination strategies; and Alert Level frameworks.

If we are comparing ourselves with other parliamentary democracies, New Zealand has arguably done quite well in terms of the public’s acceptance of the behaviours encouraged by these new systems.

But it’s still early days. COVID-19 itself has tested every system’s policy process legitimacy, often to near-breaking point. With reports emerging of underground networks organising to subvert or get around vaccine mandates, should we be concerned that the seemingly sudden appearance of defiant conspiracy theory rhetoric may have much wider implications for the legitimacy of policy decisions in the future?

What is crystal clear is that the response to COVID-19 has exacerbated the legitimacy problem that pervades all countries with histories of colonisation. In so many ways, the pandemic shows how New Zealand’s policy-making institutions, when it comes to the crunch, find it very difficult to incorporate the input of Māori and Pacific health leaders.

As to implementation, our comparatively high rates of vaccination reveal some important strengths of having a tax-funded, rather than insurance-based, health system.

However, the pandemic experience also shows the downside of quick decisions where no one has the chance to work through all the practical implications.

The pandemic response has shone a bright light on this, the booking system for MIQ being the most glaring example. This is the price we pay for a system that enables decisiveness. To be fair, this year it seems the Government has learned some policy-making lessons and has built in more time in making many key decisions, such as introducing the traffic-light system and opening borders.

But, most importantly, implementation of many COVID-related policies also clearly shows how governing effectively requires more than governments. New Zealand’s prevailing modus operandi in public management is to carve a huge gulf between government agencies, which have statutory obligations, and non-government organisations, which are only invited to fill the gaps once they are recognised as gaping holes.

Everyone in the Ministry of Health and DHB management now knows, if they didn’t already, how crucial Māori and Pacific health providers are in connecting health services to their communities. But why has it been so difficult for them to learn this lesson?

Let’s hope that the COVID-19 pandemic becomes the great disruptor that will jolt our policy-making processes out of this particular hard-wired pattern, and into some more productive habits.

Tim Tenbensel is associate professor, health policy, in the School of Population Health at the University of Auckland