COVID-19 ORDERS — Approval

I move, That this House approve the following orders made under the COVID-19 Public Health Response Act 2020:

COVID-19 Public Health Response (Air Border) Order (No 2) Amendment Order (No 9) 2021

COVID-19 Public Health Response (Required Testing) Amendment Order (No 3) 2021

COVID-19 Public Health Response (Air Border) Order (No 2) Amendment Order (No 10) 2021.

First, by way of background, as we do when we confirm these orders, under the COVID-19 Public Health Response Act, as the responsible Minister, I am able to issue a variety of orders that compel people to do things or to not do things depending on the situation as part of our overall public health response when it comes to dealing with COVID-19. The orders that I issue, if they are not confirmed by a motion in the House, are revoked after a certain time frame. I therefore have to put the motion down on the Order Paper for those orders to be confirmed. That motion and the relevant orders are then referred to the Regulations Review Committee, who scrutinise my use of the power that I am given under the COVID-19 Public Health Response Act. They have the ability to raise issues both with me as the Minister responsible and also with the House, a. And so we are now dealing with a motion to confirm three of the orders that have now been scrutinised by the Regulations Review Committee under that particular process.

I would note that the orders that we are talking about here are all amendment orders. There are, basically, two reasons why I amend orders made under the COVID-19 Public Health Response Act. The first is that many of these orders have been put in place in a hurry, and there will undoubtedly be improvements that can be made, corrections that need to be made to them, further refinements, and so on. So, yes, there are a number of amendments that fall into that category. The second, of course, is that the situation is constantly changing and constantly evolving, and, as a result, we often need to constantly amend these orders. We’re not confirming any alert level orders made in this particular batch of approvals, but alert level orders are a really good example of where we need to constantly move and adapt and change, depending on the circumstances in front of us.

So there are three orders that we’re confirming today, and I’ll quickly run through those. The first is the COVID-19 Public Health Response (Air Border) Order (No 2) Amendment Order (No 9). This is the second air border order that’s been put in place, and this one’s already been amended nine times. This set of amendments removes “Australia” and references to Australia, particularly when it comes to talking about quarantine-free travel, on the basis that there are no longer any quarantine-free flights from Australia to New Zealand. It does not preclude us reintroducing quarantine-free travel with Australia in the future. That order came into force at 11.59 p.m. back on 11 August.

The COVID-19 Public Health Response (Air Border) Order (No 2) Amendment Order (No 10) of 2021: this particular amendment added Fiji and Indonesia to the list of very high-risk countries. By being designated as a very high-risk country, it means that we are significantly limiting the number of people who can travel from that country to New Zealand. We’re narrowing that down to only New Zealand citizens who are returning home, and it does provide for some new or expanded exemptions, which include the dependent children of New Zealand citizens who are coming home; persons transiting through New Zealand while travelling from Fiji to another destination outside of New Zealand, recognising that at the moment, New Zealand is, effectively, the only regular gateway to and from Fiji; and people involved in medical transfers from Fiji to New Zealand.

The order also removes Fiji from the list of low-risk designations for the purposes of quarantine-free travel. That has an implication for aircrew members who have undertaken any flight to or from Fiji in the 14-day period before their arrival in New Zealand on a quarantine-free flight, and that means that they must have a negative result for COVID-19 before they come. That order came into force at 11.59 p.m. on 15 August.

The final order is the COVID-19 Public Health Response (Required Testing) Amendment Order (No 3). This order amends the COVID-19 Public Health Response (Required Testing) Order to allow people who are required to undergo regular COVID-19 surveillance testing and medical examination to elect to undergo regular saliva testing as an alternative to the nasal pharyngeal swabs that they currently have to take. The order also sets out the duties for the people who make that choice, as well as the record-keeping duties for the people who are conducting the business undertaking with respect to those particular people.

The Regulations Review Committee did raise an issue with regard to this particular order. They were concerned around the clarity around the frequency of the testing requirement, recognising that saliva testing will need to be more frequent than the nasal pharyngeal swabs. I’ve considered closely the feedback from the Regulations Review Committee. I am comfortable that the order is clear and that there isn’t ambiguity there, but as we continue to refine and test the orders, we will look and see whether there is simpler language that could be used in future orders just to remove any potential suggestion that that’s not clear. So that particular order came into force at 11.59 p.m. on 11 August 2021.

