Isolation breach helps Muller

The politics of Covid recovery and border security, which has quickly turned poisonous, took another incredible turn yesterday.

First Todd Muller came straight out of the gate in the morning demanding that Hamish Walker be stripped of his National Party nomination for his safe seat for leaking Covid-19 patient information to media, which he was given by former party president Michelle Boag.

Boag also resigned as chairwoman of deputy leader Nikki Kaye’s Auckland central campaign committee.

Stuff understands that some of Muller’s reluctance to denounce Walker too early was because Walker had his lawyers onto Muller to, ironically, protect his own privacy!

But the day threw up more questions than answers. When Boag first announced on Tuesday night that she had supplied the information to Walker, she said that she had obtained the information through her role as acting chief executive of the Auckland Rescue Helicopter trust, but that it was sent to a private email address. That seemed to settle the matter.

That was until yesterday morning, when the trust put out a statement claiming that none of its privacy protocols were breached and that Boag did not have access to patient information.

According to Boag, who spoke to Stuff, she received the information from the Ministry of Health in her role as acting chief executive of the trust. According to her it was information that had been regularly shared with emergency services during lockdown and had kept flowing until the ministry started asking questions on Monday.

But in the middle of all of this, and just as Muller’s day looked like getting worse – the Walker/ Boag taint was completely distracting from his $1.5 billion proposed new motorway between Christchurch and Ashburton – another Government border problem dropped in his lap.

An ashen-faced Health Minister Chris Hipkins fronted up to media with Air Commodore Digby Webb and explained that a Covid positive man had escaped his self-isolation hotel while mistaken for a contractor erecting a new fence.

The bloke wandered around a supermarket and then ambled back to the facility an hour and 10 minutes after he left. A fair amount of his time was still unaccounted for.

While Hipkins and Webb were rightly furious at this man pointing out that he broke the law and that charges would be pressed, it did highlight the strange legal twilight zone that is the New Zealand’s growing quarantine archipelago. These places are not prisons, the security personnel cannot restrain people, but can only call the police.

After all, the people in isolation in quarantine have done nothing wrong and the state shouldn’t treat them like criminals. But after this episode, it now appears that police may have to be permanently posted at these facilities, if only to assuage public anxiety.

Politically, it was a bit of a Godsend for National. The ‘‘everyday glitches’’ along the border continue, according to Muller.

The trouble with Covid is that despite all of National’s problems, they are put in perspective by the fact that just weeks after life went back to normal, someone with Covid-19 spent an hour out and about in Auckland two days ago.

To really put this into perspective, look across the ditch. At 2am today, Melbourne went back into the Australian level 3 lockdown for six weeks: people have to stay at home, only travel if necessary and not leave Melbourne.

And one of the major believed causes of the new outbreak? Security guards taking lax precautions at isolation facilities.