On Halloween eve in Wanniassa, a house party got out of control, swelled to about 150 kids, and the fallout from that "superspreader" event has been more than 30 COVID-19 infections, absolute chaos at a number of Canberra schools and heartbreak for some students caught up in it through absolutely no fault of their own.

While we may be stepping further out of restrictions today, we should remember that on October 30 such gatherings were far, far beyond the allowed numbers. And we assume for good reason. While the full epidemiological story is still sketchy, the timing suggests some of the teenagers who were there were likely still only protected by one vaccination shot, or barely past having received their second.

In any other jurisdiction in Australia, this event would surely have been the subject of a press conference almost the moment it was known. Senior police, government ministers and chief health officers would all have used it as a blunt warning of the risk of illegal gatherings.

But not in Canberra.

No, here it took The Canberra Times, acting on a tip, to extract like teeth the fact that we had just experienced one of our worst infection events of the whole pandemic. Even while belatedly confirming the 30-plus cases that were directly traced to the party, ACT Health said it was "not appropriate" to comment on the incident.

In other places, the government might have recognised the error of its ways the next morning when it saw the headlines and heard the radio bulletins, and perhaps apologised for not disclosing something so obviously in the public interest.

But instead, on Thursday Health Minister Rachel Stephen-Smith doubled down, insisting that because it was "a private event", there was no public interest in its disclosure, regardless of its very public, far-reaching consequences.

What a remarkable line to have drawn.

After effectively communicating daily throughout the serious outbreak stage (and having received plaudits from this newspaper for its approach), the government has now jerked back to its old ways, using and abusing the notion of "privacy" to avoid scrutiny.

Privacy, the right not to have unreasonable intrusion into your personal life, is important. Whatever you may think of journalists, the truth is we manage privacy concerns every single day. We conceal the identities of victims of crime. We protect whistleblowers. We respectfully deal with families in crisis or who have experienced tragedy.

But we do this with the community of Canberra's interests in mind and the awareness that sometimes the public right to know overrides the desire for an individual to keep something important secret. Hence those court reports you read each day. I'm yet to meet someone who's keen that we report their conviction, but the courts hold transparency as a key principle.

The way Andrew Barr's government and its agencies seem to interpret privacy is quite different to any definition I know. Based on this newspaper's experience, it seems it's the right of individuals and groups not to be upset by publicity, no matter the justification, no matter that their actual privacy is not being breached.

It's for so-called privacy reasons that the government has not provided suburb-by-suburb vaccination rates. We have to assume they're fearful of stigmatising certain suburbs, but they don't say that.

Even more remarkably, last week the government refused to confirm the vaccination status of a man in his 40s who had died, out of concern for his family's privacy. We had no way of identifying him, and certainly no desire to if it was against his family's wishes.

But we certainly saw an unarguable public interest in the community knowing that being an unvaccinated adult at this point in the pandemic can have deadly consequences.

Impressing on the remaining vaccine holdouts that we are now in the "pandemic of the unvaccinated" surely served the interests of a public health system that has been working so hard and so well to manage the impact of the virus.

It would be like police refusing to say whether an anonymous road fatality victim was wearing a seatbelt because the family would prefer it not be known.

On Thursday, I asked our Facebook subscribers group what they thought of Ms Stephen-Smith's justification for the government not disclosing the police and health investigation into the Halloween party and its impact. The consensus was that revealing details was in the public interest.

But are enough Canberrans concerned enough about this issue for the government to take heed, or indeed an opposition?

Are they concerned about secrecy, of non-disclosure, of excuses like "privacy" or "commercial-in-confidence" being regularly used to keep them in the dark?

Do they care? Do you care? I'm interested to know.

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