Finally, I just want to thank all those who were involved in putting these orders together. I’m often waiting up till quite late in the evening to sign the orders in order for them to come in force—typically, just before midnight—because these orders, as I said, are often put in place in quite a hurry, and the people who have to draft them often have to do so under significant time pressure. So I want to thank them for their work.

By and large, they get it right. They’ve served us incredibly well. There are undoubtedly improvements that they identify and would have been able to identify had we given them more time in the drafting, but, ultimately, we are able to pick those up with future amendments. It is a pretty nimble piece of legislation that we’re making the orders under, and I think that our COVID-19 response overall is the better for it.

The question is that the motion be agreed to.

Thank you, Mr Speaker, and can I just start by echoing the comments of Minister Hipkins in relation to the team who do all the work behind the scenes in relation to the orders. I’ve been back on the Regulations Review Committee for a couple of weeks now and it’s fair to say that the workload of the Regulations Review Committee has significantly increased from my first time on the committee, which was now five to six years ago, and that’s due to the Minister, of course, and all the various orders. But it is a really important process, and I just want to say I’m really enjoying working with Rachel Brooking from across the House, and, of course, Chris Penk, who would be here were it not for COVID restrictions. He’s the chair of the committee. He’s doing a great job, and it’s good to be with a bunch of lawyers talking about lawyerly things.

I do want to talk briefly in relation to saliva testing, which is in relation to the COVID-19 Public Health Response (Required Testing) Amendment Order (No 3) 2021. I believe that we will look back at some point in the future at saliva testing and the failure to roll it out more quickly as a gross failure of public policy in New Zealand. I think the situation is so bad that we will inevitably have to have an inquiry into what has happened. It’s worth just remembering by way of background that the Sir Brian Roche / Heather Simpson review into testing at the border recommended to the Government in September 2020—so a year ago; just over a year ago, actually—that saliva testing should be rolled out as a “matter of priority”. Those were their words, and yet here we are, a year later, and we are finally getting it going, and it was only until August—and that’s the reason why this is relevant—that we had the amendment order presented or signed by the Minister to allow for saliva testing properly at the border. So that was recommended in September 2020, and nothing symbolises, really, this Government’s inability to move quickly with innovation in science and the technology that is now available than saliva testing.

Everyone knows that the nasal PCR tests are uncomfortable, they’re very expensive, and they require a health professional to administer, and anyone who’s had one will know about the cumbersome process. Saliva testing is cheaper, it’s quicker, and it is just as accurate as the nasal PCR tests, and, the fact that Dr Anne Wyllie, who’s been dubbed the spit queen for her work at Yale University, has not been, essentially, an expert adviser to the Government here in New Zealand is, frankly, I think, disgraceful.

She’s a Kiwi doing work at Yale University. She is, basically, the inventor of saliva testing in the United States, and her work, very quickly done after COVID entered the United States, meant that the tests she created were granted emergency use authorisation by the Food and Drug Administration there in August 2020. It’s now used in 40 states, including by the NBA basketball league in the United States to keep their players safe—an amazing, amazing piece of work by an amazing Kiwi out there doing great things on the world stage. She should be being consulted by the New Zealand Government to roll out saliva testing here in New Zealand.

💬 SPEAKER: Order! Order!

Yeah—I take your point, sir. So this has been a very long and drawn out saga. It is, as I’ve said, I think, really a shame that we have not had saliva testing earlier than now.

This order is good in so far as it allows for it to happen and encourages workers who are at the border to get saliva tests, if they’d like, as a supplement to the nasal PCR tests every two or three days, but we could do so much more. This order could potentially include the allowance of saliva testing in our public hospitals, for example, or, in fact, it could make them mandatory as a form of surveillance testing in public hospitals. There are people presenting at Middlemore Hospital with COVID symptoms who have to wait quite a long time before they get tested—that’s on the public record. We could have a rule, for example, that everyone who turns up at Middlemore gets a saliva test as a mandatory thing. That could be a rule. We could make it sure that our public hospitals use saliva testing for their workers, for example; not just for border workers. The order could and should include that.

