2.1 All-of-government preparations and response Ngā whakaritenga me te urupare a te kāwanatanga whānui
Home Reports Main Report Part Two: Looking back 2.1 All-of-government preparations and response
Introduction | Kupu whakataki
This chapter begins at the start of 2020, when the scale of the threat presented by COVID-19 and its possible implications for Aotearoa New Zealand were becoming apparent.
It briefly describes and then evaluates the plans, systems, governance mechanisms, decision-making structures and strategiesi that were central to the Government’s pandemic response over the next two years, and how they were communicated to the public.
The themes running through the chapter – preparedness, decision-making, strategy – are broad and intertwined. They also resurface repeatedly throughout Chapters 3 to 8 and we will return to them again in Chapter 9 where we summarise our high-level learnings after looking back at the entire pandemic response from 2020 to 2022.
What’s in this chapter
We begin with some essential context: section 2.2 provides a brief evaluation of the state of pandemic preparedness and emergency management arrangements across government at the point COVID-19 emerged. This was the base from which the Government’s COVID-19 response began.
Sections 2.3 to 2.5 then describe the evolution of key aspects of the response over the course of the pandemic – first governance and decision-making structures (2.3), then national pandemic strategies and tools (2.4), and finally the use of public information and communications tools to mobilise support for the pandemic response (2.5).
Our assessment of all these aspects of the response and their impact is in section 2.6.
i A more detailed description of the legislation, emergency plans, systems and structures supporting the COVID-19 response is provided in Appendix A.