Murray Horn: NZ Initiative Senior Fellow says the Covid-19 inquiry wasn't comprehensive enough

A business think tank is critical of the first part of New Zealand's Covid-19 review, believing it's not comprehensive enough. 

Phase 1 of the pandemic response report from the Royal Commission of Inquiry brings 39 recommendations. 

They include planning for quarantine measures, allowing movement of public sector capability during a pandemic, and assigning a minister to lead implementation.  

New Zealand Initiative Senior Fellow, Murray Horn told Mike Hosking the report misses some areas. 

He says it doesn't explore whether damage to the economy and people's faith in government was more serious than needed. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
So the government did release the COVID report despite any
number of indications they were not going to. So we
got a lot of pages, a lot of recommendations. Will
it make a job of difference next time round? Former
Treasury Secretary, National Health Board member in New Zealand Initiative
senior fellow these days, Doctor Murray horns with us Murray morning.

Speaker 2 (00:15):
Good morning mate.

Speaker 1 (00:16):
If this was it, in other words, we weren't doing
Phase two. Is it comprehensive enough?

Speaker 2 (00:20):
I don't think so, and I think it misses some
big points. I think my view of it is as
a fairly and I've only read this summary, okay, so
I haven't read the full in how many other pages
it is, but I think it's quite a generous assessment
of what went on, and I think it misses a
couple of really big points. The first point I would

(00:42):
make is that it doesn't really pick up the fact
that the damaged done to the economy and to people's
trust in government and so on and so on was
more It was more serious than it needed to be,
because the public health response was weaker than it should
have been. Uh. Secondly, I think that you know clearly

(01:06):
we overdid the stimulus. Right, the government overdid the stimulus
and we're and we're paying for that now, and we'll
pay for that in terms of higher levels of debt,
more inflation, the recessions that need to be that we're
going through to try and get that inflation down. So
you know the fact that you know, New Zealand the
economy seemed to bounce back strongly. Yeah, well it's got

(01:27):
to help.

Speaker 1 (01:27):
That's what happens when you print money.

Speaker 2 (01:29):
Yeah, it's right, and yeah, and and you run up debt.
So you know, I think that there's a there's a
there's an important lesson there that we could have had
less locked fewer, fewer lockdowns, less severe lockdowns of the
public health response had have been had it been better.
And I'm thinking there about things like better testing, contact tracing,

(01:55):
you know, improving the health system's ability to cope. Using
private partners with their expertise, that we came to help
a whole lot of things that we should have been doing,
and even though we were badly prepared to begin with,
we didn't seem to learn much as we met went along.
And I think that brings us to my second point,

(02:17):
and probably the biggest missing of the looking forward part
of it is that the politicization of the execution of
the strategy led to the lack of adaptation and agility
in response. So you know, they come out and pick
up a couple of points at dev Gorman and I
made eighteen months ago about the need for our mosses

(02:40):
put scenario planning and all that sort of thing, and
getting ourselves in better shape for the next one. But
plans don't you know, there's a whole saying and war
and the plans don't survive the first contact with the enemy.
So yes, you've got to have plans, You've got to
do that. The scenario thing, good, good suggestions that they've made,

(03:01):
picked up the suggestions they made eighteen months ago. And
better use of the private sector as we do for
you know, farms and biosecurity. We can get farms to
protect their farms inside. But look, you don't get any
of those things f the government takes over the execution,

(03:22):
wants to claim that the best in the world, and
monopoly untruth has spin on everything. Marginalized criticism and monopolized execution,
which is what they did, and none of that, none
of that sort of chest beating and propagandizing is conducive
to admitting shortcomings, to learning from them, to adapting your response,

(03:44):
so you know, it leads to a sort of add
or you know where we got to a sort of
a fear based at or cross type approach, which which
excludes you know, the private sector, which which which doesn't
emit error and learn from them.

Speaker 1 (04:00):
Exactly, It's exactly what we came to. And I just wonder, Murray,
whether we actually needed a report because most of us
came to that conclusion sometime ago. Of course, all by ourselves,
didn't we. Murray Horn a good Heaven won the pregament.

Speaker 2 (04:10):
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