Early Edition with Kate Hawkesby

MIQ has to go and it’s important the pressure keeps being applied to the Government on this, because this is a government that responds to pressure.   As Justice Venning pointed out in Murray Bolton’s successful judicial review of his MIQ exemption, under the Bill of Rights, every New Zealand citizen has the right to enter New Zealand without “unreasonable limitation”. And in those two words are the keys that open the gates, and clearly highlight that the legal grounds for MIQ are no more. MIQ’s also redundant because we’ve abandoned elimination and shifted to containment, we have Covid throughout our communities, we’re 80% double vaccinated; and data from MIQ shows that double vaxxed returnees, who test negative on arrival, pose a statistically insignificant risk in the context of this outbreak.  New Zealand citizens wanting to return home, who are double vaccinated, Covid negative, and who are prepared to self-isolate for 7 days, should be legally free to return. We are averaging well over 120 cases per day