Health Minister Chris Hipkins is not keen on a "heavy-handed enforcement regime" for face coverings after the Government made them mandatory on public transport and Ubers under alert level 2 and above.
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced the mandatory use of face coverings on public transport and Ubers on Monday, after "strongly encouraging" their use earlier this month where social distancing was difficult.
It came after the Ministry of Health on Monday confirmed eight new cases of COVID-19 in the community, one of which had contact with another confirmed case on a bus.
"Given the recent transmission we have seen on this form of transport, Cabinet has decided to move to mandating the wearing of face coverings on public transport for level 2 and above," Ardern said. "These new orders will come into force from Monday."
Hipkins, speaking to The Breeze on Tuesday morning, said it means people will not be able to travel on a bus or a train or hop in the back of a taxi or an Uber unless they are wearing a face covering.
"You will need to wear a face covering, so bear in mind a face covering doesn't mean a medical grade hospital mask. It means you're covering your face so that if you cough or sneeze you're not spraying your particles everywhere when you do that," he said.
"We know from the latest Auckland cluster that it would appear one of the areas where it spread is on the back of a bus."
Hipkins then talked about enforcement of the new policy.
"We don't want to end up with a heavy-handed enforcement regime so we're saying to people, you know, please do this, it's the rules," he said.
Hipkins did not expand what he meant by "heavy-handed".
"At the end of the day, we didn't have to do a lot of enforcement of our level 4 and level 3 lockdowns because actually, New Zealanders understood why we were doing it and they wanted to comply with the rules because they wanted to get out of the restrictions as quickly as we could," he added.
"Similarly with masks, we don't want to have to focus on enforcement here. We just want people to do the right thing."
A report by the Ministry of Justice on alert level 4 says prosecutions for breaching the restrictions were in fact "widespread". In total, there were 608 charges filed in the District Court for breaching the restrictions.
Under the latest alert level 3 restrictions in Auckland, five people have received warnings and two have been arrested and charged, the latest police update on Thursday said.
Police say their focus remains on engaging, encouragement and education with the public, and that generally, police are "seeing our community doing an excellent job of following the rules and social distancing".
