He told Newstalk ZB's Mike Hosking this morning that he regretted "in a way" not speaking out publicly at the time, but said he was bound by ensuring the Cabinet worked as a team with a cohesive approach - and that systems mattered.
Peters was responding to what he described as a "cheap shot" , after Hosking yesterday suggested Peters was gilding the lily in not taking responsibility for some of the holes in New Zealand's Covid response. "It's a cheap shot, you're wrong."
He said he had urged the Cabinet, two days before the first lockdown, that the military needed to be called in, that masks needed to be used, and that independent overseers such as Heather Simpson should be hired.
"The problem was we were trusting a bureaucracy and frankly I never would. In this business you ensure you have oversight, constant referral back every week - what's going wrong, what's going right."
Asked why he didn't speak publicly at the time, he said if you wanted to win an argument in an organisation, you work with people behind closed doors. But there was no harm in outlining the facts respectively - and no one in the Cabinet, including the Prime Minister, could deny that he'd been pushing the case for the military and masks.
"We're five months too late doing most of these things but we are doing them now. We finally got the army in, we finally got masks in."
He had a final swipe at Hosking: "Your team, Mike, the National party and Act party, haven't got a hope in China of making it. You know that. You better be counting on commonsense and rationality, you better be backing a party called NZ First."
The Government meets today to decide the immediate future of New Zealand's alert level 2 status - and a health expert believes stricter rules around masks in Auckland will help speed up a lowering to level 1.
Health officials are confident they are on top of the community outbreak of Covid-19 cases, ahead of the Cabinet meeting today to assess alert level settings - but warn cases will likely continue for several more weeks.
There were two new Covid-19 cases announced yesterday - one case a 21-year-old man linked to the Americold cool store group of cases and who was already in isolation as a close contact, and another woman in managed isolation.
The current alert level settings (level '2.5' for Auckland and 2 for the rest of the country) are in place until Sunday, September 6 - but Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern is set to announce a decision today on whether the country stays with that status for longer.
"We are not really seeing enough evidence yet of really good control ... we still get cases every day in the community. To be really confident, we should be waiting to see days where there's no new cases," Wilson told Mike Hosking.
"I think we could move faster [by] using masks better."
He believed masks could be made mandatory in areas other than public transport, which would help speed up elimination of the virus and a return to level 1.
That would be good for business, too, he said, in that with more mask-wearing, physical distancing could be reduced.
Dr William Rainger, director of Auckland Regional Public Health Service, joined Health Minister Chris Hipkins at Middlemore Hospital for yesterday's cases update, and told media "we can be pretty confident that we are on top of this".
"The epidemic curve peaked about two weeks ago, it is undulating downwards. We have had the Mt Roskill church congregation, which has given it a little spike, but the direction of travel is downwards," Rainger said.
"So all the current clusters that we are aware of and working on, we believe we have well contained ... but we would expect to see cases for probably another few weeks."
An "overwhelming" majority of cases were already identified through contact tracing and tested as a result of that, Rainger said.
Asked about one recent case without a confirmed link - a person whose brother travelled to Hobbiton - he said it was under investigation but "is likely to have been a historical exposure".
"There has been no onward spread as a result of that. That makes us believe that there is no further risk associated with those cases."
