Jacinda Ardern’s government has achieved a "communications masterclass" in the battle against Covid-19, according to the founder one of New Zealand’s most popular current affairs websites.
Duncan Greive. Photo: supplied
Managing editor of The Spinoff, Duncan Greive, says the feat of eliminating the virus has been made even more impressive because Kiwi individualism tends to mitigate against people obeying rules.
The Covid-19 response system literally brought levels of success because of its simplicity and non-coercive tone of its communications strategy, which engendered a type of collective responsibility and social cohesion around lockdown measures.
He told Jessie Mulligan his in-depth feature on the subject, The epic story of NZ's communications-led fight against Covid-19, noted that, inititally, New Zealand appeared to be on the same path as places like Italy and the UK.
“It seemed like we were on the same track as a lot of other countries that got overrun,” he says.
“We had cases starting to spiral very rapidly, we started to see community transmission and I made reference to the Global Health Security Index study, that had us getting 54 out of 100 in terms of pandemic preparedness. So, you’d have to say, at that point, we looked like a country that was going to do very poorly.”
The United States was rated by far the best prepared by the study. The country is now leading the world in Covid-19 fatality rates and infections, with over 80,000 deaths reported.
Greive points out the survey identified tools available to countries, but not how these would use them.
“I think the big thing that ultimately became the basis of the piece was that, you can have the best tools and facilities in the world, but if you don’t have clear, crisp consistent communication from the top of government down to each department, to the private sector, then it almost doesn’t matter.
“You are going to get confusion and chaos, and my piece was an attempt to survey all of the different pieces of action… to achieve the kind of consistency of behaviour that helped us get to the point where we’re opening up again, without the dangers that other countries are facing right now.”
He says the point where the sense of impending doom seemed to lift was when Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern gave a presidential-type address to the nation on March 21, announcing the alert system to be used, with its four levels of response.
Although the address wasn’t ideal, what came across was clear and simple – New Zealanders would be expected to behave in a way necessary to contain the virus and would be briefed each step along the way.
“The main thing that you got out of that was that there’d be levels that defined your behaviour and that the government would tell you which level you’re at.
“It applied a superstructure to the limits of what we were allowed to do, which made intuitive sense and even the fact of us being at level 2, it took the patchwork of actions that been made prior to that, closure of borders, direction for inbound travellers to self-isolate for two weeks and it gave them a logic. To me, that was the single biggest thing that helped us get to where we are.”
For Greive, the beauty of bringing in the idea of response levels is it allows you to convey a lot within simple structure and then to change the terms of that structure, without doing away with the system. It allows the introduction of concepts like ‘bubbles’ and physical distancing.
“It meant that even people who aren’t necessarily paying a huge amount of attention to media ordinarily still have a way of using a kind of shorthand that conveys where we are.”
Communication was to be key to success. Ardern and Dr Ashley Bloomfield would be trustworthy figureheads at the daily 1pm media briefings, viewed by nearly one million people each day.
Ardern’s style of communication has been attacked by some for being patronising. Other attacks of a more political nature have accused her of displaying a centralist tendency, of cynically denying media access to her ministers to answer questions on the Covid-19.
“I think it’s absurd to criticise her for talking to us like we’re children,” Greive says.
“Yes, you may be a very sophisticated person, but you can still understand it. Whereas, you don’t want to make it that it excludes anyone and I think having a simplicity and clarity and a particular staging of those announcements has been really impressive.
“I think that there are - as with any announcement with complexity - things that you can fault them on. But I think that the Ardern style of speech in the 1pm briefing is in many ways the single most significant difference between the other leaders who have been more combative, who have moved their positions, and tended to have a different style, so we’ve tended to have partisans behaving differently as a result.
“If you look at what the government set out to do and what it achieved by the end on that narrow but incredibly important score, this has been a masterclass in terms of communication. It doesn’t absolve them from any criticism.”
With Kiwis often seen in a cultural sense as outdoorsy rule breakers with an individualist mindset as opposed to collectivist one, the Government’s achievement is being lauded by marketing gurus for an ingenious use of emotional appeal.
“They induced that level of compliance that you might more readily associate with more authoritarian governments and I think if it can do that in such a short space of time with very little sort of active resistance, that points to how successful it was.”
Posters, branding and advertising played an important role, as not only did these manage to convey a level of importance in observing rules, the material also implied a necessity of personal contribution to protecting the country.
Greive points out the 'Stay home, Save Lives' message had a reassuring quality, championing a collective effort and inviting you to share in the glory of eradicating the virus and sparing the suffering of others. It appealed to our best qualities as a nation.
