Petra Bagust

speaker

3,300 appearances 7 recordings 1 series first heard Apr 2026 last heard 3 Jun

Petra Bagust’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 7 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 4.

Appearances

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Grey Areas with Petra Bagust · Pushed to my limits | Sir Ashley Bloomfield · 3 Jun 2026 podcast

As you would expect, an event like this, and again, let's remind ourselves, this was the most disruptive global event since the Second World War.

It was hugely significant and so it has a long tail and that tail includes educational outcomes for our children, it includes people who were financially really disadvantaged.

by what happened.

It includes the long tail of COVID, including many people with long COVID and ongoing disability as a result of that.

And I guess everyone needs to just reflect on

what it was that did go well and why decisions were made and I think to me that's the purpose of the inquiry is not necessarily to query every decision but to just to reflect on were they reasonable decisions in the moment were the right people involved was there sufficient advice taken

And when things maybe needed to change, were those changes considered?

And that was the purpose of the inquiries first and foremost.

Did you have any thought in your head as the pandemic was unfolding and our response to it, that there would be an inquiry?

This is a really important question.

We assumed there would be, but what was really important was that we weren't trying to second guess what an inquiry might look into and what the objectives of that inquiry might be.

And this is one of the things that bothers me if there's not a really balanced and thoughtful and non-politicised response, is that it could have a chilling effect on how we behave next time, in particular the willingness of public servants to walk towards a really big challenge because they may be

Even if they do, they may be second-guessing themselves the whole time about how will my advice look when people in two years' time use the retrospective scope conveniently to look back and say, well, why didn't you do this?

So I think this is very important for our country that actually

We have an amazing public service and actually I just did a LinkedIn post yesterday on the level of trust there is in our public service that went up significantly during COVID.

It's dipped back a little bit but it's still more than 10 percentage points higher than it was pre-COVID.

So New Zealanders have got quite a high level of trust in our public service and our public service was critical to our response and it will be critical to any other threat or challenge that comes our way.

So we want to

empower those people to not have to be thinking about how's this going to look when there might be an inquiry down the road yeah that whole second guessing is a nightmare it's terrible like you you you have to do what you can do with the information that you have to the best of your ability in the moment

Yeah, because you do not know what it's going to be.

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