National Party leader Judith Collins is calling for tougher monitoring of COVID-19 contacts supposed to be self-isolating following the emergence of two new community cases on Saturday.
She says the Government needs to work harder to find out if people are breaking self-isolation rules and being "overly kind" to those who do will only cause further "suffering" for the team of 5 million.
"People are self-isolating at home and they're being phoned, four times in one case, by the contact tracing people and they just leave it," she told Newshub Nation.
"Well, why isn't someone going round there and seeing them?"
Collins wants contacts to be chased up, ensuring none are unaccounted for.
"Because a failure to go and door knock, a failure to find out where they are, a failure to involve [the] police in it - what happens then with that failure is that everybody else suffers."
Auckland was moved to alert level 3 at 6am on Sunday while the rest of the country moved to level 2.
It's been revealed one of the new cases visited a gym while their COVID-19 test results were still pending. The visit comes after another case worked at KFC Botany when they were supposed to be self-isolating.
While Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said on Friday she was "frustrated" the KFC worker broke self-isolation rules, she didn't want an environment where possible cases didn't want to come forward.
"One of the things we need is an environment where people can feel like even if they've made the wrong choice, even if they've gotten tested later than they should've, they still do what we need them to do."
COVID-19 Response Minister Chris Hipkins also asked the public on Sunday to not delay getting a coronavirus test because they think the public may have an "adverse reaction" to their actions.
He dismissed the idea of hunting down those who weren't following the rules adding that sanction "increases the potential for people who might have the virus to not come forward and that is not the space we want to be in".
Collins said the idea of sanctions causing a hidden outbreak was a "diversion" from Ardern.
"What we know is that when people understand that self-isolation means exactly that it, doesn't mean going to the gym, it doesn't mean having everybody over for a party it does mean self-isolating - and if we have people being checked on then that is something that is going to help."
Collins added that closer monitoring works in other countries and there are ways the government could enforce self-isolation.
