National Party leader Judith Collins says Gerry Brownlee's comments that the Government was holding back critical Covid-19 information from the public were a "surprise" to her.
Last week, National's deputy leader made comments at a press conference implying the Government knew more than they were letting on in the run up to placing Auckland in Alert Level 3 and the rest of the country in Level 2 for two weeks.
"I just think it was interesting that the messaging around a further outbreak of Covid-19 began a couple of weeks ago, about 10 days ago in fact, on top of that there was the issue of the masks we were encouraged to start purchasing and have them available in the emergency kit," Mr Brownlee said.
"Dr Bloomfield went a little bit further and in one interview I saw him suggesting people might wear a mask for one day a week just to get used to the idea.
Gerry Brownlee today said the Government's recent messaging on masks and testing was "interesting timing". (Source: Other)
"Then you had the Prime Minster’s visit to the mask factory and Dr Bloomfield having a test himself, after 102 days of no community transmission, all very interesting things to have happened a matter of hours before there was a notification of the largest residential part of New Zealand going into a lockdown," Mr Brownlee said.
However, when asked on TVNZ1's Breakfast this morning if she knew Mr Brownlee was about to make those comments, Ms Collins admitted "it was a bit of a surprise".
She added, though, that Mr Brownlee had since apologised over the statements.
"He was just reflecting the anxiety that we're hearing from the communities and I think you know that there's been a lot of theories going around on social media, particularly Facebook," she said.
"Gerry was just reflecting the anxiety that we were hearing because it's quite awful for people because they don't know how things have happened and they want to find out what's happened.
"My advice to everybody is calm down, understand that people have lots of theories but until we actually know it's best not to actually indulge in them."
Watch Judith Collins' full interview on Breakfast below:
The Opposition leader said it wouldn't have been tenable to have the election in a few weeks. (Source: Other)
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