The final phase of the Covid inquiry is out, and almost nobody will be fully happy with what it says. The report says New Zealand got plenty right, but it also lays out a string of failures, blind spots and overreaches. It is neither the devastating indictment that opponents of the Labour government wanted, nor the full vindication that its defenders might have hoped for.
That is probably why the political reaction has been so predictable. National and Act have seized on the sections about Auckland’s lockdown, excessive spending, and the poor handling of some vaccine mandates. Labour has highlighted the overall conclusion that New Zealand’s decisions were mostly “considered and appropriate” and that the country had “among one of the best pandemic responses in the world.” Even New Zealand First, which pushed hard for this second phase of the inquiry, is claiming vindication while also dismissing the process as inadequate. Winston Peters dismissed the inquiry itself as “totally deficient, in terms of reference, in terms of personnel”.
So everyone walks away with something they can claim as vindication, but also something they’d rather not talk about.
As RNZ’s Ellen O’Dwyer framed it neatly, politicians on all sides found exactly what they needed in the report’s 530-plus pages. Luke Malpass, writing in the Post, nailed the politics of the thing. He describes the report as a good thing for New Zealand, arguing its real impact will be felt in future rather than now. Right now, it is “mainly a helpful tool for the Government to use to whack Labour — and in particular Chris Hipkins — for decisions made during the lockdowns.” Although, he added, “probably not as helpful as some in the Government had hoped.”
Malpass argues people were scared, and that the politics of the time rewarded caution over risk‑taking. Whether a lockdown lasted a week longer here or there “is hardly uncovering some enormous blunder in the context of the overall response.”
The Auckland question
The finding doing the most political work right now is the one about Auckland’s long 2021 lockdown. The report confirms that Director-General of Health Ashley Bloomfield recommended Auckland move down from Alert Level 4. Instead, then Covid-19 Response Minister Chris Hipkins took a paper to Cabinet recommending an additional five days at Level 4, and Cabinet agreed. There is also the matter of the Auckland boundary over Christmas 2021. The Royal Commission found that Cabinet decided to keep it in place until January 16, against advice from officials that the restriction was “not necessary or practical.”
Heather du Plessis-Allan put it bluntly. Bloomfield “wasn’t the conservative one urging caution. In fact, he was more reasonable than the Government.” With the lockdown costing Auckland up to $100 million a day, she argued, “Chippy unnecessarily killed jobs and businesses when he didn’t have to.”
It’s not that simple, though. Marc Daalder, writing for Newsroom, pointed out that the Royal Commission did not explicitly conclude that the Auckland lockdown went on too long. The report hedged, noting that the lack of transition planning may have contributed to its length, but adding that “it may be that outcomes would have been the same or not significantly different overall.” On other occasions, ministers actually overrode health advice in the opposite direction: reducing restrictions in Auckland in early November despite officials recommending they be maintained.
Hipkins has contested the framing too. His office pointed to post-Cabinet transcripts where Bloomfield himself advised that “another week in alert level 4 in Auckland gives us our best chance to really finish the job off here.”
Speaking to Mike Hosking this morning, Hipkins went further than his prepared lines. He conceded that if he could go back, he would handle the end of the Auckland lockdown differently. He also said he would have pushed harder on the rollout of rapid antigen testing, where there had been a conflict between ministers and the Ministry of Health. “I think not doing some of those things were mistakes”, he said. It was a notable admission, although Hipkins also insisted the report was “pretty fair and balanced” despite what he called its “loaded terms of reference.”
The Spinoff’s Alice Neville made the most cutting point about how the report’s findings are being selectively wielded. She pointed out that government ministers have been spinning the findings well beyond what the report actually says. Act’s press release claimed officials were “ignored by Labour,” when the report itself says the key lockdown decisions were “sufficiently informed.” Neville’s conclusion was bleak: “It didn’t matter what the report said. Why would it? Reports are long. Reports are boring. No one wants to relive the pandemic by reading this one. People in power can say what they want.”
The Advice ministers never saw
Perhaps the most explosive specific finding concerns teenagers and vaccine mandates. The Covid-19 Vaccine Technical Advisory Group twice advised against requiring two doses of the Pfizer vaccine for 12- to 17-year-olds, citing myocarditis risk. That advice never reached ministers. The commission called this failure “significant.”
