'I know how tough it is at the bottom'

She may live a privileged lifestyle but Lady Deborah Chambers knows what it's like on struggle street.

- SARAH CATHERALL

Last month, Lady Deborah Chambers went on her first trip to see her adult children in Australia since the borders reopened. You could hear the relief in the barrister's voice that she wasn't required to endure managed isolation and quarantine on return.

In January, the leading divorce lawyer spent 10 days in MIQ in an Auckland hotel. It's fair to say it made her blood boil.

Like all of us, the 61-year-old has been affected by Covid restrictions: some of her colleagues at Bankside Chambers have been working from home because of the Covid isolation requirements, and her PA was also off for a time with the virus. Over the past two years, Chambers has made it clear what she thinks of the government's management of the pandemic - so much so that if you hadn't heard of her legal work and the impact she has had as a divorce and trust litigation lawyer, you might well have heard of her now.

In late February, an opinion piece the Queen's Counsel wrote for the New Zealand Herald attracted almost 1000 comments online before the Herald put a stop to them.

In the column, Chambers argued that the emergency Covid legislation giving the government the power to control our freedom of movement was no longer justified in removing our rights, enshrined in the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act 1990. Epidemiologists and health bureaucrats should have been only advisers, not dictators, of government policy, she wrote, and the government's obsessive focus on Covid-19 was to the exclusion of all else.

“There's a new view that we are entitled to be permanently safe from all bad things.”