Yesterday in Parliament there were two distinctly different statements about who knew what, when, about the new community cases.
Hon Judith Collins: At what time did she learn of likely recent community cases of COVID-19 in the Auckland area?
Rt Hon JACINDA ARDERN: It would have been somewhere between 11 and midday—there or thereabouts—on Sunday. At that point, of course, in the early stages of cases, the public health unit work very quickly to try and establish, in the first instance, whether we have a direct link between the border and the cases, because that can give us an indication as to whether or not we have leakage at the border, or whether or not we have a community outbreak, and that determines the kind of response that we’ll need.
Hansard
Then after Question Time during the Urgent Debate, Chris Hipkins started his speech with this:
Hon CHRIS HIPKINS (Minister for COVID-19 Response): On Saturday morning, early on Saturday morning, I received one of those phone calls which I dread, a phone call from the Director-General of Health to say that another COVID-19 case had been identified in the New Zealand community.
Hansard
They can’t both be right. Either Jacinda Ardern is lying or Chris Hipkins is lying.
Or they are both right and Chris Hipkins kept his Prime Minister in the dark, and then you have to wonder why that was.
I suspect we will never get the truth from either of these two.
But Ashley Bloomfield has said that he knew late on Saturday night and yet he rang Chris Hipkins and told him about it first thing in the morning the next day? What is wrong with this picture?
Hardly seems so urgent that we needed to lock down nearly two million people when the Director-General of Health didn’t pick up the phone and call his minister until the next day.
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