The Front Page: Should Govt apologise to women at centre of Northland lockdown?

There was a strictly enforced border between Northland and Auckland. Photo / Tania Whyte

The two women who sent Northland into an 11-day lockdown after entering the region have requested an apology from the Government.

While initial reports suggested that they were sex workers and gang affiliated, a 700-page file into the case has revealed that none of this was true.

It's also been revealed that the only reason they were allowed into Northland at all was because of a bureaucratic blunder.

Given these circumstances, how likely is it that the Government will give these women an apology?

"If there's no apology yet, I don't think there will be one that comes," says Herald senior writer David Fisher, who waited six months for the full case file to be released to him.

"I do think there is some strength to the argument for an apology to be made. These women were vilified and wrongly painted as border-breaking sex workers."

Fisher tells the Front Page podcast all of this could have been avoided if the Government had clarified the facts earlier.

"If the Government had been very clear at the outset about the nature of the error and where blame lay, I don't think it would have got as out of hand as it did."

"I think there's also an argument for some introspection on the part of the media. These women weren't prostitutes, and they weren't doing anything wrong."

Thus far, the Government has said that there was nothing new in this matter and that everything had already been addressed previously.

"The discovery that the error was entirely one of the Government's own making was completely sidestepped when Hipkins addressed it [this week] - as was the silence around the myth that these women were sex workers and gang affiliated.

"And that was a really useful myth for the Government because it took attention away from where the error actually was."

This entire saga has again sparked strong emotions in the community directly affected by this issue.

"The response from Northland has been anger in both cases," says Fisher.

"There was the initial anger that, according to what we knew at the time, there were a couple of women who had used false information to come north and ply their trade as sex workers...

"That anger has switched. And that anger is now very much focused on the Wellington bureaucracy. This is a part of the country that often feels forgotten by Wellington. There's not much recognition that once you leave Auckland, there's still six hours of driving to reach the top of the country."

Fisher says that the nature of this blunder is part of the reason he has long been in favour of a Royal Commission into our Covid-19 response.

"I've maintained from about six months into the first lockdown that we needed a Royal Commission of Inquiry to act as a sounding board for the sorts of decisions the Government made."

Fisher argues that this approach would have supported good decision-making and would have ensured greater transparency.

"It's a shame we haven't had that, and I think we need to have that as a matter of urgency."

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