I have written many times sharing my jaundiced view of the Ministry of Health. I totally approve of a vaccine passport. It should be on my phone alongside all the other apps. I just hope like hell that a bureaucrat instructed by the Ministry of Health does not get the job of designing the app. There will be any number of software firms out there in NZ who could write software easily.
They know how and they should get the job.
Here is part of an article by Andrew Geddis about MIQ:
We may have seen the first hints of this sort of approach in a High Court decision handed down yesterday, where the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment was ordered to reconsider a refusal to grant an exemption to MIQ requirements to a “multimillionaire and prominent businessman”. The particular facts of the case are unlikely to be repeated. Indeed, they have a certain Succession mood about them – the businessman involved wishes to fly to the US on a private jet to attend a board meeting, and then self-isolate in his home upon his return. But it’s the things that Justice Venning required MBIE to go away and look at again that are revealing. Most importantly, MBIE was told to examine “the need of the applicants to enjoy rights conferred by the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act 1990, including the right to freedom of movement and as citizens to enter New Zealand without unreasonable limitation”. MBIE, Justice Venning said, then must “balance those considerations against the degree of risk to the community of further spread of Covid-19 involved in the applicants’ isolating or quarantining at a place other than an MIQ facility”.
Perhaps at the end of the day, having done so, MBIE still will consider the risk too great and so refuse the exemption. At which point, it will be interesting to see if the court accepts that assessment or goes a step further and orders MBIE to grant the exemption in question. Because, as time goes on and the balancing of Covid risks makes it harder and harder to demonstrate that New Zealanders overseas are more dangerous than those at home, then the basis for the sort of MIQ system we have been operating will become more and more difficult to justify.
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