They feel like a cavalry galloping down the hill to try and save the day. About 12,000 people will get jabs within a month. Their close contacts will be next in line.
The problems with hotel quarantine facilities have never been ironed-out to anyone's satisfaction on either side of the Tasman, and looking ahead it all needs to be properly studied and experiences shared in a transparent way.
Victoria's Premier Daniel Andrews even suggested last Friday that stopping hotel quarantine in Melbourne or only allowing overseas arrivals on compassionate grounds could be on the table.
The Australian and New Zealand Governments appear to have been consulting regularly over the pandemic.
But the two countries probably need to work out an overt, joint pandemic strategy, building on knowledge gained from this one.
We have to take a realistic view of where things are headed.
The bottomline is the pandemic has shoved the world further in the direction of a hybrid model of international relations. States are now more inclined to bolster national defences than before, while still co-operating on major issues.
The days of over-reliance on international supply lines are over. Normal supply chains function in normal times, but there can be risks when major crises occur.
What we have seen is that major power blocs will hoard equipment and vaccine supplies and look after their own populations first. They have more people, political clout and purchasing power than New Zealand and Australia do.
There were fears for a while that orders for the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine outside Europe could be jeopardised after the EU placed export controls on doses produced in its territory, because it was worried about its own supplies.
Australia has the ability to manufacture medicines out of Melbourne. It is making its own doses of the AstraZeneca/Oxford vaccine there. But the science behind the mRNA Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna vaccines is going to be important for treatments of a range of illnesses in future.
It would seem like a good bet to partner with Australia to produce our own Australasian high-tech drugs in future and our own emergency stores of protective equipment.
And that should go alongside a transtasman blueprint for responding to future virus threats. It in turn could make a travel bubble easier to implement for the next pandemic.
The two countries essentially got to the same page - an elimination strategy - on the virus from different starting points. There have been plenty of comparisons, but a willingness to act quickly in the interest of public health has been a common theme.
A joint summit to assess what has been learned would be a good start.
