By Toby Manhire*
A week that saw the government on the back foot in its Covid-19 response, with the prime minister acknowledging failures in the self-isolation and quarantining system and calling in the military to oversee the process, has led to a marked, if hardly cataclysmic, drop in the popular backing for the government response to the pandemic.
The sixth in a series of demographically weighted polls by Stickybeak for The Spinoff conducted over recent months sees overall support for the government response fall just shy of 75%. That’s a drop of 10% from our previous poll, which was completed at the start of last week. Across five previous polls, beginning in late March, the average total backing for the government response was 84%, and this is the first time it has dropped under 80%.
A week ago, we reported 74% of respondents judging the response “excellent”; today that number is 53%.
Given the kind of week it was (a “fiasco”, in the words of Neale Jones, former chief of staff to Jacinda Ardern), and the excoriating tenor of commentary over the weekend, the Labour-led government can draw some relief from a result showing three in four New Zealanders continue to back the response. So long, that is, as they can arrest the slide.
The revelation that two women, just a few days after arriving from the UK, had been allowed to exit managed isolation and drive from Auckland to Wellington under a compassionate exemption – without being tested – only to later test positive for Covid-19, dominated the news in New Zealand last week. Worse still, it emerged that one of the women had experienced symptoms, which she had put down to a pre-existing respiratory condition.
That was compounded further when the National opposition revealed that, contrary to information provided to and revealed by the director general of health, Ashley Bloomfield, the two women had met with friends after accidentally taking the northbound lane on to State Highway One from the Novotel Ellerslie.
Jacinda Ardern and the health secretary, David Clark, both diagnosed a failure in the system, with senior minister Stuart Nash going further, calling it “unforgivable” and the result of “ineptitude”. A string of other stories suggesting porousness in the border system followed, and the prime minister moved to bring in a senior military figure, Darryn Webb, to oversee the process, with Megan Woods given ministerial responsibility, an urgent audit commissioned and exemptions suspended.
The exposure of failures in the system appears to have engendered increased concern about a possible second wave of the virus. A week ago, 42% said they were concerned about the prospect; today that’s up to 50%. Respondents may be alert, too, to the global picture: as Siouxsie Wiles writes, the pandemic continues to grow around the world, and every one of the nine cases that has cropped in New Zealand in the week since the run of zero numbers came to an end has involved an arrival from abroad.
The Stickybeak poll, undertaken from Friday night through to yesterday morning, revealed the depth of feeling on the performance of the quarantine and isolation system. While 37% said they were confident in the arrangements, 39% said they were not, with 24% on the fence. Of the five options, “not confident at all” was the most popular, selected by one in four respondents.
What of the “heads must roll” call? Some have demanded the resignation of the health minister, David Clark; a smaller number have suggested Bloomfield should go. We asked simply: should there be a senior resignation following the big revelation of last week? Just over 45% said yes, with 40% saying the opposite, and just shy of 15% noncommittal.
Some of the air seems to have come out of the international bubble clamour, too. As the state of Victoria experiences a spike in community transmission, we asked whether New Zealand should prioritise a border opening with Australia or the Pacific Islands or whether we “should not be thinking of bubbles at all” at this time, some 47% went for the latter. Enthusiasm for an Australian bubble edges out the Pacific option, but only by five points.
Confidence in the contact tracing system has taken an even greater hit than the overall assessment and the concern about a second wave; with the official system continuing to be sluggish in pickup and manual systems for visitors to premises all but abandoned, it’s down from 55% in our poll a week ago to 43%.
Finally, expectations of a negative personal financial impact have grown. Last week 41% said they expected their personal financial situation to be negatively affected by Covid-19. That has risen to 47% in the poll completed yesterday. That remains lower, however, than the figure from five weeks ago, when 51% said they expected to see a negative impact.
About the study
Respondents were self-selecting participants, recruited via Facebook and Instagram.
A total of n=700 sample was achieved of adults in New Zealand.
Results in this report are weighted by age, gender and region to statistics from the 2018 Census.
For a random sample of this size and after accounting for weighting the maximum sampling error (using 95% confidence) is approximately ±4%.
The study went into the field at 7pm Friday June 19 and was completed at midday Monday June 22.
