Unvaccinated teenagers will soon no longer have to show a vaccine passport to enter council-owned facilities for Education Outside The Classroom (EOTC).
The new Ministry of Education legislation, due to come into effect by March 15, was announced by council’s general manager of recreation Steve Gibling at the Performance, Policy and Partnerships committee today.
Steve told the meeting he received a letter from Sport New Zealand, and council’s chief executive Clare Hadley also received correspondence from the Department of Internal Affairs, saying the Ministry of Education had advised it was making changes to the Covid-19 Framework.
This was around curricular and extra-curricular activities including EOTC.
Vaccine pass requirements will soon be illegal for those participating in school activities outside the classroom.
Once the legislation is passed, council cannot ask young people to present their pass, but it only applies to school activities, for example if there was a water polo game played at Splash Palace on a Friday night.
Council has already indicated that it was reviewing the use of vaccine passes at its facilities in April, and councillors questioned how this new legislation would work at Stadium Southland.
The stadium is a public facility and not owned by the council, but currently can only operate with groups of 100 at a time, making tournaments extremely difficult as it is, without having to soon apply vaccine exemptions for EOTC.
Steve said until he actually saw the new legislation, he wasn’t exactly sure how it would apply to Stadium Southland.
“Because of the pool, we do have a unique operating capacity, we can put more than 100 people in there.”
Councillor Nigel Skelt, also the Stadium Southland manager, said the issue for him was around parents and the confusion of the existing rules.
“We have a massive anomaly in the current policy.”
Deputy Mayor Nobby Clark believed it wasn’t wise to leave the council review of vaccine mandates another month until mid-April – especially given the recent public protest about the situation.
“This is going to be a massive inconsistency….we already have had a lot of criticism from a small section of the community,” he said.
Meeting chair Darren Ludlow said given that Government was due to make new legislation around vaccine mandates for school children, an extra meeting could be called in the next few weeks to deal with the issue.