COVID-19 Public Health Response Amendment Bill (No 2)

I move, That the COVID-19 Public Health Response Amendment Bill (No 2) be reported to the House by 11 November 2021 and that the committee have the authority to meet at any time while the House is sitting (except during oral questions), during any evening on a day on which there has been a sitting of the House, and on a Friday in a week in which there has been a sitting of the House and outside the Wellington area, despite Standing Orders 193, 195, and 196.

There are a range of reasons why the Government wishes to progress this bill into law relatively quickly. We do want there to be an opportunity for select committee consideration of the bill; however, there are some provisions in this bill that are important to get into law sooner rather than later.

💬 Chris Bishop: Which ones?

Most notably, the increase in infringements and fines for those who deliberately break the rules. But, as Mr Bishop asked, I would point out to him that, under his plan, he would need some of the provisions in this legislation in order to be able to enact some of the things that the National Party announced today—and the National Party are voting against the provisions that would allow them to do the things that they said that they wanted to do, today. And one good example of that, one example of something that we want to have in place sooner rather than later, is the broadening of the purposes for which orders can be made under the Act. At the moment, orders can be made to prevent COVID-19 from getting into the community. This bill allows orders to be made for the purposes of managing COVID-19 in the community—which is a given, if the National Party had their plan. At least they were open about that. COVID-19 would be spreading in the community if National’s plan was put in place, and so they would want those extra provisions in place so that they could actually have orders put in place for the management of COVID-19. So these things need to be put in place sooner rather than later.

To look at some of the other issues: now, the ability to have internal rules around the way managed isolation and quarantine facilities operate is important. There are aspects that are covered by orders at the moment that are more appropriately covered in primary legislation, and so this bill formalises and codifies that. That should be in place sooner rather than later, in the Government’s view. And the other thing, of course, is that it allows for the regulation of COVID-19 laboratories, testing, and supplies. And, again, we’ve seen an example just today, even, where people are talking about significantly surging up testing. These are the sorts of provisions that one would need to have in place if one was going to surge up testing to the level that some parties are suggesting. Similarly interestingly, those parties are therefore voting against putting those very provisions in place. Ultimately, improved, delegated decision-making is another area where the sooner that area of the law is clarified so that people are absolutely clear what can be delegated and how delegations operate. I’m relatively clear, but I do concede that the wording in the law at the moment could be clearer, and that’s exactly what this bill tidies up.

These are things that should be done sooner rather than later. The pandemic is not over, despite some people wishing it to be so. In fact, there are still some pretty big challenges to come, and some of those challenges will come as things shift up around the border. The changes in this bill allow us to stay nimble as the situation continues to change. I note those who are arguing that the changes that could be coming or that are likely coming should be accelerated are voting against the legislation that would allow us to respond to those changes, which seems farcical and nonsensical. But there you go. Politics is an interesting place to be at the moment.

So, ultimately, this motion still allows for select committee consideration. It is a short select committee consideration, but that is because there’s very good reason for having these legislative changes in place before Christmas.

The question is that the motion be agreed to. And before I take a call, can I just explain to the House that this debate should be confined to the reasons why or why not the report date should stand. Members can refer to provisions in the bill and why members oppose or support the report-back date.

Thank you very much, Madam Speaker. The ACT Party stands in opposition to this shortened report-back date. For people who may have just tuned into this, the Government is trying to ensure that a law it wants to pass, instead of going to select committee for proper consultation of the public over six months like the rules of Parliament require, they want it to happen for about six weeks and report it back in November.

This is something that has gone on too long and is happening too often under this Government. It’s the second such debate that we’ve had in Parliament tonight so far. We have already had exactly this debate on the previous piece of legislation, the COVID-19 Response (Management Measures) Legislation Bill.

💬 Hon Chris Hipkins: This from the party founded by Richard Prebble and Roger Douglas.

And the problem is—and Chris Hipkins says this is the party founded by Richard Prebble and Roger Douglas. Can he tell us what the relevance of this comment was?

💬 Hon Chris Hipkins: Because they never consulted on anything.

Well, actually, I’ll have the record set straight, as Chris Hipkins says. They consulted very widely, and the Labour Party, then a fine party committed to better public policy, had in its manifesto that it would remove unnecessary regulation, and indeed they did. People voted for them on that basis and they implemented their agenda.

