Covid-19 Royal Commission chairman details when public will be informed on inquiry

New Zealand's response to Covid-19 will be assessed by a Royal Commission of Inquiry. Photo / CDC

New Zealanders could learn by the end of February how their voices will be heard as part of the Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Covid-19 response.

Inquiry chairman Professor Tony Blakely, alongside the commissioners - former National Party Cabinet minister Hekia Parata and former Treasury secretary John Whitehead - will be meeting key individuals after Waitangi Day to develop the inquiry’s work programme.

Speaking from Melbourne, Blakely told the Herald he expected to make public announcements on how the inquiry would progress by late February.

“The work programme is not yet public because we’re still developing it,” Blakely said.

“What we can say is just to remind everybody, myself included, the terms of reference of this Royal Commission are very much about lessons learned.”

When the Royal Commission was announced by former Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern in early December, it outlined how evidence could be considered by the inquiry from today, February 1, but Blakely confirmed there would be no public launch.

Instead, the Australian-based epidemiologist and public health specialist would fly to New Zealand in the coming weeks to meet with Parata and Whitehead, as well as the inquiry’s recently-appointed executive director Anita West and legal counsel Jane Meares.

Epidemiologist professor Tony Blakely is leading the Royal Commission of Inquiry into New Zealand's response to Covid-19.

The overall aim of the inquiry - expected to cost $15 million - was to examine lessons learned from New Zealand’s response that could be applied in preparation for a future pandemic, as outlined in its terms of reference.

Either side of a brief summer holiday, Blakely had been poring over the dozens of reports assessing various points of New Zealand’s response and pondering how the inquiry would be structured in order to meet the inquiry’s aim within the 18-month deadline.

“I think about it like a big whiteboard,” Blakely explained.

“There’s a big whiteboard in front of you and it’s got this huge grid on it, a huge table, and the first column is a coronavirus called Covid-19.

“Down that column, there’s heaps of rows - things like quarantine, testing, vaccination, mask policy - all the things that we as Homo sapiens, as human society, can do to respond to a pandemic.

“The challenge for us, clearly laid out by Jacinda Ardern, is that when Covid-19 hit, the existing pandemic plans were for an influenza virus, but we got hit by a coronavirus.”

“[The inquiry’s] job is down that column of everything that we’ve learned about a pandemic from a coronavirus ... our job is to take those lessons and then populate them across the other columns in that table which would be for an influenza virus, or an antimicrobial-resistant bacteria, or an Ebola-type virus, or whatever the other types of pandemic agents that might hit us in the next 20, 30, 50 years.”

Blakely’s central goal was for the inquiry to provide a useful roadmap that governments and health professionals could use to develop policies to best protect New Zealanders when faced with future pandemics.

“I would hope that on whatever date in however many years’ time, the Prime Minister and the Director General of Health and yourself as a reporter can pull our report off the shelf, quickly re-read the summary and be starting to think pretty quickly about policy responses.”

Tony Blakely is hopeful the inquiry will provide a useful resource for future pandemics. Photo / RNZ

Blakely wouldn’t specify though what method he thought would be most effective when engaging the public, except to recognise the public’s role in the inquiry.

“We are very nascent in our thinking about how we’ll do that public engagement but that’s a very important priority for us as a commission as to how to do that public engagement in a way that is useful for everybody.”

He believed the 18-month deadline, with a report due back on June 26 next year, was “adequate”, but he acknowledged the trade-offs necessary to complete the job on schedule.

“If you had a five-year timeline and $100 million to do this, I don’t think that the marginal benefit of that would probably be justified because we want to provide information soon because the world might have another pandemic in 18 months’ time.”

Between 30 to 50 staff would be required to complete the inquiry, Blakely estimated.

Given his base in Melbourne, Blakely would be travelling between the two countries when his presence in New Zealand was necessary.

Asked whether it would be more cost-effective to move to New Zealand for the duration of the inquiry, Blakely suggested the proposed arrangement could be cheaper than paying for accommodation.

He added that one of the pandemic’s many lessons was showing what could be achieved through working remotely.

Blakely’s role as the head of the Covid-19 inquiry had the potential to make him a person of interest to the anti-vax community and others who objected to the Government’s restrictions throughout the pandemic.

Blakely confirmed he had considered his own security but did not elaborate further.

“I’ve experienced this before and I respect people’s different opinions and I think it’s important to point out that the majority of the people who reach out to you [are] positive.”