Very sensible. From Bloomie:
New Zealand’s road to economic recovery is unlikely to include the return of foreign students this year, Finance Minister Grant Robertson said.
While the nation’s successful elimination of community transmission of Covid-19 should make it an attractive destination for international students, it will take some time to establish the quarantine facilities needed to let them back in, Robertson said in an interview aired Tuesday for Bloomberg’s Inside Track webinar. Existing quarantine capacity is already being stretched by a surge in the number of New Zealand citizens returning home, he said.
“Growing our capacity for quarantine that we have absolute confidence in requires facilities that will need to be very carefully designed and used,” he said. “Moving toward an international student market for that will take some time.”
There is no foolproof quarantine system that involves people and this virus. See Victoria, NZ, and US. We should keep the borders shut until the pandemic passes.
To not do so is to make an asymmetric bet with the entire economy on little upside and massive downside.
He is also a former gold trader and economic commentator at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, the ABC and Business Spectator. He is the co-author of The Great Crash of 2008 with Ross Garnaut and was the editor of the second Garnaut Climate Change Review.
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