“The Government needs to release full details of the contacts made with the family of cases L, M, N and O at the centre of the South Auckland cluster,” says ACT Leader David Seymour.

“The Prime Minister is fighting an asymmetrical information war, drip feeding details from the highest pulpit in the land against people who have no platform to respond.

“Conveniently this tactic avoids scrutiny of the Government’s performance as the Prime Minister whips up anger towards unnamed individuals.

“But what if in actual fact it's the Prime Minister that has let down the whole country, inviting the full judgment of the entire nation?

“The only real answer is to release the full and objective details of what occurred.

“If they won’t do that they must ask the Ombudsman to review the information and release his findings so the public can be satisfied everything that should have been done was done.

“One of the Ombudsman’s primary roles to investigate the administrative conduct of public sector agencies, and that is exactly what is at the heart of this situation.

“We have at least one member of the family in the public absolutely at odds with the Government story over the level of contact.

“The Prime Minister says she’s checked the logs and she’s satisfied – so release the logs Prime Minister; release all the evidence.

“Director General of Health Ashley Bloomfield was adamant this morning that isolating families receive a phone call every day and if they don’t answer the phone they are visited.

“That means there must be logs of successful phone calls or visits to the property, but case L says neither thing happened.

“Auckland is locked down right now and the rest of the country is significantly inconvenienced because public health orders were breached.

“At least one member of the family says they were breached because the things the Prime Minister says her officials did weren’t actually done.

“What is the information the Prime Minister has seen that has satisfied her that her officials are right and did everything they should have?

“We need to get to the bottom of this and we only will with the sort of transparency expected of democratically elected Governments.”

ENDS