Muller says Walker taking only option to stand down
National leader Todd Muller says his MP, Hamish Walker, is paying ‘‘the ultimate price’’ for his involvement in the leaking of Covid-19 patient information to media and apologises on behalf of his party.
Walker announced he will leave politics over his involvement in a leak of Covid-19 patient information to media. But he will remain in Parliament until the September election.
Muller said yesterday that Walker had ‘‘gone behind my back’’ with the leak and it was ‘‘the only option’’ for him to stand down. He said his party retained the ability to credibly attack the Government over Covid-19 despite the fracas.
‘‘We have had one MP who made a serious error and has paid the ultimate price in terms of his political career. I think that talks to a party that has high standards,’’ Muller said. ‘‘I signalled quite clearly in terms of my public comments that I had lost confidence in him. It was a serious error of judgment that has cost him his career.’’
Walker admitted on Tuesday to passing on leaked information to media. The admission came soon after a State Services Commission inquiry was launched into the leak.
Walker had received the information on the active Covid-19 patients from former National Party president Michelle Boag, who said the Ministry of Health sent her the personal details of Covid-19 patients, which she then leaked to the MP.
Boag resigned from her job as acting chief executive of the Auckland Rescue Helicopter Trust on Tuesday, after she confessed to leaking the details of Covid-19 patients to Walker, who in turn passed the details on to journalists.
The helicopter trust yesterday said Boag ‘‘never had access to any clinical or patient data’’.
Boag told Stuff the Ministry of Health sent her information about
Covid-19 patients throughout the pandemic response – in an ‘‘unsolicited’’ email to her personal email address – but only once did she decide to leak it to her National Party colleagues. ‘‘None of the
Covid-19 patient data did anything else but sit in the spreadsheet the ministry sent, it wasn’t entered anywhere. It just came in a spreadsheet, stayed in a spreadsheet, nothing was ever done with it, except to let people know where there was community transmission.’’
Boag said she would pass on the Covid-19 patient information to the clinicians at the helicopter trust, ‘‘so that they knew if they had a mission into a community where there had been an outbreak, they could prepare for that’’.
Yet the information kept coming until Monday, when the ministry contacted emergency service operators to ask if they still needed Covid-19 patient data.
Boag said she sent Walker one email and did not send the information to any other National MP.
She would not say exactly what the email contained, or why she sent Walker the patient details – ‘‘That’s a matter for the investigation. Apart from the people who I was authorised to send it to, the people in the [trust] who needed to know, and the fact that Hamish has said himself what he did with the information, I’m reserving all discussion for the inquiry.’’
Boag yesterday resigned from the National Party Auckland Central electorate team and the campaign committee for the electorate.