Marty Verry: I'm a protest funder - here's why

OPINION:

The risk-reward of opening the borders to quarantine-free travel has become the most asymmetrical no-brainer in the history of economic management. One simple calculation explains why. My hope is the protests will push the government to do the maths.

As a CEO I tend to also run a business eye over government decisions to see if risks are being weighed properly against opportunities. This is especially important with a government made up of people with very little personal experience in risk taking.

When it comes to opening the borders to quarantine-free travel, the case in favour of opening has suddenly become undeniably compelling. Let me explain by running a simple equation across Friday's Covid numbers.

There were 1929 new Covid cases in the community and 12 detected at the border. Now let's assume for a moment that those entering the country were required to be vaccinated and tested negative before travelling, yet had no quarantine obligation. Instead they had a RAT test on arrival. Given RATS are 80 per cent accurate, of the 12 cases detected at the border, just one would have got into the community. The 11 caught by the RATS would have gone to MIQ.

The one extra community case would have pushed that tally from 1929 to 1930. That change is nothing, a rounding adjustment, and completely negligible in light of the high community cases.

But to protect New Zealand from that one extra case daily we have the border closed to international tourism. They won't come if required to quarantine. Our previously largest foreign exchange earning industry has been destroyed. With winter coming and no imminent tourism opening date announced, hundreds/thousands of businesses are set to close. Already they have been holding on by their fingernails for two years.

Tourism's contribution

It is useful to recap on the contribution tourism was making pre-Covid because we are going to need it again to have any hope of repaying the massive debts incurred in the last two years. Annual international tourism expenditure was $17.5 billion.

Tourism was New Zealand's biggest foreign exchange earner, contributing 20.1 per cent of total exports. 225,384 people were directly and another 158,802 indirectly employed. Annual GST paid by international tourists was $1.8b.

All that is now largely foregone in the name of stopping one extra daily case in the community.

Now the astute reader will be saying, but Marty, what if there were indeed ten times as many people arriving in New Zealand on Friday with borders open? Well, that would mean 10 instead of one person would have slipped through the RAT cordon that day. Ten extra cases is still insignificant compared to the nearly 2000 daily community cases.

Pre-Covid, annual international tourism expenditure was $17.5 billion. Photo / Mark Mitchell

With a $17b upside potential, never has there been a more asymmetrical risk-reward opportunity for a country.

It's not just international tourism businesses being decimated. On Wednesday I met a distraught Rotorua tenant with a café on the brink of closure because of a lack of tourists and people being too scared to go out. Next day I went to a mate's restaurant in Raglan, it too was largely deserted. On Friday I had a beer with Peter Burling, and he told me about the Sail GP. No MIQ spaces allocated meant the New Zealand leg was cancelled. Another tragic missed opportunity.

I came home that night and immediately looked up the border cases for that day, expecting to see the data justifying the ruining of these people's lives. Instead the calculation above demonstrated the folly of our current border settings and the huge opportunity being missed.

Quarantine-free low hanging fruit

Now the problem with this government is that it needs to be pushed to make decisions that aren't ultra conservative. The squeaky wheel gets the oil. Right now, that loudest squeak is coming in the form of the Wellington occupation. My hope is that by supporting the protest and shining a light on the simple calculation above, the government will take a fresh perspective on the need for quarantine.

We are not the first country to deal with Omicron. In fact, we are one of the last. The smarter people in Wellington should be able to use the international experience to model and forecast beyond this current outbreak peak and name a date two month out for quarantine-free opening.

For the record, I'm pro-vax. But I am also pro-choice. Last year my company Red Stag made headlines by repaying the wage subsidy through a $3000 bonus to staff that got vaccinated. Despite a 50 per cent Māori workforce and Rotorua being one of the lowest vaccination areas of the country, Red Stag's vaccination rate jumped to 95 per cent as a result of the initiative.

We did not mandate staff to be vaccinated in order to keep their job, and it makes no sense to me that firefighters, police, teachers and nurses had to lose theirs. I thought we needed more of them, not less.

That protest is not going away. It represents a groundswell of Kiwis pushing the government to transition faster to the post-Covid restriction-free era. The smart thing for the government to do is stop trying to discredit the fringe elements and some excessive tactics, and start to engage and listen to the reasons for the protest.

To have any chance of ending the protest concessions will be required. Opening the borders to tourism would be low hanging fruit, as would giving the teachers, nurses, police and firefighters their jobs back.

- Marty Verry is the CEO of the Red Stag group of tourism, wood processing and forestry businesses.