There are private hospitals in New Zealand right now using Rako Science’s saliva test for their workers, for the people who come to work and work in the private hospitals. Why can’t we do that for our public hospitals? There’s nothing stopping us from doing that, and the attitude of the Ministry of Health towards saliva testing has been, quite frankly, disgraceful so far.

So this is good in so far as it goes: using saliva testing at our border facilities, at our airports, at our ports, and at our managed isolation and quarantine facilities as an option for workers being mandatorily tested. It’s being belatedly rolled out at the Auckland boundary for people crossing the border, but we could and should do so much more.

Saliva testing is one of those things which I think, you know, we will look back on, as I say, in a couple of years and say that we really missed an opportunity there, because, as Dr Ashley Bloomfield says and the Prime Minister has said, it’s all about testing. You know, the Auckland situation now is all about as many people as you can test as quickly as you can. The nasal test is expensive and it’s cumbersome and it’s time-consuming. Why wouldn’t we want to make use of the technology that’s available to us, that we could use alongside the nasal PCR test and alongside rapid testing—which, of course, is not the subject of this order, so I won’t talk about it.

So this is good. National will support that order and the other two orders, which are very non-controversial and make a lot of sense. But we can and should do so much more when it comes to saliva testing. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I’ll just make a short contribution on these orders. The Green Party is going to support all three of them. They’re very sensible. It is good to see the development and roll-out of more alternatives to PCR testing.

One comment I would make about the Public Health Response (Air Border) Order (No 2) Amendment Order (No 9), which, of course, removed any references to Australia when it comes to quarantine-free travel, is just to acknowledge those New Zealanders, especially those who live permanently in New Zealand or who may have been planning to return to New Zealand in the last few months, to relocate here permanently, who have been caught out by the fact that the bubble had to be suspended, and there’s been just extreme demand for managed isolation and quarantine (MIQ) facilities and for people to come back into Aotearoa New Zealand. I think that it was the right call to suspend quarantine-free travel with Australia, but I do think that the Government needs to urgently look at alternatives, especially for those who are in states that currently have no community spread of COVID, if there is a way for them to return and, if they’ve been vaccinated, to bypass the MIQ facility—if that is possible and can be done safely—because there’s just a huge number of people whose lives have been disrupted.

If they are citizens and residents of New Zealand, then they really do have a right to return to this country, and we’ve been asking the Government what they can do to increase the quantity of MIQ facilities in a safe way. But I think that there are states where there’s no community spread, and if people were able to travel from that state without passing through New South Wales or Victoria, and particularly if they’ve been vaccinated—if they could be isolating at home, they should probably be eligible for the pilot which is going to be rolled out to business people who are leaving New Zealand and coming back next month. I think that’s going to happen in November.

I’d like to see the ability of New Zealand citizens and residents to come back to New Zealand as a priority over discretionary business travel away from New Zealand when it comes to piloting safe quarantine at home. That’s all we have to say.

Before I call David Seymour, I’m going ask Mr Eagle to apply his mask to his beak.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. There is one absolutely certain way to know that an issue has turned, and that is when the Green Party start taking sensible positions on it. What we just heard from Julie Anne Genter—that there should be risk-proportionate exemptions for New Zealanders in COVID-free states of Australia to travel here without managed isolation and quarantine (MIQ)—is the surest sign that the tide is turning towards sanity on this issue of COVID-19 that I’ve seen since I first heard of COVID-19 last January.

This is a very momentous day for this House and our country’s journey with COVID-19 policy, but we’re here just to examine a few of these COVID-19 Public Health Response Act amendment orders—three of them—all of which the ACT Party will support. The first of those says that Fiji should no longer be considered a low-risk country. Now, of course, for people who are listening at home, this is retrospective—these orders were made much earlier; we’re just confirming them—but when Fiji got into some difficulty with Delta, it was the right and proper thing to do to say that aircrew traveling to Fiji should have to take more precautions than previously and that we shouldn’t consider that Fiji was a low-risk country to go to any more, sad as that may be. It’s a good example of a risk-proportionate approach: that we don’t use broad-brush restrictions on people’s freedom to go about satisfying other aspects of their wellbeing; we actually assess the level of risk and then we respond proportionately.

