There was no overwhelming health reason why students from China could not have come to New Zealand universities this year.
Instead, the Ministry of Health feared the students might create extra work if they were allowed in, and that appears to have been behind the decision to ban them.
Papers “dumped” by the Prime Minister’s office on Friday reveal the tortuous and at times “Yes Minister” background to the decision not to relax the ban.
Over 9800 students from China who were expected to come to New Zealand to study this year were outside the country in February after the ban on travel was imposed on February 2.
The ban threatened New Zealand’s relations with China.
On February 18 the Chinese Ambassador to Wellington, Wu Xi, held a press conference to argue against the ban on Chinese students.
She implied that it could impact on New Zealand’s broader relationship with China.
She quoted a Chinese proverb which said: “when in prosperity, friends know us, and in adversity, we know our friends.”The next day, the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment wrote a paper for the Ministers of Education, Health and Immigration entitled “COVID-19 Temporary Border Measures and Considerations Regarding Possible Exemptions.”
The paper was contained within the “document dump” on Friday.
It started optimistically.
“Our initial view is that a broad exemption from the restrictions based on visa categories may be feasible,” it said.
“Any exemption relies on Ministers having confidence that there is a realistic prospect that isolation requirements can be met to manage the threat to public health.”
The Universities had already “several weeks ago” presented a proposal to manage the isolation requirements.
Details of that are in another paper, prepared by the Ministry of Health a week later, on February 27.
The Vice-Chancellors have demonstrated willingness to meet any requirements that the government considers are necessary from a public health perspective,” the paper said.
“For example, the universities plan to accommodate exempted students in seven separate facilities (isolated from domestic students).
“All universities also have onsite health staff (including more than fifty GPs), extensive pandemic management hygiene campaigns plans’ and are also planning campus-wide hygiene plans.”
Based on this, the paper said officials had developed an assurance system that was intended to allow a cohort of Chinese students to travel to New Zealand, enter self-isolation and then enrol for study, on a managed basis.
The paper said: “Our advice is you could implement an exemption with minimal risk to the New Zealand public based on an assurance based approach for up to 2,000 PhD and post-graduate students.
“Students from mainland China outside Wuhan represent a low public health risk, and could be effectively accommodated in self-isolation once they have arrived.”
So as far as the Ministry of Health was concerned, admitting students from China to study (or in many cases to continue their studies) at New Zealand universities presented a low health risk.
So why were they barred?
The answer to that, it seems, is what looks like pure bureaucratic expediency.
It can be found in another Cabinet paper from the same week, from the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment, which incorporates the Department of Immigration.
An annexe to a paper, prepared by MBIE, sets out the laborious process under which airlines at overseas airports decide whether to board passengers bound for New Zealand if they had been in China in the 14 days before travel.
“ If people subject to the ban are boarding from a mainland China airport, the check-in agent receives an automatic “Border Closed” response when attempting to check-in,” the paper said.
“If people are boarding from another port outside of China, the check-in agent must ask if they have been in China within the previous 14 Days.
“If they respond “yes”, the agent must contact the Immigration Border Office (IBO) by telephone (a five-minute conversation) and an immigration officer at the IBO will refuse uplift, and that person cannot be checked in and boarded “
There was no computerised way of distinguishing the status of the passenger.
“The international system which generates automatic board/do not board directives to check-in agents is not currently functionally capable of distinguishing by visa type or other characteristics (such as having been previously living in New Zealand before the restrictions being put in place).
“The current functionality is set to only distinguish between New Zealand citizens and residents, and all others (i.e. temporary visa holders).
“Individual, case-by-case, manual exemptions are able to be implemented now, but this is happening in only small numbers (e.g. the immediate family of NZ citizens and residents and Australians who are ordinarily resident in New Zealand and government-to-government requests for individuals such as diplomatic staff).
“Only an Immigration Officer may issue a board/do not board directive.
“As at February 17 2020, 959 calls from airlines had been received and resolved by Immigration New Zealand (INZ) staff at the IBO to determine if the traveller is eligible to travel to New Zealand related to COVID-19.”
In other words, Immigration New Zealand was relying entirely on a manual system involving a telephone call to check each passenger in.
But the paper said it was urgently upgrading its IT system
It had requested the provider of the border passenger processing system to develop new code to allow this type of ‘bulk’ exemption at a visa type level.
This was likely to take three to four weeks due to the testing required with airline systems and cost $75,000 – $100,000.
Immigration was asking SITA to develop a system which would exempt a whole visa class, such as all student visa holders, or all temporary work visa holders.
“This approach would be suitable if the proposal from the education sector, and supported by the Ministry of Health, was to exempt all students on the basis that all education providers have the measures and facilities in place to ensure the self-isolation of students will be adhered to,” the paper said.
“The second option is to take the current manual process to a much larger scale.”
What follows in the paper is a set of steps that would seem to have escaped from the British comedy series, “yes Minister”.
“A list of eligible travellers would need to be generated by and provided to Immigration New Zealand (INZ),” the paper said.
“Before providing to INZ, this list would have been authorised by relevant the authorities, such as the Ministry of health and in the case of students, the Ministry of Education.
“The traveller would be contacted and informed that they are eligible to travel.
“The traveller would contact INZ to provide their travel details (flight number, time and date of travel).
“The traveller would arrive at check-in, and the agent would receive a “Border Closed message upon check-in.
“The traveller would provide their confirmation of their ability to travel and advising the agent to contact the IBO by telephone.
“The IBO will check that the traveller is on the list that has been provided to INZ and either advise the agent to check-in and board the traveller or not
“The agent will generate a manual boarding pass to enable boarding.
“On arrival in New Zealand, the traveller would provide their confirmation of their ability to travel to a Customs officer, who would process he passenger and refer them to Ministry of Health officials.”
But — and here appears to be the ultimate obstacle: “Given that only warranted Immigration Officers can process a manual exemption, implementing an exemption on a manual basis would mean that INZ would need to divert existing resources from security screening at the border and/or visa processing.”
Yet, despite all this, the paper concluded that: “Our initial view is that a broad exemption from the restrictions based on visa categories may be feasible. Any exemption relies on Ministers having confidence that there is a realistic prospect that isolation requirements can be met to manage the threat to public health.”
However, the paper said it could depend on Ministers being satisfied that self-isolation (for the students once they arrived) was carried out effectively.
But: “Health staff and immigration officers do not have the capacity or mandate to individually verify isolation measures at a large scale.”
Nevertheless, despite their obviously antiquated procedures and staff pressures, all of which made for extra work, Immigration were not opposed to granting the exemption to Chinese students.
This was reinforced in another paper the same week, from Immigration’s “parent”, MBIE, who said work had already begun on making the changes to the visa processing system.
But despite all this, it appears it was the Ministry of Health who prevailed with their opposition to lifting the ban, not because the Chinese students posed a health risk, but for bureaucratic reasons.
“Our advice is you could implement an exemption with minimal risk to the New Zealand public based on an assurance based approach for up to 2,000 PhD and post-graduate students,” the paper said.
“Students from mainland China outside Wuhan represent a low public health risk, and could be effectively accommodated in self-isolation once they have arrived.”
“We are also advising that, on balance, you should not implement such an exemption because any exemption could require scarce public health resources and represent too great an opportunity cost,” their February 19 paper said.
“Any model would divert resources away from planning and responding to an outbreak of COVID-19 in NZ (and other public health issues).”
In other words, the Chinese students would have meant extra work.