As the Post’s Harriet Laughton reported, the firmer piece of advice, dated December 9, 2021, and stating that the risks were “insufficient to justify mandating a 2 dose schedule of the Pfizer vaccine” for under-18s, was simply not provided to ministers. An earlier, softer version was seen by then Associate Health Minister Ayesha Verrall, who noted her concern about “insufficient data on safety of second dose.” But the commission found the December advice was “different in substance” from what ministers actually received.
Liam Hehir, writing in The Blue Review, called this “the most damning specific finding.” He argued it revealed that “government mandates continued to reflect outdated advice while updated advice sat somewhere in the system, undelivered.” Whether this was bureaucratic incompetence or something worse, the commission’s findings demand a clearer accounting.
Hipkins called it “a huge oversight by the officials who prepared that advice.” The Ministry of Health acknowledged the failing, saying “the standard was not met.” Those words may be the most understated admission in the entire affair. When advice about myocarditis risks to teenagers never reaches the ministers signing off mandates, that’s not just a bureaucratic slip‑up, it’s a breakdown in democratic accountability
Mandates: valid tool, botched execution
On vaccine mandates more broadly, the commission did not condemn them outright. It found they are “a valid intervention that should be kept in the toolbox for future pandemic responses.” But it was sharply critical of how they were implemented and monitored.
The Government did not track how many workers were affected. Job losses were not tracked. Reinstatements were not tracked. Enforcement activity was not tracked. Advice about whether to continue or remove mandates was therefore flying blind. The Spinoff’s Alice Neville noted the “striking absence of monitoring.”
Research conducted for the inquiry found that by July 2024, almost 25 percent of education workers who declined vaccination were not in employment, compared to 11 percent of those who got vaccinated early. These are “wage scarring” impacts that the commission said were foreseeable but poorly monitored.
Hehir’s verdict was blunt: “A policy affecting an unknown number of New Zealanders’ livelihoods was extended and modified without anyone in the system being able to say with confidence how many people it was affecting.” Cabinet papers did not explicitly discuss whether rights restrictions were proportionate to public health benefit. No real consideration was given to less restrictive alternatives.
That is a remarkable failure of basic accountability. One of the most intrusive uses of state power in recent New Zealand history — affecting people’s livelihoods, careers, incomes and reputations — and the Government did not properly track its own policy consequences.
From a different angle entirely, Te Pāti Māori co-leader Debbie Ngarewa-Packer said the mandates had been “cruel and harsh” on Māori, and that the inquiry treated the role of iwi as “an extra, instead of a critical part of the response.”
The Spending question
The report’s findings on fiscal policy have been fought over too. Around half of the $60 billion Covid Response and Recovery Fund was spent on things not directly related to the pandemic. The “shovel-ready” programme was singled out as “not targeted to costs arising from the pandemic” and by nature not “timely or temporary.” The commission also found that quantitative easing and other unconventional monetary policies “had significant costs,” and that stimulatory measures went too far and for too long.
The Greens’ Ricardo Menéndez March made what Malpass called “a good point”—acknowledging that “an over-reliance on unconventional monetary policy saw one of the largest transfers of wealth that we have ever seen, along with the inflationary environment impacting low-income New Zealanders the most.” That point matters because the fallout was not evenly spread. Lower-income New Zealanders got hit harder, while asset owners often came through far better. The economic fallout was not neutral. It hit lower-income New Zealanders hardest, inflated asset values, and deepened existing divides.
But on the Treasury warnings that Simeon Brown has made so much of, the picture is more nuanced than the political talking points suggest. The commission found that “Treasury advice in 2021 was that the fiscal response associated with lockdowns was prudent.” Treasury was, on more than one occasion, “supportive of the economic measures that were in place.” The shift came in 2022, when the stimulus should have been wound back sooner. The report was clear that “decision-makers followed that advice” during 2021. It was in the transition period that things went off track.
The Gaping hole
Several commentators have pointed to what the inquiry did not cover. Hehir highlighted that the terms of reference excluded the foundational year of pandemic governance (February 2020 to January 2021) when MIQ was built, core Covid legislation was passed, and the country locked down for the first time. He was blunt about why that period was excluded, pointing to NZ First’s role as a coalition partner during that time: “An inquiry that leaves that year largely unscrutinised is, whatever else it is, convenient for the party currently most invested in making the most of performative populist outrage about Covid overreach.”
