Critics have cherrypicked aspects of court rulings on the Covid response \u2013 which saved thousands of lives \u2013 to wrongly paint it as illegal <\/p>\n
In a judgment delivered this week, New Zealand\u2019s high court found that elements of the country\u2019s Managed Isolation and Quarantine (MIQ) system, the cornerstone of our world-leading pandemic response, were unlawful. The decision dropped to a good deal of delight. One well-known conservative commentator wrote<\/a>: \u201cSo the courts have found the lockdown was illegal, the vaccine mandate was illegal and MIQ was illegal, so can anyone name a major aspect of the response that hasn\u2019t been found to be illegal?\u201d<\/p>\n That response is predictably mischievous \u2013 none of those measures were ruled \u201cillegal\u201d \u2013 but it typifies the response. Perhaps the best-known of the conservative commentators involved wrote<\/a>: \u201cJacinda Ardern has been found by the courts to have abused her powers by illegally preventing New Zealand citizens from leaving & returning home.\u201d That isn\u2019t what the high court found, but accurate reporting is hardly the point. In New Zealand the political right is fighting a relentless battle to rewrite the history of New Zealand\u2019s pandemic success.<\/p>\n Morgan Godfery (Te Pahipoto, S\u0101moa) is a senior lecturer at the University of Otago and a columnist at Metro<\/p>\n