Urgency

I move, That urgency be accorded the passing through all stages of the COVID-19 Public Health Response Bill and the passing through the remaining stages of the COVID-19 Response (Further Management Measures) Legislation Bill, and any bills into which it may be divided.

I will deal with the easy one first, which is the latter of those two bills, in terms of explaining the need for urgency. Members have—just in this debate that we have just concluded, on the second reading of that bill—outlined the reasons for it, outlined the urgency behind it, which is that many of those measures are needed to be put in place in order to ease the burden of COVID-19, in order to particularly ensure that our businesses can get back up on their feet and that the impacts of COVID-19 are, as far as possible, mitigated. So we’ve passed the second reading today—normally, Parliament will only do one stage of a bill at a time—and urgency is required in order to ensure that Parliament can complete the passage of that particular piece of legislation.

On to the more substantive issue though, which is the COVID-19 Public Health Response Bill. At the end of tomorrow, New Zealand moves into the next phase of the fight against COVID-19, when we move to alert level 2. We will move out of the cycle of the renewal of a national state of emergency. This bill, the public health response bill, establishes a fit-for-purpose legal framework for managing the unprecedented circumstances of the COVID-19 epidemic in a coordinated and orderly way where a national state of emergency may not exist. To this end, the bill establishes stand-alone legislation that provides a legal framework for responding to COVID-19 over the next two years, or until COVID-19 is brought under control, if that is sooner.

The need to pass that legislation is self-evident. The legal framework needs to be in place as we move to level 2 from 11.59 p.m. tomorrow night, Wednesday night, so that the powers and the protections that it creates will be available from the outset of level 2, and so that there will be no opportunity for the virus to regain a foothold in New Zealand because of a legislative hiatus.

New Zealand and New Zealanders have gained international respect for our response to and our resistance to COVID-19. This bill offers some assurance that the effort and sacrifice that the country has made will not be wasted, and the Attorney-General will talk specifically about the provisions of the bill in the first reading.