Covid 19 Delta outbreak: Auckland Airport chief executive Adrian Littlewood says inquiry needed to learn from mistakes

Departing Auckland Airport boss Adrian Littlewood says a Royal Commission is needed to fully investigate the country's response to Covid-19.

Speaking to the Herald before the National Party made the same call, he said New Zealand needed to learn lessons from the pandemic.

"In the early part of next calendar year, the opening will start to happen at pace - quicker than most people realise," said Littlewood. "But we must learn and record the lessons that we've learned the hard way through this period.

"The pandemic is very difficult and tricky and messy, but if 2021 was the year of the vaccine, in 2022 I think we really do need a genuine review with a Royal Commission while it's fresh in our memory."

Littlewood said the airport had long experience of working collaboratively with the government, its agencies and others and there were some great examples of this working during the pandemic.

"Some parts of government have been fantastic to deal with but I would have liked to see more work with industry from [the Ministry of] Health," he said.

"There is no question that this pandemic has affected almost every business in New Zealand and every New Zealander's life to some degree and there's no way you can run a country through the lens of that one part of government."

He said the whole machinery of government and industry needed to work together. The aviation sector had good relationships with the Ministry of Transport and Customs.

Within the aviation industry, airlines and airports put aside some historic differences and spoke with one voice, forming the New Zealand Aviation Coalition.

With the travel industry, the coalition pushed hard for the opening of the transtasman bubble which ended abruptly after less than three months.

A quarantining returnee from Australia is thought to be the source of the Delta outbreak in August, at a time when the government's slow vaccine rollout left the country vulnerable to the more infectious strain.

Littlewood said the bubble was opened according to the facts of the time. "The outbreak of Delta came through MIQ - it didn't come through the transtasman bubble."

Experts had said it was safe to start quarantine-free travel.

"I remember many epidemiologists acknowledging that it was safe to reopen to the Tasman with the mitigations, the protections and performance in each country. Obviously Delta changed all that."