“The Prime Minister’s post-Cabinet press conference today was a nauseating stream of self-congratulation when what she should have been doing was apologise,” says ACT Leader David Seymour.

“Make no mistake, our biggest city is in a three day lockdown because someone who worked in close proximity to the border wasn’t vaccinated.

“That worker and her colleagues could have been vaccinated by now, but New Zealand stood back and allowed 78 other countries to steal a march on us.

“To claim some sort of success because we aimed to be about the 100th country on the planet to vaccinate and instead we’ll be about 80th is an attempted triumph of spin over substance.

“The state we’re in is nothing to be proud of Prime Minister.

“Very little has been done in recent months to harden our defences or improve contact tracing and testing, despite the more contagious variants.

“Why are we so far behind Australia rolling out widespread saliva testing, for instance?

“What happened to the trial of the COVID card?

“Paying lip service to common sense improvements to our COVID defences isn’t plugging the gaps in our system.

“The latest outbreak is proof of that, and the Prime Minister has no reason to be smugly patting herself on the back.”

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