In business, the day-to-day response to a crisis is important, but equally critical is the long-term plan for how to get out of the hole.
You need both to be successful. At the country level, it’s no different.
A strong, immediate response to threats need to be supported by a clear strategy to guide all the decisions needed to exit the crisis.
What we’ve seen over the past year is a government that hasn’t been afraid to move decisively in order to manage the immediate risks posed by covid-19 — from closing borders to asking everyone to remain at home, and quarantining returning New Zealanders. The government has had and continues to have our full support. And New Zealand can be proud of how we’ve all responded.
Strategy
However, as vaccinations begin to roll out to our essential workers, and it feels like there is a light at the end of the pandemic tunnel, we need to ensure we have the building blocks in place for our new normal. This is an environment where the virus is ever-present, and probably mutating but under control.
We must work to implement systems that can handle resurgences or, as the experts are warning us, the next covid-type pandemic. This requires a strategy, which will be the government’s strategy and therefore New Zealand’s strategy.
And it is urgent. Already, many of our systems are hardly fit for purpose. Contact tracing and quarantine remains manual and is struggling to be effective. Testing is stretched, and new technologies used so effectively overseas are not yet being used here.
New Zealand has a great pool of talent across government agencies, education and medical sectors, research institutes, community groups and businesses, big and small. The best — and possibly only — effective way to develop that strategy and introduce fit for purpose systems is to harness that talent.
Harness skills
It will require a major change of work mode and mindset by those developing it, including the Ministry of Health. This is not about briefing people after the fact — it is about transparency and true partnership.
Make no mistake, the government has the final say and ownership of any strategy. But it will be far more powerful and well supported if they harness the wider New Zealand community and the deep skill-base within it.
Our ask is simply that the government gives every sector — because this isn’t just about business — a chance to comment, contribute, and buy-in to New Zealand’s future covid management strategy.
Patrick Strange is the chair of Auckland Airport and Chorus.