💬 Hon Chris Hipkins: They sold everything off!

Chris Hipkins might be interested to know, now that he’s bought this into the debate, that that particular Government that Roger Douglas and Richard Prebble were an integral part of introduced a Constitution Act that stopped what used to happen; the disgraceful suspension of the Standing Orders, where people used to just say the rules don’t apply and do almost anything in this Parliament. They actually introduced, for example, the Public Finance Act so that Governments had to properly budget.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): Order! Order! I have explained to the House that this debate has to be confined to members’ views on why or why not the report-back date should stand.

Madam Speaker, thank you.

💬 Chris Bishop: Point of order, Madam Speaker. I want to clarify, because I, for one, was enjoying that exchange and the Minister was making repeated interjections, so is it the case that a member can respond during the debate to the interjection in relation to that, or—

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): Thank you—thank you. I’ll take some advice on that, thank you. Thank you both for your points of order. Members can respond to interjections by other members of the House, but those responses should be in passing and should not then become the main body or an extended argument of their intervention.

Well, thank you, Madam Speaker. I did want to set the record straight. To say that Roger Douglas and Richard Prebble never consulted on anything is grossly unfair, historically inaccurate, as I was just demonstrating for the education of the new Labour members who often aren’t particularly familiar with their own history.

If I really wanted to go off track, I might have referred to the first session of Parliament in 1854, in which the Standing Orders were suspended and it actually descended into a fist fight as members of the Opposition attempted to scale the walls into the public gallery to deny the Government a quorum. But, Madam Speaker, that would be going off track on this—

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): I think it would be. I would invite the member to come back to the debate in hand.

No, no. I certainly won’t talk about that. We should actually talk about the shortening of this select committee, because it is, I think, increasingly relevant to democracy, not only in New Zealand but around the world, that we are seeing less and less respect for democratic processes. When this bill goes before a select committee, it’s not being examined by the half a dozen or a dozen members of a particular select committee, the Health Committee in this instance; it’s actually being examined by them on behalf of the citizens who elected them. The right to elect somebody, to speak for you, into a Parliament is something that half the world’s never had and that the other half has had to fight for desperately, and we throw it away at our peril.

We need to be perfectly clear that it’s not about rushing this legislation past those MPs; it’s actually denying the rights of those citizens to vote for a representative to scrutinise the legislation in any proper way, and it’s critical that if we have these rights we actually preserve them. And if you look at the wider context tonight, three bills in a row: the COVID-19 Response (Management Measures) Legislation Bill. Well, that’s going to have a two-week select committee process, even though it is for the first time in a very long time, if not in New Zealand history, showing Parliament retrospectively altering the terms of private contracts. It’s never been done before. There’s going to be a two-week consultation on that.

And the bill that is scheduled to be debated after this, the Counter-Terrorism Legislation Bill, well, that was at select committee. Four months had passed. The members of that committee had been listening to members of the public making their submissions. And then what happened? We had our tragic event in LynnMall, West Auckland, at the Countdown out there. The Government panicked and decided to take that legislation away from the select committee who were just doing the important part of their work in the fifth and sixth month, where they actually take what they’ve heard from listening to people and put it into the legislation so we can actually have laws that benefit from hearing the public. What did the Government do? They said, “We’re going to drag that out of the select committee and we’re just going to do it ourselves.”

Well, this is something that has to be seen in a wider trend of a Government that is not giving voice to New Zealanders, is not allowing them to be heard. It’s a threat to democracy generally, because all around the world we see people losing faith in politicians. We see people losing faith in the democratic process. We see fewer countries practising democracy and those that do are not practising it as well as they used to. Don’t take my word for it. That’s Freedom House. They’re based in Washington, DC. They’ve been studying democracy around the world, civil liberties, and political rights—they’ve been studying those since 1944—and for the last 15 years around the world, the respect for and practice of democracy has been in decline.

We in this House have a duty to uphold what we have inherited. We stand here surrounded by the names of battles where usually young boys but also men and women of the New Zealand Defence Force have been sent to their death to uphold those values. And here we are, three times in one night, denying New Zealanders the right to have their legislation properly considered in front of a select committee.

