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National | ACT Party

Government under fire for rule breakers

Associate Health Minister Peeni Henare is defending the government's contact-tracing regime against mounting criticism by the opposition.

ACT Party leader David Seymour spoke to Te Ao Tapatahi this morning criticising New Zealand's current contact tracing model of "trust but verify".

He says, "Well, it's all trust and no verify, so when one or two people inevitably break the rules, the only remaining tool the Prime Minister has is public shaming, which sounds barbaric."

This comes after Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern yesterday said if people needed to call a family member or work colleague out for not following the rules, "then we should do that."

Seymour says the government should look to a Taiwanese monitoring system that he believes has effectively kept cases low.

Seymour says, "they've had 12 times fewer deaths than us per capita, and they have much greater challenges being a tiny densely populated island right next to China."

He says during lockdown the Taiwanese use triangulation technology from cellphone towers to track where people are through their mobile devices and if the person leaves the location where they should be, authorities call them and in some cases visit them.

Associate Health Minister Peeni Henare says New Zealand has challenges that are different from Taiwan's.

"As a government we looked at a number of models around the world about the way we do our technology, our contact tracing, our testing, managing our lockdown and our economy. And we decided, actually for the most part we are going to trust Aotearoa New Zealand and the team of five million to make sure that we can use an educated approach to ensure that people are abiding by the rules."

There are no new Covid-19 cases in the community to report. The original cases from the Papatoetoe cluster are believed to have recovered, so the current Papatoetoe community cluster sits at 12.

The prime minister and Health Minister Andrew Little will be making an announcement today about a review into the governments drug-buying agency Pharmac that Labour committed to during last year's election.