Judith Collins: The Government’s complacency has cost Kiwis

The last few weeks have a felt a little like 2020 again with country forced into a lockdown. It will have been a very unsettling and uncertain time for many of you, especially those in Auckland still dealing with the outbreak of Delta.

If you do require any support, National MPs up and down the country are available to help in any way they can.

Like many other I felt that with the rollout of the vaccine this year we would start to see the end of lockdowns. That’s why the National Party has been so vocal in calling on the Government to ramp things up.

The Prime Minister did label 2021 as the ‘year of the vaccine’, which is why it’s hard to understand how the Government got so complacent.

National has been critical of the Government’s efforts to date. We were told we would be at the front of the queue for vaccines.

But we were slow to sign contracts with the manufacturers of vaccines. Then we were slow to actually order Pfizer doses and we didn’t order enough. As a result, New Zealand has the slowest rollout in the developed world.

Many people argued that because we didn’t have community transmission of Covid, the slowness of our rollout wasn’t an issue. The Government spent months telling Kiwis there was no way to speed up the vaccine supply and the Prime Minister even went as far as to suggest there was something immoral about securing more vaccines over other countries.

But we can see now how easily the Delta variant has made its way into New Zealand and how quickly we’ve had to lock down as a result. We only have to look across the ditch at New South Wales and see how Delta is rampaging through a largely unvaccinated population.

The Government’s complacency has cost New Zealanders.

It had five months since Delta reached our border to plan, just in case it came through into the community.

It had 18 months since we first locked down to prepare for another one.

It should’ve been working out what Delta would mean for operating at Alert Level 2. It should’ve been working out how we would deal with a regional border, like Auckland’s, and those who have to cross for essential travel.

It had plenty of time. But what we’ve seen over the last week is a Government struggling to catch up.

We had three weeks of press conferences and not once did the Prime Minister or her Ministers let on that Level 2 would be a little different.

Businesses spent that time preparing for last year’s Level 2, only to be told the new rules a couple of days beforehand.

And the transport sector wasn’t consulted on how testing at the Auckland border would work in practice.

The only thing slower than the vaccine rollout has been the rollout of saliva testing.

National has been pushing the Government to introduce saliva testing at the border since the beginning of the year. We even called for saliva testing to be part of surveillance testing in the Delta outbreak.

It’s ridiculous that in the middle of an outbreak people are expected to line up for 10-12 hours to get a nasal PCR test.

The Government’s effective ban on rapid antigen testing, a different type of test to saliva testing, has made no sense either.

Rapid antigen tests are widely used overseas and provide a result in less than 15 minutes. While they are slightly less accurate than the nasal tests, their great advantage is their speed.

They would be incredibly useful for those essential workers crossing the Auckland border. Workers could do a rapid antigen test either daily or every second day which would see any positive cases picked up more quickly than tests done weekly.

The Government got complacent. It had 18 months to plan, it didn’t and Kiwis are paying the price. - Judith Collins, National party leader based in Auckland, Leader of the opposition, Member for Papkura, National Party.