I can report that the wheels appear to be officially falling off the 1 o’clock press briefings.

We have come a long long way from an adoring media beaming back at the Prime Minister as she smiled broadly about teddy bears in windows and tooth fairies being exempt to the lockdown. Oh how the worm is turning.

Yesterday for the first time it felt like the press were waking up.

We didn’t get questions about how the PM was feeling, or whether Bloomfield had won Lotto.

No, instead officials got a barrage of non stop questions on the testing fiasco.

Question after question on why there hadn’t been enough carried out, who was to blame, or at the very least take responsibility, how the ball had been dropped so badly, why no one at government level was checking on it.

This part in particular is galling given while the PM was busy telling all of us that all border workers were being tested, her government was in fact not even checking that was the case. And for two months no one at government level seemed to register anything and go hang on, wait a minute, where are the border worker test results? Oh that’s right, we don’t have any. Jeez, does that mean we’re not testing?

So now we have the inevitable chasing of the tail.

And while we’re chasing our tails, we have a community cluster growing, and our first case outside of that community cluster. Unsurprisingly that’s a border worker at the quarantine hotel who doesn’t routinely work there, but goes in and out in a maintenance capacity. Shockingly he showed up for work with a cough, and passed the health check and carried on into work, which begs the question, are the health checks for quarantine facility workers stringent enough?

Well we may never know, because while the press came to life with a battery of questions yesterday, the answers from those in charge were elusive, and underwhelming.

“I don’t have that detail”.. “It’s a mystery”… “We’ll follow that up”.. “We just don’t know”.. “We’ll look at how we can strengthen that”..

These were the actual answers given to questions. I wish I was making that up, I’m not. That’s the level of accountability and competence running things right now. “We just don’t know, it’s all a mystery.”

Let’s hope the mysteries start getting solved real quick, because there is a yawning gap in accountability right now. A total disconnect between what we’re being told and what is actually happening. It’s flu vaccines and PPE all over again. The theory is not matching the reality.

And no one is to blame. Not the Ministry of Health, not the ministers, not the defence force, not the PM, not Ashley Bloomfield, no one.

This is a shambles, and if broadcasting standards allowed, I’d be using the word cluster in an entirely other capacity to describe it.