Jacinda Ardern promotes coronavirus ‘travel bubble’ between Australia and New Zealand

New Zealand’s prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, will join Australia’s national cabinet meeting on Tuesday to discuss approaches to managing the coronavirus, including the possible implementation of a trans-Tasman “travel bubble” between the two countries.

The Australian prime minister, Scott Morrison, who has been in regular dialogue with other leaders during the pandemic, invited Ardern to join Tuesday’s discussion with state premiers last week.

Australia and New Zealand have both deployed successful strategies to manage the pandemic, although New Zealand’s lockdown has been more stringent than Australia’s.

New Zealand on Monday reported no new cases of Covid-19 for the first time in a month. The country has recently eased restrictions from level four to level three.

Ardern told reporters on Monday the meeting of the national cabinet, which she would join by video-conference, would consider a trans-Tasman reopening, where Australians and New Zealanders could travel between the countries without a 14-day quarantine period.

Last week, Morrison said he had been in dialogue with Ardern about relaxing travelling restrictions between the two countries. “If there’s any country in the world with whom we can reconnect with first, undoubtedly that’s New Zealand,” Morrison said last Thursday.

Ardern said on Monday the creation of a trans-Tasman travel “bubble” was on the agenda, but would not happen instantly. “Don’t expect this to happen in a couple of weeks’ time,” she said. The two countries had a “very similar perspective of the type of timeline” that might be possible, she said.

“Both our countries’ strong record on fighting the virus has placed us in the enviable position of being able to plan the next stage in our economic rebuild and to include trans-Tasman travel and engagement in our strategy,” she said.

New Zealand’s foreign minister, Winston Peters, also backed the concept. Peters heaped praise on Australia’s National Rugby League for including the New Zealand Warriors in its competition. The team flew to the regional NSW town of Tamworth on Sunday and is now beginning a 14-day isolation period.

Peters said in a statement that the move showed a travel agreement between the countries “could work seriously well”.

Australian prime ministers have attended New Zealand’s cabinet meetings before, but Ardern said her attendance at Tuesday’s meeting was “without precedent”.

“It highlights what’s happened with cooperation at the state level and the mutual importance of both countries’ economies to each other,” she said.

Australian officials said Tuesday’s meeting would also consider the CovidSafe tracing app. Ardern said on Monday New Zealand had already been in touch with officials in Singapore, the originators of the contact-tracing app that Australia has largely replicated.

She said New Zealand was interested in pursuing technological solutions to managing the pandemic, but wasn’t relying on them, because there were “no silver bullets”.

Ardern said in late April community transmission had ceased in New Zealand. But she said isolated cases would continue to pop up and would continue “being stamped out” until a vaccine was found.

Morrison and the state premiers will meet twice this week to consider easing some of the restrictions imposed in Australia to flatten the curve of infections, with announcements expected on Friday.

Morrison has been keen to project that Australia is now on a path to easing some of the restrictions, and has also pressed for school students to return to classroom learning.

The states have hastened slowly on reopening schools, with Victoria refusing to switch course until the state has conducted mass testing over the next week.

The federal education minister, Dan Tehan, launched a swingeing political attack on the Victorian premier, Daniel Andrews, on Sunday, accusing him of taking a “sledgehammer” to education.

Tehan withdrew his comments a couple of hours later after Victoria queried whether he had overstepped the mark, and announced it would close a school campus because a teacher had returned a positive test for Covid-19. The federal education minister later blamed the outburst on “frustration”.

The closure of schools has been a persistent source of tension between the jurisdictions, but Andrews told reporters in Melbourne on Monday the national cabinet continued to work well, was taking the advice of “experts” and would not let “personal frustrations” get in the way of good decision-making.

“Comments were made yesterday morning, a statement was issued, that was the end of the matter as far as I was concerned … while they were out doing that, I tell you what we were doing – testing 13,000 people,” Andrews said Monday morning.

He told reporters he had not heard from Tehan, but was “not particularly worried” about him either.

Andrews also confirmed there was a new cluster of Covid-19 infections at a meat processing facility in Victoria.