About Stickybeak
Stickybeak is a New Zealand startup launched globally last June, that uses chatbots to make quantitative market research more conversational and therefore less boring and even fun for respondents. Unlike conventional research which uses panels of professional paid responders, Stickybeak recruits unique respondents fresh for each survey via social media.
*Toby Manhire is editor of The Spinoff. This article first ran here on The Spinoff and is used with permission.
24 Comments
It is unrealistic to expect every individual down the line to work faultlessly to the rules put in place. Similarly, but on a much larger scale of course, a general cannot be responsible for every soldier under his command. But nonetheless, the line of command must have checks and balances, and managers and supervisors who know what needs to be done and how to do it. In days gone by we used to call that making things fail safe. The trouble though is our public service, at national and local levels, is far too ready to exert authority and far too unfamiliar with the actual responsibility for that same authority. Hence what appears to be the case here is that MOH head office who are policy orientated got themselves involved with operational matters.The fact is that any government in power will wear the upside and downside of that approach and consequences, like it or lump it.
It's worse than that Foxy. Most public service managers spend a lot of their effort ensuring failures beneath them are someone else's fault, and promotion is more often on presentation over capability. It is mostly about politics, not capability. Plus the history of many Government Departments is that internal audit groups don't exist. So Senior managers have little way of checking that things are happening, happening as designed, or how effective they are. And in the absence of bad news, they say it must be all good news.
Consultants are seldom brought in to carry out routine audits. Most commonly they are asked to recommend solutions to a known problem. I agree there is often a case of lack of accountability, but not for the consultant. It is usually the senior management who either ignores the advice, or shifts the scope of any resulting recommendations to make them ineffective or limited in results. But of course they blame the consultants.
and the prime minister moved to bring in a senior military figure, Darryn Webb, to oversee the process,
Let's debunk this once and for all
DW was/is already in,
it was a jump to the left, then a step to the right.
Here is the in office video that that shows DW movement within the All of Government response as he recieved his promotion.
No you have got the Wrong Clip. You have Wong Key begging to get back into power so he can his enhance his business arrangements, and introduce Muller walking on a Bridge(s), with China. I also saw Wong talking to Obamacare about golf. They weren't playing. They were just cleaning their clubs -Posers - while watching CNN.
Does anyone know if Winston Peters is still pushing to open the borders to Australians ?
A couple of weeks ago I saw him doing a serious impression of Trump on the TV news where he lowered his voice an octave and in his best super-confident brusque manner (which he can sustain for no more than one short sentence) asserted that we should open up to the Australians pronto.
Haven't heard anymore from him since.
Just wonder why they don't seriously look at Pacific Islands. apparently Rarotonga will be unable to borrow anymore $ after September, and desperately want NZ tourists back (Only NZ). If we can get our border control in check from in coming kiwis, wouldnt this be safer than OZ
They're dickheads. The whole country was placed under house arrest, missing out on the beautiful autumn weather, only for the government to drop the ball afterwards. Nice to have a smiley figurehead but we actually need a government of competence. Hard to see these failures happening under Joyce or English.
This is something that will go up and down i think. There will be very visual reminders for the public of how well we have done - such as rugby games with crowds compared to other countries where this is not happening. Hopefully too the economy will also see the bounce from the post-lockdown spend up.
The government however will have to hold true on the border. Any missteps here - especially for one that causes community transmission is probably the biggest risk (and likely only course for National to win the election). I would imagine they will from here be super tough and there will be no travel bubbles with any country until after the election at the earliest.
I can't even understand why there was overwhelming support in the first place! It was like taking out a possum with an Apache helicopter when all was needed was a .22 rifle. Locking everyone down and achieving one of the highest global scores on the lockdown stringency index was the easiest thing to do. All the politicking around being kind and the team of five million was just a distraction from the the obvious point - that Jacinda knew she could not rely on cabinet to manage lock down under a risk-based approach and achieve the same result. I mean, she even had to do the role of her Health Minister who was off mountain biking. Imagine if they had kept the forestry industry running (one that would have had virtually zero transmission risk as physical distancing is very easy in this industry) - Shane Jones would have been in charge and it would have had diabolical consequences. The fact is that the stringency of our lockdown was necessary because cabinet were too incompetent to manage it any other way. The border debacle is simply another symptom of the incompetence.
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