Heather du Plessis-Allan: Jacinda Ardern and Chris Hipkins owe the people of Northland an apology

The Prime Minister and Chris Hipkins should just apologise to the people of Northland.

Of course they owe them an apology. They let three women cross the border from Auckland to Northland.  They gave them permission. And those women took Covid with them and Covid - back then - equalled a government lockdown.

Yes, it wasn’t Jacinda and it wasn’t Chris who signed off on the permission for those women to go over the border. It was some faceless bureaucrat in MSD. But it was the system that Jacinda and Chris designed and they are more than happy to take the credit for all the times they think their system worked, but they are not happy to take the blame when their system didn’t work.

That region went into an 11 day lockdown. And that was on top of being cut off from the rest of the country by Auckland’s border for months.  Chris and Jacinda’s refusal to apologise to Northlanders for what they had to go through says to me these two have no idea what Auckland and Northland and parts of Wakiato went through.  They sat comfy in Wellington for the entire duration of that Delta lockdown and border closure that went on for months, going to cafes and restaurants and being normal. They don’t know how hard that was. 

And they clearly don’t know also how shady this looks. They knew at the time of the lockdown that it was a government problem and they said nothing.  In that press conference at the very start they blamed the women for using "false information" to get travel permits.But they knew it was actually their fault.  Chris Hipkins let it slip in an interview that "There was a degree of error in the approval in the first place".  That was on day 5 of the lockdown.  But that was all he said, in one interview that most of us wouldn’t' have heard.  So they let us all believe for 11 months that those women were to blame and never corrected the record form what we can see. That’s shady.

So yes, they should apologise for the sake of the Northlanders who were put through that lockdown by a Government stuff up.  And for their own sake, because if they don’t, they’ll just keep on being untrustworthy and act like they don’t really care what happened to the people of Northland because their system stuffed up. 

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