[ad_1]
ANALYSIS: It’s not every day the government announces new spending worth $ 3 billion; in fact, most government budgets don’t even have that many new expenses each year.
But yesterday, the proper last day of the political year, Covid-19 Minister Chris Hipkins announced that he would inject an additional $ 2.86 billion into country testing and border response for the period through June 2022, that’s almost the 1 percent of the total for New Zealand. economy and 3 percent of annual public spending.
A look at the deadly pandemic making its way around the world – another 8,000 deaths yesterday, bringing the total to 1.66 million – reveals that the injection is money well spent.
STUFF
The Minister of Response to Covid-19, Chris Hipkins, and the Director General of Health, Ashley Bloomfield, are warning tourists to be prepared in the event of a closure during the holidays.
But the timing of the expense announcement and the report with which it was released should be cause for concern. The funds were delivered alongside the long-awaited report by Heather Simpson and Brian Roche on the testing and surveillance system.
READ MORE:
* An additional $ 3 billion for Covid response after review criticizes Ministry of Health response
* Chris Hipkins holding on to report on the Ministry of Health
* Coronavirus: Let’s redesign the edge from scratch to make sure it works properly
The report was commissioned in August after reports of multiple failures in the Covid-19 response. A first version was delivered to the Government on September 30 and a final version delivered on November 27.
Chris Bishop, a spokesman for National Covid-19, criticized the lack of transparency exemplified by holding on to the report for so long.
Releasing the report shortly after ministers received it would have allowed some time for parliamentary scrutiny. Instead, the government decided to bury its release on the last business day of the political year, with no time for scrutiny in Parliament or elsewhere.
ROBERT KITCHEN / Things
National Covid-19 spokesman Chris Bishop has criticized the government for the report.
It is not difficult to see why. The report is damning, and particularly damning of the Health Ministry, the heroes of the Covid-19 response.
Of the 28 recommendations made in two reports, 25 were for the Ministry: the criticisms are extensive and the accusations of what amounts to a seizure of power by the Ministry of Health, which did not adequately share information with other ministries or even ministers and it did not cooperate adequately with the rest of the government.
The report found that there was “inappropriate accountability” for different parts of the strategy and that “numerous written reports” from the Ministry on the progress it was making at the border “did not always reflect concrete actions on the ground”.
The report said the ministry’s approach to implementing the policy “was often seen as contrary to the general collective interest.”
Breakfast
The prime minister says New Zealanders should stay home if they feel sick.
Testing fees, something we know is crucial to keeping Covid out, were kept low because the Ministry was lax when it came to paying people conducting tests.
Unsurprisingly, this led to “increased dissatisfaction with the system and, at times, made them reluctant to increase testing rates, thus reducing access.”
Not surprisingly, the official response for not publishing the report earlier was to give the Ministry time to respond to allegations of serious flaws on its part.
Other parts of the Government “without exception… expressed concern about their ability to be ‘heard’ by the Ministry of Health.
ROBERT KITCHEN / Things
Chris Hipkins is changing the way the Health Ministry conducts border testing, but he will not criticize CEO Ashley Bloomfield.
Other agencies and the private sector said the Ministry of Health acted without fully considering the impact of its decisions, even as “they constantly sought more input to put implementation plans into operation.”
This cannot have been helped by the fact that the large intergovernmental group (All of Government group or AoG) created to manage the pandemic did not actually include the Ministry of Health. The Ministry decided on its own not to participate.
Once the country returned to level 1, that problem deepened. The AoG “effectively became a ‘Government Rest Unit’ being anything but health.”
This was a problem because at the time, communication difficulties at the Ministry of Health meant that future planning had to be interrupted.
Throughout the pandemic, public officials and ministers have struggled to find the balance between public health and other concerns. This report suggests that the Ministry of Health did not even try to strike that balance, sending policy advice to ministers before consulting with other parts of the government.
“The Ministry of Health is the main adviser to the Government, as it is essential that the decisions made as part of the response are firmly based on the best science in public health.”
“Sometimes, however, this seems to have been interpreted to mean that the advice should not be influenced by information or legitimate concerns expressed by other sectors.
“Clearly, that should not be the case,” the report said.
“Too often, decision-making documents have been sent to the cabinet with little or no real analysis of the options and little evidence of input from outside health or even from different parts of the ministry or health sector,” the report said.
Reviewers acknowledge that such chaos would be forgivable in the first weeks of the pandemic, but “it should not continue eight months in a problem like the one we are currently facing.”
That’s a pretty amazing admission. Some margin in the early months of the pandemic is understandable, but as the crisis shifted from a health problem to an economic and social one, not having broader approval is
Of the many rather damning reports of Covid’s response, this is one of the most serious. The ministers fear leading the Ministry to serious criticism, since Hipkins yesterday could not articulate whether the Ministry had expressed concern about the loss of powers.
And despite agreeing to implement the report’s recommendations, Hipkins will not present political arguments in favor of the changes, moving away from any serious criticism of the Ministry.
The Prime Minister knows the popularity of the Ministry of Health.
She stopped there for an unusual Christmas visit last week, taking a selfie on Instagram with herself and Bloomfield there in case people weren’t paying attention. For a Prime Minister who has avoided most of the Christmas holidays this year, the visit was noteworthy.
Government officials are, frankly, the forgotten heroes of much more than our Covid-19 response. They deserve so much more than the miserable thanks they get.
But a Ministry that enjoys enormous political popularity is a problem, especially if, as the Simpson-Roche report suggests, that Ministry is quite interested in gaining more powers and functions for itself.
In 2021, we hope that ministers will feel as comfortable talking about the shortcomings of the Ministry as they are about its successes.
