Nz will get thru this and eventually open up BUT their tourism industry is SHOT for years to come if Jacinda remains as leader. Who in their right mind would book a holiday to NZ for some new variant to emerge while you are there and get stuck with borders closed.!!
Not really---if I'm British and I go on holiday to NZ and a new variant arises while I'm in NZ, there is no particular reason why NZ wouldnt let me fly out of the country and go home. It's the other way round that's the issue! Kiwis may be very chary of flying out of NZ and going on holiday to Bali for several years, if there is a sort of anxious feeling that NZ is now a country that watches the world's virus situation intently and is prone to clanging the borders shut and locking out their citizens if they have got the wind up about something.
As I understand, the NZ tourist industry has actually done not-too-badly--everyone in NZ has just gone on holiday within their own country, making up much of the revenues lost from foreign tourists. This is not a practical solution for lower income and middle income countries like Jamaica and Thailand, where there are not enough locals wealthy enough for hotel-holidays. But NZ is lucky enough to be both geographically isolated AND have a population rich enough to self-fund its own tourism for a couple of years. So the closed borders have worked out OK in that respect.
The bigger question going forward, for NZ, will be the long-term impact on immigration.
I do think that it is likely that immigration will decline quite a bit, long-term. People will be really leery of migrating to a country that makes it so hard to visit relatives overseas. And countries which forcibly stop immigration for a bit will probably find that they need and prefer less immigration permanently, because industries will learn to adapt. For example, universities might start developing courses aimed at reskilling local workers, rather than relying on income brought by overseas students; agriculture and industry will invest more heavily in automation to reduce the need for human workers.
It's one way of doing things, and every country has the right to decide whether it wants to be an immigration-based economy or not of course. But, assuming this happens, I do think it's kind of funny that the political left in NZ will have effectively succeeded in doing what conservatives could not manage to do! There will be some interesting political pivoting going on.