For Mrs Sorensen the recent government announcements has only galvanized her thinking that solutions must come from within the Pacific community and that we must come together to ensure our young people are empowered and enabled if the solutions are to be sustainable.

“We’re actually a team of 300,000 – not a team of five million. Our responsibility is to our communities and we see the pain that our communities are feeling. 1 in 3 Pacific people are reaching out for support and that is growing every week.

We have young people who are going to work because they’re the only people who can get jobs in their household. We really need to think hard about how we get students back on track”, says Mrs Sorensen.

Dr Tukuitonga maintains that the current Alert Level restrictions still put many of the Pacific community at risk as cases continue to escalate.

“I thought the change was hasty and premature. It looks as if the business community and tired Aucklanders forced this change.

It’s also very clear to me that Māori and Pasifika will pay the price of this change. My position has always been to hold the line and keep the restrictions we’ve had because it was working.

We’ve lost our way a little bit and the risks will no doubt fall on Māori and Pasifika people.”

Mrs Sorensen shared how the real challenge is not the response to the short-term effects of Covid-19 but what the response and plan is for the immediate and long term impacts of Covid-19 from national leadership for Pacific families.

“What I would like to see is a concerted effort to have long term sustainable funding for our Pacific providers.

One of the concerns that I have is that the Covid money that has been released to the community and to our providers is short term money. When that runs out in six months, they’re back to the same situation of being underfunded and under-resourced.

There needs to be a really focused and substantial investment and a really clear plan about how we continue to grow. I would really encourage the Government to bring our leadership together and start thinking about how we move forward.”

Dr Tukuitonga adds that the current outbreak has the potential to overwhelm our hospital system and cause issues around access to wider healthcare.

“It seems to me that our leaders have given up trying to control the outbreak in Auckland and basically gives me the impression that we can’t do anything about it now.

If the numbers continue to rise, more people will end up in hospital. There’s a fixed number of beds in our hospital system and when you displace people out of those beds with sick Covid patients, they will not be able to get the care they need for other conditions.

There is a very real possibility that most of our people will suffer the consequences not just from Covid, but the inability to get care for other things. I just think the pandemic is going to roll on for a lot longer than we’d like.”

Watch the full talanoa here.

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Date: 28 October 2021