The politics of life itself

ACT's deputy leader questions the pandemic response

ACT’s deputy leader Brooke van Velden has said, with hindsight, that in the Covid-19 response “we completely blew out what the value of a life was”.

Whatever choices a government made during that time, there’d be explicit or implicit trade-offs between the imperative to prevent deaths and other important values: freedom of movement, business success, mental health, availability of routine healthcare services, etc. Whichever choices a government made, there’d be a price to pay.

It’s valid to ask in retrospect how well the NZ government got that balance right, or not. For instance, comparisons were often made between NZ and Sweden. The latter took a laissez-faire approach. Any credible dataset will show that NZ got better results, for example relatively low cumulative excess deaths per 100,000 people.

That alone doesn’t, however, settle the question as to whether NZ overestimated the value of a life saved from Covid-19 at that time. The matter is up to each citizen to judge (preferably with credible information), but the government had to make certain policy choices on our behalf anyway – in the thick of unpredictable events. A fundamental duty of any government is to protect life itself. But no one lives for ever, and trade-offs get made – traffic safety being the go-to example.

In 2020, in the midst of the first level-4 lockdown, I wrote an article that was supportive of the government’s responses, while questioning the level of preparedness in the early weeks. In September 2020 (a few weeks before the election) a survey we ran on the Stuff website asked people about the trade-off between public-health and economic priorities.

Caveat: the survey was reader-initiated and not a representative sample of the NZ population, so we don’t treat the figures as “accurate”. But cross-tabbing response-rates by political-party preference revealed a striking left-to-right polarisation.

No one can cram everything into one survey question, and this one could be accused of missing context such as delayed medical procedures, loneliness, school closures, etc. Nevertheless, most people clearly understood the trade-off and favoured one version or the other.

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Whether or not you think it’s insensitive to question “the value of a life”, Ms van Velden was reflecting an opinion widely held among ACT and National supporters: that the economic costs of the lockdown were too high and that they outweighed the public-health benefits. They didn’t agree with the “pain now, gain later” (or less loss) model that was favoured on the left.

NZ got good Covid-related outcomes, but there were human and economic prices to pay for this. And hence there was a political cost, which registered rather brutally for Labour in the 2023 election defeat (acknowledging that there were other reasons behind that too).

Although the Labour government’s responses at the time were defensible, some aspects of the Covid-19 policies were causing harm, for example the crazy MIQ system and some over-zealous uses of vaccine mandates. Labour seemed not to understand the human consequences of some policies and how they were administered. Hence Labour lost a lot of the supporters that had been theirs at the time of the survey and the election in 2020.

If we can have an open and frank assessment of the effectiveness and fairness of the responses to the last pandemic, then we may do an even better job next time. But let’s admit that there are trade-offs.