Another good example of that is what Julie Anne Genter from the Green Party has just suggested in relation to allowing quarantine-free travel from Australian states that have no community transmission, and similar arguments can be made for Pacific Islands, such as Samoa and Niue, that have never had COVID-19. It seems madness that we put those people, when they come here, in more danger of catching COVID-19 than at any other time of their life—that is, when they go into an MIQ facility in New Zealand.

The further orders—one, sadly, removes Australia as a quarantine-free travel destination. As I say, it’s one of those times: when ACT and the Green Party are agreeing, you know that an issue is turning. We’ve been saying this all year. We shouldn’t be saying that people from a state like Western Australia, that hasn’t had a community transmission case for a very long time—people should be able to just come, because the costs of not allowing people to come are absolutely enormous.

💬 Hon Julie Anne Genter: I still think they should isolate at home.

And Julie Anne Genter has just piped up, for people who may not have their microphones highly tuned at home, that she still thinks people should isolate at home. It may be that she’s been reading ACT’s COVID 3.0 document, which says very similar things—

💬 Chris Bishop: No, she’s got a leaked copy of ours.

—and Chris Bishop says that he’s got a leak from that document. We put it there precisely for him. In case he was preparing to release anything himself, we wanted to make all of the details available, because we know that in the past his party has relied on ACT policy to inform its own, and we’d like that to continue far into the future.

💬 SPEAKER: Order!

Mr Speaker, I will now, as you say, narrow towards the COVID orders being debated, but I agree that’s very important.

Other than the change in risk profile for aircrew going to and from Fiji, and also removing Australia—all of it; not just some states with problems—from the quarantine-free travel provisions, we also have another welcome but really quite late change, and that is allowing saliva testing in a very narrow range of instances. It is true that saliva testing, or the lack of it, really epitomises the problems with this Government’s COVID response.

It was said to be an urgent priority by Brian Roche, whom the Government paid to advise them last September, and what do we have now? Just a few trickles of saliva tests in the Government response being widely adapted by private enterprise, and you have to feel a little bit sorry for the Minister. You know, he comes into Parliament believing in the essential goodness of State action, thinking that he’s going, with the might and power of the New Zealand Government, to change the world, and he discovers the practical reality that with the tools and advice of the Ministry of Health, he hasn’t been able to roll out a better technology. It’s been used overseas, used by the private sector—championed by a world expert, who is a Kiwi, in the form of Dr Anne Wyllie from Yale, and he hasn’t been able to get it contracted, rolled out, and implemented in a year that it’s being recommended, and the sad story about how that’s come to pass will come out sooner or later. I could spend the rest of this speech filling in a few details, but it’s all going to come out, and we’re going to understand why it’s been just so difficult for the New Zealand Government apparatus to absorb a new technology.

That’s why the ACT Party has said consistently that, instead of having minimal amounts of testing rolled out in this piecemeal fashion, we should have far better partnership with business. In our COVID 3.0 paper, we’ve said that we should have a series of sprints where everyone is brought around the table, all of the team, people brought off the bench, to figure out how we reduce transmission rates at least cost—better, faster testing would help with that—how we reduce hospitalisation at least cost, and how we reduce deaths.

Those should be the goals, and those cannot be achieved if we don’t have a way of getting better technology absorbed into our system. The poor Minister for COVID-19 Response hasn’t been able to implement it with the apparatus he’s given and, in his frustration, when his policies are questioned, he says that the questioners are somehow attacking every New Zealander. Well, that is total illogic. People are able to criticise the Government policy and its failings without it being an attack on front-line workers or the team of 5 million or anyone else. In fact, it would be undemocratic if New Zealanders were not able to have healthy debates about which Government policies were the correct ones without being accused, almost, of treasonous activity.

So these orders are good and proper, but it needs to be acknowledged that they are occurring in a context of too little, too late and of enormous failings by this Government to do basic things that would have allowed New Zealanders to respond to COVID while looking after their overall wellbeing and being able to provide for their needs with much greater freedom than if we’re able to do basic things like get a few contracts and roll out some saliva testing. Thank you, Mr Speaker.

Motion agreed to.

Orders approved.

I declare the House in committee for consideration of the Counter-Terrorism Legislation Bill and the Social Security (Subsequent Child Policy Removal) Amendment Bill.