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Wednesday, September 18, 2024

Ele Ludemann: Cost of incompetence


Labour’s handling of Managed Isolation and Quarantine (MIQ) was incompetent.

There was favouritism over who could get in and who could not – DJs were approved, people with dying relatives were not.

There was its unfair lottery for places which left getting a place to luck.

And there was the cost because people didn’t have to pay upfront.

Thomas Cranmer writes:

Some eye-opening amounts are still owing in relation to the country’s Covid-era MIQ operation.

As at 31 May, $57.1M has been referred to external debt collection agencies. $27.8M has been collected by those agencies. No legal proceedings has been initiated.

As at 31 May, MBIE advises that the total outstanding unpaid debt was $19,035,707.67. Surely a mistake – should it be $190M? Will make further inquiries to confirm.

Even $19m is an eyewatering amount of money, made worse when the country’s debt is so high.


Click to view

The last MIQ hotels closed in June two years ago. Some of those debts would have been incurred earlier – the oldest in June 2020. That’s a very long time to have money the country needs owing.

How hard would it have been to require payment when an MIQ place was booked or when people checked in to the MIQ hotel?

That way there would be no debts and no need for the cost of recovering it.

This is yet another sign of just how incompetent the Ardern and Hipkins governments were.

Ele Ludemann is a North Otago farmer and journalist, who blogs HERE - where this article was sourced.

3 comments:

rouppe said...

Possibly people object to being forced to pay for a hotel they didn't want.

Hotels that didn't separate incoming cohorts to prevent cross infection. Hotels that didn't clean properly between "guests" - or should i say inmates since it was coerced. Hotels that provide food prison inmates would riot over.

Anonymous said...

I dont think people should have to pay it at all. It was a complete mess and the whole thing was heartbreaking. If you tested negative there was no reason to be locked up. The stories coming out of those places were heartbreaking. One of the biggest non-forgivables in all of this was not allowing people to be with their families when they were dying. And in MIQ they had to also jump thru a gauntlet of hoops before they were turned down. The whole thing was disgusting. Let those people be.

Anonymous said...

Ideally all MIQ costs should be debited agains all those Parliamentarians in Govt and opposition at the time.