COVID-19 Response (Further Management Measures) Legislation Bill

I move, That the COVID-19 Response (Further Management Measures) Legislation Bill be now read a second time.

I’d like to acknowledge the work of the Epidemic Response Committee for the careful deliberation on this bill, given the very, very tight time frame they were given to do that. In particular, I understand I should acknowledge the acting chair of the committee, Michael Woodhouse, for being a steady pair of hands in shepherding this bill through what was undoubtedly a very short select committee process. I’d like to thank everybody who made a submission on the bill. I know that the Epidemic Response Committee were impressed by the way, at very short notice, submitters had carefully considered the amendments in the bill, and I believe that the bill has been improved as a result of those submissions and the committee’s deliberations.

Before I go into the changes recommended by the committee, I do want to give a brief overview of the bill. The important purpose of the bill is to manage the response to COVID-19. The fact that it amends or modifies 45 different pieces of legislation—[Interruption]

💬 SPEAKER: I’m just going to warn the member, the thing will finish in a minute.

Oh yeah, that’s all right. The fact that it covers 45 different pieces of legislation does show the wide-ranging effect that COVID-19 has had on the New Zealand economy and society. There are two tiers of amendments in this bill. The first tier deals with more significant amendments that enable businesses, local government, and others to effectively manage the immediate impacts of COVID-19 and to mitigate unnecessary and potentially long-term impacts on society. These include changes to insolvency and corporate law to increase the prospects of businesses surviving the COVID-19 response; changes to property law to support commercial tenants and borrowers to manage situations where businesses are unable to pay their rent or meet their mortgage payments; changes to parental leave to enable COVID-19 response workers to temporarily return to work to assist the response to COVID-19 without being disadvantaged and losing their entitlement to certain leave and payments; changes to local government by-election timing to enable key stages of by-elections to be postponed until movement restrictions are no longer in place; changes to the Gambling Act to enable the Heart Foundation, the Coastguard, and the Countdown Kids Charitable Trust to send and receive forms and take payments for their lotteries online or by phone.

The bill also includes a number of minor and technical changes that are necessary to respond to and recover from COVID-19. These will include deferring new regulatory requirements in circumstances where Government agencies or businesses would have difficulty implementing new legislation or requirements that are due to come into force while New Zealand is still responding to COVID-19, deferring existing statutory deadlines and other minor exemptions where compliance would not be possible or would be unreasonably burdensome, mitigating impracticality issues that have arisen through the response to COVID-19—for example, changing the Coroners Act 2006 to enable a coroner to direct a pathologist to takes swabs to test for COVID-19 as part of a post-mortem exam situation where the deceased is suspected to have had COVID-19—to mitigate problems with legislative compliance that have arisen due to physical presence requirements and other technological reasons.

As I indicated, the Epidemic Response Committee has recommended several changes, and these have been presented to the House in the form of a Supplementary Order Paper. They have suggested that the bill should clarify the amendments in relation to hearings, examinations, and appearances by use of audio-only link as opposed to audiovisual link. They have suggested there should be some minor changes to the Unit Titles Act to maintain consistent language and to clarify that the changes will apply from when the epidemic notice came into force and will have effect for 12 weeks after the notice expires or is revoked. They clarify that during the extended duration period, for firearms and dealers licences that may have expired during lockdown, the application fees for the new replacement licensing will be the same as those that applied on 24 March.

A new Schedule 14A should be added to the bill to modify the Rating Valuations Act. This is because it may not be possible for some councils to practicably complete a credible general re-evaluation to statutory deadlines due to the likely impacts of COVID-19 on the property market in the latter half of the year. There is clarification for the bill to ensure that it is clear that a temporary return to work as a COVID-19 response worker is not a return to work from parental leave for the purpose of section 14 of the Parental Leave and Employment Protection Act.

There are also a number of changes recommended to the insolvency and corporate law - related amendments in the bill as a result of the submissions made to the committee. Briefly, these recommendations include changes to modification and exemption provisions in Part 2 of the Act to change the expiry date for the corporate governance modification and exemption provisions from 30 September to 30 November 2020, to add voting integrity provisions in relation to electronic meetings, to add counting people for quorum purposes to the list of electronic meeting permissions, and other minor and technical changes to make the modification and exemption regimes more effective.

Changes to safe harbour provisions are to add a purpose clause to assist with understanding of the scope of safe harbour and providing that Ministers must have regard to that purpose when making regulations relating to safe harbour; to make it clear that any entity incorporated before the date of announcement of the safe harbour on 3 April 2020 can have the benefit of it, provided that they meet the threshold test. Changes to business debt hibernation provisions are to ensure that the business debt hibernation provisions regime is easy to understand and navigate for small businesses, noting that Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment websites will have educational and guidance material available, including removing the need for a statutory declaration to enter the business debt hibernation scheme; clarifying the scope of protections to businesses through the moratorium; making it clear that creditors with large over the whole, or substantially the whole, of the property of the business—general security arrangements holders are not bound by the moratorium; clarifying the voting rules; and modifying the way that the voidable transactions provisions will apply when a business is in a business debt hibernation mode.

I have also released Supplementary Order Paper 493. This is a technical Supplementary Order Paper, which amends two clauses to the bill that calculate the periods of time in reference to the orders or other restrictions under section 70 of the Health Act. In both cases, it adds a reference to an order made under the COVID-19 Public Health Response Act 2020 so that the calculation of time can also be done with reference to an order made under the Act.

So once again, I’d like to thank the Epidemic Response Committee, my ministerial colleagues and their officials who have worked on these amendments, and the numerous officials who have worked on the bill. The effects of the COVID-19 epidemic are being felt widely across the country. This bill does assist New Zealanders to respond, and I commend it to the House.

Debate interrupted.