Your quote feels deceptively lacking in context. In particular, the second part ("Unless... truth") is in response to a direct question about a viral hoax that suggested an imminent lockdown. It seems quite reasonable to me that the government should be the one source of truth on their own intended policies, just as it seems reasonable that a news reporter's publications should remain the source of truth on that reporter's writing and perspectives.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/jacinda-ardern-truth/

- "It seems quite reasonable to me that the government should be the one source of truth on their own intended policies"

Why shouldn't citizens have the right to speculate that their government is lying to them about its intended plans?

They clearly do, but there is a difference between speculating and posing as the government and lying about what the real government is saying.

Which one is the Washington Post, when the US government says X, but the Post says they interviewed two anonymous insider sources and the truth is actually Y? Are they "posing as the government"?

Does that change if the sources happen to be wrong?

I don't understand the perspective of the other side of this position, at all, frankly. Contradicting official narratives isn't some edge-case scenario we're just thinking up; it's the core competence of the Fifth Estate.

When you read that on a newspaper you know that you're reading a newspaper and they tell you that they've talked with people that allegedly told them something different than the official line.

This doesn't happen with stuff like "no, no the Senate actually didn't pass that law yesterday" that are a matter of obvious public record.

If you're acknowledging a newspaper as a potential source of truth, you're no longer acknowledging the government as the sole source.

I'm going to put it this way: "reputable" newspapers generally want to influence opionion (lie) in a somewhat subtle way. Publishing trivially disprovable falsehoods about official acts isn't how they act, so you can generally trust the parliament-does-something -> official act -> newspaper writing about the official act custody chain insofar as the official act actually existing.

MBS, theocratic dictator of Saudi Arabia, is very fond of being the one source of truth about the murder of Jamal Khashoggi.

Xi Jinping, communist dictator of China, is very fond of being the one source of truth about genocide of Muslim Uighurs in Xinjiang.

Donald Trump, former corrupt president of the United States, is very fond of being the one source of truth about the 2020 election (or would be, if we let him).

They should have that right. I didn’t say otherwise, nor do I mean otherwise. That doesn’t mean that such speculation is an alternative source of truth for the government’s actual plans.

Agree to disagree that the fluff in the middle of the statement matters. You did just link a snopes "fact-check" that agrees that, "Unless You Hear It from Us, It Is Not the Truth'?", is correctly attributed. The rest of the article is spin, as is often the case with snopes.

The truth is independent of any political or journalistic entity. It's incredibly naive to think that self-appointed arbiters of truth will stop at one issue, the one that you happen to agree with them on.

The omitted part drastically alters the meaning and you just ran with it.

It does not in the slightest. I don't care what question she was answering. The statement is absolutely bone chilling in any context.

I don't find it "chilling in all contexts" at all. Organizations very often set up a single channel for information distribution to avoid confusion arising from rumours, personal opinions and speculations. "Whatever gets posted at _____ should be treated as verified info, and everything else you hear as unverified" is very common during events such as natural disasters.

Imagine that you're talking about database transactions or crypto key exchanges, instead of executive acts.

Humans, and the systems they create amongst themselves, like governments, are infinitely more fallible than hardened features of computer systems like database transactions. This is an unbelievably poor analogy.

This entire conversation reaffirms my belief that we need to require more humanities education for STEM majors.

What is being said here is basically the tautological truth that official government acts are indeed the official government acts, generally with some mechanism such as signing, publishing in an official gazette or something like that. Not that government can define reality.

Your Trump example in the other post is the most interesting because Trump actually created confusion on this point, by tweeting random stuff about acts that he then would never follow the proper channels for etc.