From Both Sides Now

The morning after  the funeral Isaac was on a flight home, having made the last of the three flights she’d booked in case of cancellation. This time her MIQ host was the New Zealand government and she was placed in the Sudima Rotorua. It was here that she fell apart, even though the rules and regulations were far less stringent than those in Australia.

“I was exhausted and I just cried the whole way to Rotorua. The thing that broke me was the futility of it all. There were still no community cases on either side, my sister had just died and I was about to be confined in a room for 14 days. No one could give me a hug or touch me, for what felt like no good reason.”

After keeping herself together for so long, Kara began to unravel. Again her room had little natural light and she could hear what was happening in the rooms next door.

“It’s the most broken I’ve ever been. On the first morning I just sobbed to the nurse and NZDF security guard. They were great. They got me a different room that had light and a view with a tree in blossom. The difference that made was huge. I knew what it was like to do MIQ with no sunlight, but that time I did what I had to do to get to my sister. This time I had lost her. MIQ in that circumstance was not a safe place to fall apart.”

Today, Isaac is composed and talking at her Wellington home. Framed photos of Mel are on the walls.

After her 14 days in Rotorua were up, Isaac returned to Wellington and her role at the Ministry of Education. But something deep and significant had shifted within her. “You come back from something like I’d gone through and it changes the landscape of your whole life. I was flattened by grief and on the second day after I was back at work someone made a joke about how I had been on holiday to Australia while everyone else was stuck in New Zealand. I just thought I’m not doing this job anymore.”

Not long after, the role of MIQ policy general manager was advertised. Isaac’s interest was piqued, even though the reports about MIQ were discouraging. “Every other day it was in the news — someone escaping, someone falling through the cracks, no rooms available, that sort of thing.”

But also, she realised that after almost two decades working in government, she had the skills acquired from working in both operational and policy areas. And she also had the very recent experience of MIQ. “When New Zealand was facing something this big, the complexity and change to the way we lived, you want good people on the ground. I knew that if I got the job I would give it my best shot and bring a different perspective. It felt like working there could be something that mattered and was bigger than me and my family and our grief.”

At that time, December 2020, 32 hotels in Auckland, Hamilton, Rotorua, and Christchurch had been designated as isolation facilities, and over 80,000 returning New Zealanders and essential workers had flowed through them. The armed services had been drafted in to manage the facilities, with overall responsibility shared jointly between the New Zealand Defence Force, MBIE and the Ministry of Health. But by December, demand far outstripped supply, and there was growing anger from those stuck offshore who couldn’t get home, or if they could, faced what seemed ludicrous, hard-hearted rules once they got here.

As part of preparing for the job interview, Isaac read dozens of desperate messages on social media from people trying to get back to New Zealand or trying to get family members home.

“That set my approach to the job,” she says. “I thought I’m never going to be able to change big things for lots of people but if I’m lucky I can change small things for a few people. It’s the starfish story — you can’t save every beached starfish, but your actions matter to the one starfish you throw back into the sea.”

The truth was that Isaac’s teams’ own lives were little different from anyone else’s. Many had family members overseas they longed to see, while others had whānau trying to get home. Isaac was worried team members would develop a bunker mentality when they needed to stay open to relooking at anything, no matter where a problem was raised — on social media or elsewhere. “Where our team made the biggest tangible difference was in emergency allocations. The criteria was set by the minister [Chris Hipkins] but at our advice.”

One of the examples Isaac recalls is the man who went overseas for medical treatment he couldn’t get in New Zealand and when seeking to return didn’t fit any of the criteria for an emergency MIQ allocation. As a result, a new category was developed so that anyone who needed critical treatment unavailable here was eligible for an emergency space on their return. In another case, a young woman’s family rushed to be with her when she was in an ICU overseas after almost drowning. She recovered, but there were no criteria allowing the parents to return home. Had she died, the system would have allowed them to access MIQ space to return. Isaac’s team provided advice to the minister and a new category was added meaning families who had someone suffer a catastrophic medical event could be prioritised.

In this way the team was able to fine-tune the system at least half a dozen times. Isaac credits Hipkins, then the minister for the Covid-19 response, for approving every expansion of emergency allocations the officials recommended. Again, the starfish effect at work.