In the case of this latest legislation, it’s being done simply because the Government wasn’t prepared. They’ve been underprepared all year. They took the world’s longest nap. They thought they had COVID beaten. They got to the stage where they actually thought it was a good idea to spend half a billion dollars on a boomer bike bridge to Birkenhead. That how off track they got. That’s how long their nap was. And then there was an outbreak, and they thought, “Oh, we should do something about that.”, and as a result of their own unpreparedness, they are introducing legislation and rushing it through undemocratically.

Now, I think there’s a simple choice here. Either the Government should accept that its response and its measures are late and give people the due process and opportunity to have their voices heard and proper lawmaking process considered, or democracy can suffer. That’s really the question. This Government’s level of organisation, this Government’s reputation; that’s one set of considerations. And the other set of considerations is the long-term health of New Zealand democracy and the simple idea that every adult New Zealander has the right to elect a representative to speak for them, go to select committees and scrutinise bills, and be heard—a proper democratic lawmaking process.

In fact, it is probably the singular New Zealand political achievement at a global level—the simple idea that every adult New Zealander has the right to vote, something that the Prime Minister and many other politicians in this House were celebrating just nine days ago on 19 September. And then what are we doing tonight? Three times in one night, saying: “Actually, the people that got represented, the people that got representation that Kate Sheppard and her petitioners won that right for, well, we’re not going to listen to them in select committee; we’re just going to rush the bill through, and who cares? The Government knows best. We don’t really need democracy.”

I think that is an enormous shame, but from a Government that was quite prepared to have stand-ups with two dozen journalists in a tiny room of the Beehive Theatrette but thought that having this Parliament sitting in person with them, standing on the same carpet as every other representative, was somehow far too dangerous—I’m not surprised that democracy is in a certain amount of trouble. And that’s why this motion to rush through select committee should fall tonight. Thank you, Madam Speaker.

Well, here we go again. It was less than three hours and 15 minutes ago that the Minister for COVID-19 Response stood in this House, wringing his hands, saying how much it pained him to bypass the normal select committee process, that he wanted things like that to be rare and reasonable, and then, again we’ve spent the last three and a half hours debating bills and report-backs that run roughshod over the very thing he claims to want to protect.

I’ve got to say that in his speech moving this motion, he made some extraordinary comments to Mr Bishop in respect of what other parties would do, because, this afternoon, a colleague of his described the National Party’s COVID plan as “risky, rushed, and reckless.”, and then asked what we were going to get for Christmas, on the first day we’ll get COVID. Well, actually, we don’t have to wait for Christmas to get COVID, because it is here and spreading in South Auckland, and I think we are going to be hearing an awful lot more about that, and that actually is very relevant to both this bill and to the time we are going to take to consider it and make amendments to it. I should add that the other irony of that is that Mr Hipkins points out that the very things that the National Party wants to see happen are going to be made possible by the orders that are made in this bill. So, on the one hand, they say it is rushed, risky, and reckless, but they are doing it as well. He then challenged Mr Bishop to say why he wouldn’t support this bill and its rushed passage. Well, the answer is very simple: a National Government would not have mucked around for months to get the necessary orders in place to enable the reopening plan to be made effective, and, actually, we wouldn’t be getting loved ones for Christmas; we would have probably got them for Labour weekend or maybe Matariki if it had been held this year, or even Easter, but it sure as heck wouldn’t have been at the end of the first quarter of 2022.

Now, if this bill only extended the term of the COVID-19 Public Health Response Act by one year—and the Minister is claiming that is the substantive part of this bill—objectionable though that may be for some, including me, that we still need this, maybe it could have gone through a shortened process, because the scope of that change is relatively narrow. But the Minister actually understates the other things that this bill does and that warrant a very significant consideration, much more than the four and a half, five weeks that the Health Committee is going to be given to do that.

Not the least of which is the infringement regime being strengthened to increase the maximum fines and fees and enabling new regulations to set a sliding scale of infringement offences. If I read that correctly, it is an Act to pass a regulation to pass an infringement, and where are we going to find out and how much are we going to see of the scale of those fees? Are they going to be done in secondary legislation? Are they going to go before the Regulations Review Committee? I hope so because I know the very good people from the National Party on the Regulations Review Committee would scrutinise that closely.

