When Ellen, 30, a New Zealander returning home from London, arrived at Auckland airport after a long-haul flight, she understood that she would be transported to a local hotel a short bus ride away for a fortnight’s government-mandated quarantine. Instead – with no warning, or chance to buy water or use the toilet – she found herself on a four-hour bus trip to Rotorua, a city 225km away, to spend her quarantine there.
When she tweeted about her experience – New Zealand’s government had started to use hotels in Rotorua and the South Island city of Christchurch to quarantine returning travellers as Auckland reached capacity – it didn’t take long for responders to chide Ellen for what they saw as complaining. “Stay away from us until you’re declared safe,” one wrote. “So sorry if we don’t care about your food needs.”
It was just one example of the backlash from some quarters against New Zealanders returning to the country in search of safety from the pandemic raging on other shores. In a nation in the rare position of returning to normal life free from Covid-19, New Zealanders are roiling with anxiety as coronavirus cases ratchet up in other countries, fearing the virus could be imported here. And some would rather pull up the drawbridge.
“It was just baffling to me that these very fundamental, basic human needs that people would be willing to deny those in others,” Ellen said. “By no means have any of us been complaining about needing to quarantine, or the sacrifices or even the quality of quarantine. We just wanted to be told what was happening.”
New Zealand was, until just over a week ago, free of Covid-19 after the last remaining case in the country was declared recovered, and had recorded 24 consecutive days with no fresh instances of the virus, drawing global admiration for prime minister Jacinda Ardern’s government. The nation has recorded fewer than 1,500 confirmed cases of Covid-19 in total, and 22 deaths.
But over the past week, a slow trickle of cases has begun at the border - as Ardern and her officials warned it would - as the number of New Zealanders returning home increases.
Quarantine hotels appointed to manage their two-week isolation are filling up - there were 4,200 people quarantined in the facilities as of Monday, Ardern said, with 900 more expected in the next two days.
There are currently 11 active cases of Covid-19 in the country, with none in hospital - all of them returning travellers, and all but two diagnosed during routine testing at the quarantine hotels. Tensions among New Zealanders over some of the cases exploded last week when officials were forced to admit that two of them, women returning from Britain, had been allowed to leave quarantine early on compassionate grounds without being tested.
Dozens of others were also allowed to leave facilities without testing before rules were tightened up, it was revealed. Now, resentment of new arrivals for - in the eyes of some - putting the country’s Covid-19 elimination status in jeopardy, combined with anger at news outlets for reporting each new quarantine bungle and complaint, has proved a potent mix.
“Early on, we predicted there would be much higher levels of anxiety, but people really pulled together as this ‘team of five million,’” said Dougal Sutherland, the clinical practice manager at Victoria University’s school of psychology, referring to the phrase Ardern had coined to unite New Zealanders during a strict national lockdown in March and April.
“On the other side, it seems like there’s a few fractures and splinters,” he added. “That animosity towards returning New Zealanders who might have the coronavirus is part of a fight, flight or freeze response, and the fight response really activates that anger part of it.”
The country was on wartime footing, he said, and threats felt heightened. “The downside of the ‘team of five million’ is that we cast people as the out-group,” he said. “Anyone coming in from the outside is a potential threat and we respond to them that way.”
Only New Zealanders, their immediate families, and certain essential workers are permitted to enter the country, Sutherland added: “They all have the right to be there.”
The rhetoric of national unity – New Zealand together against the world – that Ardern successfully deployed to manage the national lockdown has been a unique part of the country’s response, other analysts said.
“In New Zealand, we had enormous buy-in to this strategy that you don’t see elsewhere,” said Rodney Jones, an economist based in Auckland with Wigram Capital Advisors. “You read the British papers and you see enormous societal divisions.”
New Zealand had been “able to fashion consensus” about the need for a strict national lockdown, he said. “Australia has, but not to the same degree.”
Now, Jones said he understood the anger about new arrivals taking issue with their conditions.
“For me that’s people who finally make it to the lifeboat complaining they got wet,” he told TVNZ on Monday. “New Zealand is the lifeboat.”
The government is considering making returnees pay for part of their quarantine and Jones said pressure would continue on ministers to do so.
“I have seen people saying that people in quarantine should be grateful to be put in these hotels that are paid for by the taxpayers,” Ellen said. “People have said that New Zealanders have made so many sacrifices, they were in lockdown for a month, so we just have to suck it up and deal with it.”
She and other returning travelers also made sacrifices during the crisis, she said; she had lost her job in London and spent three months in isolation with almost no human contact in order to stay distanced from a housemate who was flouting the rules.
New Zealanders have a complicated relationship with the idea of living overseas; travel is considered a rite of passage for inhabitants of the small island nation, but there is resentment about it from some, said Sutherland, the psychologist.
“I wonder if that’s a little bit of that tall poppy syndrome,” he said, referring to the phenomenon of high achievers being ‘cut down to size.’
“You’ve been away and you’ve come back and you think you’re all that, but you’re not, you’re just one of us, so pull your head in a bit.”