“If I look back on the work we did, that is one of the areas where I am proudest of the team. We never stood back and said the criteria are what they are and we’re not changing them.”

The only other country to embrace the elimination strategy as thoroughly as New Zealand was Australia, largely because most other nations had land borders. Singapore also followed an elimination strategy until July 2021, but it handed the operational side of managed isolation to the private sector.

From April to June 2021, MIQ had rooms to spare. “We were pretty much begging people to come home if they wanted to. Thousands of rooms went empty over that time.”

Many MIQ hotels only had 30 per cent occupancy when they could have been running at 80$90 per cent. Bored staff left. Those running MIQ knew the window of opportunity would likely be short-lived: later that year seasonal workers, deep-sea fishers, and Olympians would be prioritised for rooms, alongside growing demand from people wanting to return to New Zealand for summer. In addition, the trans-Tasman bubble with Australia was looking increasingly tenuous.

By June, demand for MIQ spaces had picked up. The MIQ website became susceptible to bots and when MBIE released rooms, the site struggled under the sheer demand.

Then, from late June, the trans-Tasman bubble deflated, starting with New South Wales, as its Delta outbreak took off. Suddenly rooms were needed to accommodate more than 2000 returning New Zealanders on managed flights from Sydney. This was followed by the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban, prompting the deployment of a New Zealand Defence Force team to help evacuate New Zealanders and other foreign nationals. And then came the Delta variant making its way into the community, plunging New Zealand back into lockdown.

As a result, from August until 20 September, when the virtual queue and lobby system for rooms was launched, the government decided not to release vouchers, due to all of the other demands for space in MIQ. The only way home was for applicants meeting emergency criteria. By the time the new voucher system started it was asked to cope with weeks of pent-up demand. Almost 31,000 people queued online for the randomly-assigned 3200 rooms.

Looking back, Isaac nominates last September as the worst of times. It was then, she says, that “everything was on fire”. Hotels had to be flipped from managed isolation for border arrivals to quarantine facilities for community cases. Returnees from Afghanistan and the burst Australian bubble added to demand, and desperation mounted among New Zealanders overseas who had no pathway home. The thirst for information from people up the chain was unquenchable, she says. The pressure took its toll.

In one meeting she broke down and sobbed offscreen during a Zoom call with government ministers and other senior officials. Afterwards, MIQ joint head Brigadier Rose King told her this was the most stressful job she’d ever had too. “And she’s served in war zones, so that made me feel better.”

The weight of responsibility and often the impossibility of what officials were being asked to do wore people down. “It honestly felt like the whole system was about to topple over. Part of my breakdown then was knowing how bad the situation was on the front line and feeling like I was failing to get across to ministers the reality of what was happening. It was so intense that our briefings were time-stamped, because you knew that within hours the situation might have changed.

“On the worst days when I didn’t have time to eat, I just ate Fix & Fogg Everything Butter out of the jar with a spoon. That got me through.”

At this juncture, MIQ facilities now had to accommodate a completely different group of people — Covid-positive people from the community who were placed into quarantine facilities, often unwillingly, and sometimes not even believing Covid was real. They included people with significant mental-health challenges, criminal convictions for violence, drug and alcohol addictions and gang members. The highly restrictive environment of MIQ made it, Isaac says, the worst place for many of them to be. Their complex needs required wrap-around support that MIQ couldn’t provide. The police and health staff did their best, but the risk of a staff member being seriously harmed felt very real.

The rising heat of volatile situations also caused a change in the protocol on releasing Isaac’s team members’ names in responses to Official Information Act requests about policy advice. Although she believes New Zealanders should have the right to know the names of people providing advice, seeing abusive emails arriving in staff’s personal inboxes prompted her to revisit her position. A seafarer posted a team member’s name and email on social media and encouraged others to flood their inbox with hostile and abusive emails.

“We decided that only the names of general manager level and above should be released because, ultimately, it’s those of us in senior roles who are responsible for the advice and decision making, not our people. If anyone had a problem with the policy advice we provided that should land on me, not my team.”

It was hoped that once the bubble with Australia was re-established, demand for MIQ would tail off. But when relief came, it was only temporary. In October, the elimination strategy was abandoned in favour of suppression. Time in MIQ was reduced from 14 to seven days, with three days self-isolation. On 24 November, the Government announced the reopening of the border with Australia in January, to be followed by rest of the world in February, allowing vaccinated Kiwi overseas to return without the need for MIQ.

