Canterbury Mornings with John MacDonald

John MacDonald: Time for orange to be the new red


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It is great to be back. We had a brilliant week in Twizel with the teenagers at the Maadi Cup rowing championships. 
Cashmere High School did itself very proud – the girls winning silver in two finals (the first-time girls from Cashmere have ever won medals at the Maadi Cup). 
And the boys in the Big 8s boat came 4th in the big Maadi Cup final – only the second time Cashmere has qualified for that event, beating schools with a lot more money behind them, just saying.  
So, after a fantastic week, it is back to the real world today. For the kids – and the parents. 
By the way, congratulations to the organisers for pulling off what they did in Twizel. After planning for having no spectators, they kicked into gear big time when the Government announced the other week that crowd limits at outdoor events were out the window. 
So, pretty much at the last minute, they arranged to have a separate spectator zone up-and-running in time for the final's races on Friday and Saturday. So big ups to South Island Rowing and Rowing New Zealand for making all that happen.    
But I tell you what, it did bring home to me some of the absurdities we are still dealing with when it comes to COVID-19.  
I’ll give you an example. When we arrived at the gate, we had to have a mask on. Despite the fact that as soon as we got past the gate, pretty much everyone took them off. I’ll go as far as saying 99 percent of people did that. Maybe even more. 
Which brought home to me the fact that the Government just has to stop tinkering at the edges with this and, when they meet today, Cabinet Ministers have to look around the table and say to each other ‘the time has come’. 
The time has come to – at the very least – change the traffic light settings. And I’m not talking about shifting Auckland from red to orange and keeping the rest of the country at red, as I’ve heard talked about. Imagine how people here in Canterbury would react to that? 
No, I’m talking about one of two things: shifting the whole country from red to orange, or doing away with the traffic light system completely.  
I think a good first-step would be shifting the entire country from red to orange. Not just Auckland. The whole country. 
Vaccine passes are voluntary from midnight tonight. Vaccine mandates are pretty much gone too – except for some areas in the public and health sectors. 
Omicron seems to have peaked – although Canterbury’s the current hotspot, apparently. 
The hospitality sector wants a shift from Red to Orange. Other parts of the business sector do too. 
Even Professor Michael Baker from the Otago Medical School is saying he thinks the traffic light system needs to be “reinvented into something more meaningful”. They’re his words not mine. 
He’s saying today that the changes to the traffic light system the Government made recently are too “murky”. Again, his words – not mine. 
But I think the most sensible thing I’ve heard about all of this today has come from Leeann Watson, who runs the Canterbury Employers’ Chamber of Commerce. 
She’s saying businesses are more than capable of making decisions to manage the risk of Covid-19 in their workplaces. 
Which indicates to me that she’d probably go for the second of the two options I mentioned earlier – doing away with the traffic light system altogether. 
I think that would be too much, too soon. For a couple of reasons. 
First, changing the setting from Red to Orange can pretty much be done with a stroke of the pen. A new Health Order (which is the paperwork the Director General of Health signs to make things like lockdowns happen) can be done in no time. 
My second reason for shifting the traffic light setting and not doing away with the system altogether, is based on some research that came out over the weekend about vaccine mandates, which found older people are more unhappy about vaccine mandates going than younger...

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