Behind the scenes: New Zealand’s Covid-19 border closures
Before Covid-19 swept across the world, New Zealand Customs Service was processing up to 60,000 airline passengers a day as well as collecting import and export taxes.
Within a few days of the virus coming into the country, the government closed the borders to foreign travellers and mandated 14 days’ managed isolation for returning citizens. Immediately, traffic fell to around 300 passengers per day. The response certainly stemmed the spread of Covid: even at the peak of transmission in April 2020, the country was recording 89 new cases a day and, by August 2021, only 26 people had died.
While it may seem to the outside world that this swift, effective action has meant that life within New Zealand was not unduly affected by the pandemic, it created unprecedented challenges for many civil service organisations, not least Customs.
Janine Foster, director of risk, security and assurance at Customs, suspects that the situation created by Covid might explain why the lower-grade respondents gave less positive answers than their leaders.
She says that for Customs, responding to Covid has been “our entire focus every day since February last year”, with constant major changes that needed rapid implementation.
Airport closures, which led to hundreds of Customs staff being redeployed to other functions such as contact tracing, gave way to travel bubbles with Australia and other neighbouring countries, effectively creating two airports on one site. Both zones needed to be staffed until the travel bubbles were suspended.
The collection of taxes and duties was made more flexible to support importers and exporters, producing more administrative changes. Then, at the end of 2020, the department was given two weeks’ notice that it would also being take charge of managing the 24/7 quarantine function at the 16 maritime ports.
Suddenly, small towns such as Opua in the far North Island – the first port for overseas yachts arriving after crossing the Pacific Ocean – needed 25 people to oversee the arrival of commercial and pleasure craft, when normally one person would do.
Foster says legislative change has been “written at speeds it’s never been written at before” and, on several occasions, policy was formulated with little or no consideration of how difficult it would be to implement. She adds that while Customs staff might normally handle one or two legislative changes a year, they have implemented many more in the past 18 months.
Foster is proud that to date the agency has managed to avoid making redundancies, but she estimates that around two-thirds of Customs’ 1,500 staff have had to be shifted into new roles at least once over the course of the pandemic.
“This has put massive amounts of pressure on people who are not used to operating at speed,” she says. “Civil servants are used to doing things right, not fast.” This has required a real shift in mindset among officials, she says, which hasn’t been easy to absorb or to manage.
“From a strategic perspective, it’s been very, very difficult to plan. It’s just been a case of responding day to day.”
Foster says the Public Service Act was enacted at just the right time to optimise the country’s crisis response. She notes that the law has formalised the role of the public service to provide free, frank advice to support the government to do what it needs to do, and it also allows for the creation of executive boards – formal bodies comprising the chief executives of various ministries that will work together to achieve aligned objectives.
The first of these to be established was the Border Executive Board, hosted by Customs and populated by the heads of other agencies with an interest in borders, such as health, trade and transport.
“I would have to say that Customs has been more responsive to new demands in the last 18 months than it could ever have imagined. If someone had said to us two years ago, ‘do you think you could deal with this sort of change?’, no one would have said yes.
“I do think people feel more confident that even if they don’t know everything, actually it turns out they don’t need to – they can still make a good decision based on what they do know, and change it later if need be.”