Listening to Simon Bridges valuing the democracy theatre of commuting between Wellington and Tauranga over working effectively from home and making himself available to the press in his duties on the Epidemic Response Committee is somewhat enraging. https://twitter.com/NZMorningReport/status/1247610235948118017

I support Bridges chairing the committee, consider it both essential and beneficial to our epidemic response, and have no problem, in theory, with him doing so from Parliament... but...

Let's face it: There is no good reason that Mr Bridges should not have access to all the officials he likes working from home or from his electorate office, and in these times I would have expected him to be pro-actively informed by officials and by the government.

Yes, he might potentially lose the odd bit of non-critical on-the-ground information by remoting in and requiring phone or email. If he wants that information so badly as leader of the Opposition, the responsible thing to do would be to self-isolate here in Wellington, instead.

What he is doing, while not as obviously stupid as David Clark, still seems incredibly reckless and not an intelligent trade-off, and setting an extremely poor example in a time when leaders should be extolling the virtues of staying isolated and working remotely.

Instead, he has questioned that the Health Minister was able to function in his role remotely, when there doesn't in fact seem to be any evidence of such a struggle. Clark's poor recent performance is much more easily explained by the impending end of his ministerial career.

While I find the Epidemic Response Committee valuable, I do not find it so valuable that Bridges can go around undermining confidence in other critical aspects of our response without hard evidence to back him up. This point-scoring nonsense around remoting needs to stop.