For a few days, MIQ workers had an opportunity to catch their breath after five months of relentless pressure and scrutiny. But a new foe surfaced and tipped everything upside down: Omicron.

In late November, nine southern African countries were classified as “very high risk” for the new, highly transmissible variant. Entry was restricted to New Zealand citizens and their immediate families, who were required to spend 14 days in managed isolation. On 21 December, the Government announced the suspension of the border reopening indefinitely. MIQ stays increased again, from seven to 10 days.

Public tolerance for MIQ slumped to a new low. Many people had not participated in the four most recent voucher releases, thinking the border was about to re-open. But now more people were stranded in Australia, having travelled there since the 24 November announcement, intending to return in January. Others had been trapped there since June or July when the bubble first burst, many of them superannuitants at risk of having their super cut: payments cease if the recipient is six months overseas. The iron-clad guarantee of free movement between countries turned out to be as sturdy as wet cardboard.

“There was a sense of lose, lose, lose as we tried to get as many New Zealanders here vaccinated while leaving more New Zealanders overseas in desperate circumstances through no fault of their own.”

When Isaac had started the job in December 2020, she took a 12-month fixed-term contract. After a halcyon, Covid-free summer, friends laughed that she’d be out of a job in six months. Instead, by the end of 2021, Isaac wondered if her job would ever end. She promised her family she would give it her all for 18 months but that was it. “I knew I couldn’t keep going longer than that. If MIQ’s role in the pandemic went on, the best person to take this job forward wouldn’t be me.”

She knew her exhaustion was shared in different ways by many in the community. The day the borders opened with the world in March, allowing New Zealanders to return, was momentous.

“I teared up watching the news footage, knowing that if someone got the worst news in their life about a loved one, they could get on a plane to them. After everything my family had been through, the relief of that, of knowing MIQ was no longer the barrier making their most devastating days worse — I can’t describe what that was like.”

This June, the last of the MIQ hotels closed. Isaac’s team shrank to six, and MIQ has engaged in a process of review and planning for the future. “When you are fighting the fire, you have no time to think about water infrastructure.” In her last few months, work included supporting the preparation of a readiness plan that will be regularly updated, as well as pulling apart the previous systems, processes, and decisions, and designing better ways of doing things if MIQ is ever needed again.

Part of the reflection is taking on board the April judgement of Justice Mallon, who ruled on a High Court case taken by the Grounded Kiwis advocacy group. Justice Mallon found that the way New Zealand’s borders were managed during part of the Covid-19 pandemic did, in some cases, impede the right of returning Kiwi in a way that was not justified in a free and democratic society. The judicial review focused on the months Isaac identified as the eye of the firestorm ” between 1 September and 17 December 2021. While the voucher system was not deemed to be an unjustified infringement “the virtual lobby did not prioritise New Zealand citizens over non-citizens and nor did it prioritise on need or the delay experienced by a citizen”, Mallon wrote.

Isaac knows that some of the criticisms lobbed at MIQ by the media, the Ombudsman, members of Parliament and the general public were valid.

“Their commentary and feedback was an important part of transparency and accountability because we were doing something that had never been done before, and that is stripping New Zealand citizens of their right to return home when they wanted or needed to. Some things were picked up and changed because of that scrutiny. Sometimes it was the only way people could be heard.”

If MIQ is ever required in the future, Isaac hopes the people in charge of designing the key parts of system will be in the same agency as the people implementing it, “because there’s little worse than being in a meeting and reviewing applications for early or temporary release where you have no discretion, yet you are the ones blamed for the decision. And, at the end of the day, the intricacies of government decision making doesn’t matter to the people who didn’t get to be with their dying family member.”

She often thinks about those people for whom MIQ caused enormous distress as well as the 230,000 people who were able to return to New Zealand in a way that protected the community and saved lives.

“It was far from perfect and we wouldn’t do it the same way again but we can also say we gave it everything we had.”

For now, Isaac has no idea what her post-MIQ future holds professionally. She’s not even sure what she wants to do apart from spend time with her family.

“I’m 40 years old,” she says, “and it’s possible this may have been the most important work I will do in my life.”