A royal commission gives New Zealand a chance to reckon with what Covid did to us

It’s hard to describe just how good New Zealand felt as summer began at the end of 2020.

Aotearoa had seemingly got through the pandemic unscathed, relying on a zero-Covid or “elimination” strategy. We had been in alert level 1 since October, meaning there were no real restrictions on daily life, with huge music festivals and parties going ahead while much of the western world was still struggling with lockdowns.

Related: New Zealand announces inquiry into Covid-19 response

The economy was buzzing, with unemployment dropping off the high it had reached in September of 2020 – defying many predictions that we were in for serious scarring – and house prices engaged in a steady climb upwards into ever-increasing unaffordability. As the year got going, unemployment would continue to fall, while house prices continued to rise.

This couldn’t last. But it kind of felt like it could.

The overseas jeerers got their insults confused and accused of us over-using lockdowns. The truth was that our “short and sharp” lockdowns had allowed us far more day-to-day freedom than most of the countries still “mitigating” Covid-19.

But elimination relied on us essentially telling everyone outside the country to get lost, even if they were citizens, unless they had the time, money, and luck to be able to secure a spot in a managed isolation hotel (MIQ), where they would have to stay for two weeks before entering the country. Even the economic good times – surprising in a country that relies on tourism – were built on the foundations of a disgustingly unequal housing market.

So it’s telling that prime minister Jacinda Ardern still had to remind New Zealanders how successful our overall pandemic response had been when she announced a new royal commission of inquiry earlier this week, noting we had seen far fewer deaths than most countries thanks to only allowing the virus in once most people had been vaccinated.

Because 2021 and 2022 went on to make a mockery of that good time, at least inside New Zealand.

MIQ was one of the sorest points. After it stopped feeling like an emergency the endless stories of bureaucratic cruelty started to really hit, with legions of families separated and people unable to make it home for funerals and new babies.

But it was the Delta strain that ruined things, overcoming the restriction that a long Auckland lockdown placed on it, and spreading despite the mass rollout of the vaccine.

New Zealand struggled to give up on the elimination strategy that had worked so well, and the messy process of untangling ourselves from it created some policies that deserve serious attention from the royal commission, such as the continued use of MIQ once the elimination battle was lost and the widespread use of vaccine passes and mandates to bar the unvaccinated from certain parts of public and professional life.

These tensions reached a crescendo earlier this year when the grounds of parliament were occupied for 24 days by an alliance of far-right provocateurs, organised anti-vaxxers, and genuinely misguided people.

I talked to many of these protesters, and I did not find a single one whose view on the vaccine mandate was purely based on a principled view of civil liberties – they all eventually said they thought the vaccine itself was dangerous.

But it would be a mistake to think that it was only these seriously misguided people who were upset with the state of play at the start of 2022 – Aucklanders had put up with months of lockdown while the country got vaccinated, and a lot of Kiwis overseas had gone from an understanding sadness to full-on fury.

It is the period from about September 2021 onwards that deserves the most scrutiny. This was when we realised we couldn’t beat Delta and slowly started to dismantle the elimination strategy, introducing sweeping vaccine mandates as Auckland was on its way out of lockdown.

This somewhat chaotic period – at one point there were three separate stages within one of the four separate alert levels – is where the clarity of hindsight is probably of the most use.

Hopefully the Commission will use the unfair but necessary wisdom of hindsight to establish whether this period was messy by necessity, or because the Government didn’t adapt fast enough.

Some idea of how much more chaotic the process of ending lockdowns in other countries was should be considered here, but we should not just rely on having done things better than our peers.

Which is not to say that the Government’s continued efforts to at least delay widespread infection were misguided, or that the only thing that deserves scrutiny is whether it fought the virus too strongly. Indeed, it will also be very interesting to see what the Commission makes of New Zealand’s abandonment of much of its defences in 2022, something that has irked many who still see a place for widespread mask mandates as a low-intrusion way to stop the disease spreading.

One expects that the inquiry will find less to really disagree with in 2020, when vaccines were not available and much about the virus was still not known. After all the elimination strategy was deeply popular during this period because it was working.

It would be interesting to know just how much money was wasted on the “deep clean” of surfaces inside rooms that did nothing to kill what was an airborne disease, even well after this was established scientific fact, but I doubt such tallying up will feature.

It’s also doubtful that the royal commission will plumb into the psychological shift some Kiwis went through, one which made them eager to exclude people from public spaces and to call the police if they saw their neighbours out for too many walks.

Royal commissions are powerful things, accountable only to the monarch once they get going. Past ones have transformed our electoral system and the system of governance in our largest city. It is unlikely that this new royal commission will be able to end the debate on such a momentous period of history, but it will develop some lessons for next time. Hopefully by the time we need those lessons the worst wounds from this period will be long gone.

• Henry Cooke is former chief political reporter for New Zealand news organisation Stuff