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Speaker 1: The second half of the COVID nineteen Royal Commission of

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Speaker 1: Inquiry gets underway today, at least as far as the

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Speaker 1: public part is concerned. Public hearings will be held all

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Speaker 1: week and they will be live streamed online. Grant Ellingworth

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Speaker 1: Casey is the chair of the Royal Commission of Inquiry

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Speaker 1: with us.

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Speaker 2: Now High Grant, good morning.

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Speaker 1: What do you reckon? Is going to be the most

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Speaker 1: crunchy here? The mandates or the vaccine safety? Look?

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Speaker 2: I think mandates are the thing that people are most

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Speaker 2: excited about and that they find most ejectionable. Obviously, not

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Speaker 2: everyone does, because some people are Quite a number of

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Speaker 2: people think that the mandates protected them while they were

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Speaker 2: at work and so on. But there are of course

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Speaker 2: many people who take the opposite view.

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Speaker 1: You've obviously already got some submissions that have come in.

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Speaker 1: What proportion do you reckon in support of the mandates?

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Speaker 2: Look, we've got people assessing the submissions at the moment,

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Speaker 2: and there are thirty one thousand of them. I don't

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Speaker 2: profess to have read them all. I've read some, and

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Speaker 2: I can't give you any accurate figures as to proportions,

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Speaker 2: but there's certainly a fair chunk that will be focusing

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Speaker 2: on that issue.

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Speaker 1: Do you I mean, this has been a touchy subject

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Speaker 1: in the past. Do you think that you will get full,

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Speaker 1: unvarnished opinions from people.

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Speaker 2: Yes, I think we will and we have. We've done

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Speaker 2: a lot of interviews, a lot of engagements with groups,

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Speaker 2: and people are being very open and forthright about what

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Speaker 2: they think.

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Speaker 1: Are you forming an opinion yet on whether the mandates

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Speaker 1: were necessary?

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Speaker 2: I can't predetermine what the outcome is going to be,

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Speaker 2: but of course you get impressions along the way. We've

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Speaker 2: got to keep an open mind because we are required

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Speaker 2: to follow the principles of procedural fairness. But certainly impressions

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Speaker 2: are being gathered and many of them.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, interesting, Grant. I mean, at the start, the opposition

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Speaker 1: was largely to the vaccine. Why do you think it

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Speaker 1: and you know, questions around vaccine safety. Why do you

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Speaker 1: think the mandates have overtaken that?

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Speaker 2: Well, vaccines were introduced at a point where we desperately

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Speaker 2: needed something to solve a very big problem, and I

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Speaker 2: think the majority of New Zealanders embraced it, and the

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Speaker 2: questions of vaccine safety became more poignant further down the track.

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Speaker 2: But once vaccine mandates were introduced and as that policy developed,

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Speaker 2: it affected more people and I think people felt, well,

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Speaker 2: my rights are being taken away, so you know, it

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Speaker 2: touches a nerve and people react.

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Speaker 1: Looking forward to seeing what you've got to say about that, Grant,

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Speaker 1: really appreciate your time. Grant elling with Casey, Chair of

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Speaker 1: the Royal Commission of Inquiry into COVID nineteen Part two.

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