Hipkins has made a similar point from the other direction, alleging the terms of reference were “deliberately constructed to achieve a particular outcome.” The exclusion of the period when NZ First was in government is a legitimate concern. It leaves a significant gap in the historical record.
And there is the matter of participation. Ardern, Robertson, and Hipkins all declined to appear at public hearings, though they said they cooperated extensively in private interviews. Robertson called the public hearings a “show trial.” That is an awkward look for former leaders of a government that repeatedly invoked transparency and openness during the pandemic itself. If the inquiry was worth having – and Labour established the first phase of it – then its processes deserved full engagement, not selective participation.
Hipkins is, in a sense, the last one left standing. Speaking on Newstalk ZB today, he noted that former colleagues had moved on, and defended their right to do so, pointing out that “it’s pretty unusual for a government to be subjected to the amount of post-office scrutiny that they have been.” It is an understandable position. But it also underscores the accountability gap: the people who made the biggest calls are the least available to explain them.
As Ani O’Brien put it, by declining to appear publicly the former ministers “deprived us all of the opportunity to understand and seek accountability.” When a government exercises extraordinary emergency powers, the public has a right to expect those who wielded that power to account for it in the most open forum available.
The Report nobody will read
The most politically astute take on the whole affair might have been Malpass’ observation about the entire exercise:
“Everyone also has a pet theory about Covid-19. Mine is that just about everyone is a little bit ashamed of how they acted during the pandemic. Maybe you denounced fellow Kiwis a bit too gladly for not following the rules. Maybe you went down an anti-vax rabbit hole… Maybe you dobbed in your neighbour for going to the supermarket too often or inviting some mates over. Maybe you treated your partner or family a bit shabbily. Or irrationally bought a thousand rolls of toilet paper. The point is that most people seem to want to forget the whole episode. The public does not like reading stories about it, politicians do not much like talking about it, and dwelling on it does not appear to be an electoral winner.”
He noted that all political parties were broadly aligned on the rules until late 2021, when the Auckland lockdown dragged on and the public became more receptive to arguments about trade-offs. Labour was sure to remind everyone in the House that the then new National leader Christopher Luxon had been asking why the government was not spending more.
This is a good report, Malpass concluded, “one that will be important for New Zealand in decades to come. But try as the Government might, it is difficult to see it having much impact in the current political climate — or giving anyone much of a political advantage.”
The ODT made a related point today, observing that most New Zealanders already knew the broad outlines of what went wrong. But it pointed out something more immediate: the report was released as New Zealand enters its ninth wave of Covid, with more than 50 people hospitalised and 19 dead in the past week. Covid hasn’t gone away.
What this report is really about
I’ve followed these debates since the early days of the pandemic, and what gnaws at me most is the power dynamics. Emergency rules rushed under urgency. Scant checks on rights or alternatives. Officials gatekeeping advice that ministers say they never received. It’s a warning about how crises concentrate authority — and about how quickly the boring but essential work of monitoring, review, and transparency gets shelved when governments feel they are on a war footing.
The inequality element runs through the whole thing. Mandates hit low-wage sectors hardest. Lockdowns crushed small businesses while larger players adapted. Quantitative easing juiced asset prices and widened the wealth gap. The Auckland-Wellington disconnect — which business leaders and community figures described in vivid terms to the Post — is not just a pandemic gripe. It speaks to a centralised system of power that struggles to accommodate regional realities, even in a crisis.
This is not a whitewash, but nor is it the grand scandal some wanted. What it really is, is a portrait of governance under pressure, warts and all. Transparency gaps — like unshared teen vaccine advice — breed long-term distrust. The absence of tracking on mandate fallout is not just sloppy administration; it is a failure of democratic accountability, hiding the costs of policy from the voters who bore them.
But our willingness to grapple honestly with what happened and who was accountable has not exactly intensified. This report, for all its length and careful analysis, may end up being more important as a document for future policymakers than as a reckoning for the present.
The real lessons are about monitoring, transparency, emergency powers and accountability. And they matter whether anyone in politics wants to hear them right now or not.
With Covid now in its ninth wave, the real question is whether the state has learned enough before the next emergency arrives.
Dr Bryce Edwards
Director of the Democracy Project
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