Out for a long walk yesterday, I was surprised by the amount of traffic flowing around suburban Auckland. It seems like even the mention of Level Three, the light at the end of the tunnel, and people are starting to loosen up. This is where the science behind the government’s decision to lift lockdown meets psychology.

Tomorrow’s decision about when we move out of Level Four - and if we do it as a nation or region by region - will be one of the biggest decisions Cabinet had made in a long time. At least, it should be, except that so many decisions at the moment are bigger in scale than government in normal times. It’s really only the biggest decision since the previous one.

At the heart of the decision will be science. Specifically, the risk of further transmission and our ability to test and trace, provide surveillance and quarantine. But it can’t be the one and only factor, and nor should it be. A divide of sorts in the debate over how the government should act from here, between the bleeding heart humanitarians who see themselves as those who really, truly care about the loss of life and the hard-nosed realists who care about the economy and people’s livelihoods.

Governments don’t have the luxury of taking sides in that debate. The outcome is either one thing or another, but the when it comes to the decision our leaders are making there is no simple binary. There is no right or wrong decision. Whichever way we go from here, lives and livelihoods will be lost. Of course the life and death of New Zealanders is critical, but as Adrian Orr said to the select committee last week, the point of economies is to create wellbeing for citizens and communities, so the two are intrinsically intertwined.

The ability to build, buy and sell is critical to our wellbeing, just as is our mental health, our freedom of movement, our freedom from disease and so on. So the question is how Cabinet balances all those needs.

Like those plate spinners in circus acts, Cabinet has to figure out how to keep as many plates as possible in motion, keeping its eye on all and sundry, not just choosing the health plate over the economic plate, and so on.

You can also toss in a logistics plate, because there’s no point making decisions without the tools or resources to offer or enforce them.

And then there’s the psychology. On one hand, I’d suspect that many people would rather stay in Level Four for an extra week or two now, than come out of it and then have to bounce back for another week or two - or longer - down the track. Its easier to keep doing something a little longer now, than to adjust your mindset and then have to adjust back.

On the other hand, compliance fatigue is real. People resent being told what to do and our innate sense of rebellion and independence grows as time passes. Even the most decent and law-abiding folk will be tempted to justify being the exception to the rule, the longer this goes on.

I hope the government’s pollsters are still working, because Cabinet will need to carefully weigh the mood of the nation as it makes its decision. A big part of whether we look back and see tomorrow’s decision as wise or not will depend on whether the government gets buy-in. New Zealanders have by and large been incredibly compliant thus far; one of the key factors to consider is how long that will last.

As Victoria University clinical psychologist Dougal Sutherland said last week, people will need time to absorb the decision and process their feelings.

"Having a bored and grumpy population who are losing motivation is a situation the government will want to avoid."

If or when the government does ask more of us, one way to help the medicine go down would be a spoonful of sugar in the form of greater reward.

The wage subsidy at the moment is $585.80 per week for a full-time worker and $350.00 for part-time workers. That’s about 60% of the median wage. And it lags behind what’s on offer in countries such as Canada and Australia. The New Zealand Initiative, for example, points out that Canada’s subsidies “for companies of all sizes cover up to 75% of a worker’s wage, or 80% of the average Canadian weekly wage”.

It’s past time our government caught up with comparable countries, and if more is going to be asked of us in the coming weeks, this might be a good time to move.

Science must be at the heart of tomorrow’s big call, but it can’t be the only consideration. The goal is to figure out how to keep as many plates spinning for as long as possible.