Minutes before Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern called a press conference to confirm community transmission, a former prime minister was asked about the Government’s response to Covid-19.

Helen Clark was giving a lecture in Dunedin on Tuesday night, telling a packed audience: '’We are where we are, a brilliant job has been done.'’

However, she warned against complacency as ‘'we are going to be managing around this for the foreseeable future’’.

New Zealand was a ‘’poster child'’ on what a country could do, but there were plenty of examples of what countries shouldn’t do.

 

'’We are a very globally connected world and this virus is so easily transmissible.’’

The Government’s successful response was because it made important decisions early on.

‘’It was clear that the New Zealand Government cottoned on far earlier than many other Governments…that you weren’t dealing with something that could be managed like a flu.’’

That included halting travel from specific countries, and '’it was really a race against time to build the public understanding of what needed to be done''.

Clark said she referred to the elimination strategy as ''a zero tolerance strategy – you see it, you squash it’’.

She believed the Government would ‘’scale-up the quarantine provisions'’, to allow for overseas specialists, such as those from the health care sector, to travel to New Zealand for work.

That may include conversations around international students and film crews returning to New Zealand.

‘’There are lots for New Zealand to think about, but I think actually the Government has done an outstanding job on an issue where they were acting on totally imperfect information.’’

While time, money and effort, was being poured into potential solutions for Covid-19, Clark questioned how any future vaccine could realistically be rolled-out to 7.5 billion people.

‘’We are in this for the long haul.'’

Clark’s hour-long lecture was the 9th Annual Dame Dorothy Fraser lecture hosted by outgoing Dunedin South MP Clare Curran.

Taieri Labour candidate Ingrid Leary posed questions to Clark, which included diverse topics such as media, climate change, sexism and cannabis legalisation.

Clark said cannabis was a widely-used drug and ''about as common as having a glass of wine''.

Cannabis was less harmful than other legal drugs, and the case for selling it via licenced retailers with specified contents was ‘'quite strong'’.