There are two other things that concern me that the Health Committee really needs to drill into. Firstly, the empowering of the creation of orders for the purpose of requisitioning testing consumables and requiring labs doing COVID-19 testing to do so for the national public health response—so State intervention over private laboratories’ ability to do and not do things, or to transact business in a certain way free of interference from the State?

Now, there are a lot of people who have made a lot of money out of COVID. There is no doubt about that. I don’t discourage that. I don’t criticise that. That is fine. But for the Government to then give itself the power to interject itself, intervene in that transaction, even though it is actually the purchaser—so it, basically, doesn’t trust its own ability to create arrangements that would be suitable to both the purchaser and the provider—it is going to legislate to say, “We’ll just get what we want.” I have a bit of a problem with that, and I’m sure the people who are affected by it will want to talk to the Health Committee if, as I’m sure they will, they have concerns about that.

Then, we are expressly recognising the ability of the CEO of the agency responsible to impose room restrictions on people undertaking isolation or quarantine. So it is no longer the Minister’s problem; it is now going to be the chief executive. Arm’s length, further distance by the Government from the problem, and the problem is managed isolation and quarantine.

Now, in order to be able to scrutinise this bill within five weeks, the Health Committee is going to have to set aside other business. Now, I’m not sure what business is before the Health Committee at the moment, but my colleague Mr Bishop tells me that they’ve been meeting from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m., so there must be a lot of it. Here is what is not before the Health Committee, and should be: legislation to reform the New Zealand Public Health and Disability Act, which the Government tells us is going to be in force on 1 July next year. That should be what the Health Committee is doing right now. Shortening the select committee process for this bill further bumps the business of the committee and any ability for it to consider what some would call an important piece of legislation. It is certainly a significant piece of legislation for our public health sector—we haven’t even seen it yet—but there will be even less time for the Health Committee to be able to do that and its other business as a consequence of this.

That is consistent with a pattern that we are seeing, because the Finance and Expenditure Committee has even less time than that to consider the omnibus bill that has gone through, and it should be focusing on $41 billion of imprest supply that we don’t know how it is getting spent, the Crown accounts that are about to be released, and a plethora of other important issues before the Finance and Expenditure Committee.

So two of our most influential standing committees have now got to disrupt their normal business and squeeze through in an impossibly short time frame two COVID-19 response bills because this Government cannot get organised enough to say, “What are we going to need off in the horizon? What are the burning bridges from a legislative perspective that we need to make sure we have covered?” And yet this is, virtually, retrospective—again. The second bill that we’ve seen tonight that is, effectively, retrospective legislation where we are going to ask submitters to rush their submissions, to have lip-service paid to their oral submissions, to get officials to burn the midnight oil, as usual—it’s not as if they don’t work hard enough anyway when getting these bills through—in order so that the Government can just get what it wants.

Well, I probably did use a bit of hyperbole in my first debate speech on the shortened report-back motion in the previous bill. Actually, with the pattern that is emerging, the death by a thousand cuts of democracy in this country continues. It is a very, very sad day for the manner in which this country sees its laws passed, and the disrespect that it pays to its electorate, its voters, and its submitters. This has got to stop. We strongly oppose the report-back motion. I think it would be appropriate for there to be perhaps an amendment, I don’t know; there is certainly an opportunity to do that, but, you know, it would certainly need to be longer than the five weeks or so that we’ve given it. I will leave that for others to consider it. But with that, I strongly oppose this motion.

Thank you very much, Madam Speaker. Now, 11 November is the day the committee or the day the Minister wants the shortened report back to be. I was sitting here thinking 11 November—why does that ring a bell with me? It’s Armistice Day, but it’s also the day of the dismissal in Australia. It’s the day that the Governor-General was instructed—it’s the day of the Whitlam dismissal when Sir John Kerr dismissed the elected Prime Minister of Australia. Of course in Labour Party legend, this is the end of days. I’m sitting here thinking “And that’s relevant.” Some people might think, “Well, why is that relevant?” It is important because—it’s obviously not an extreme that is happening here but, as Michael Woodhouse just made mention, the slow whittling away of democracy and the way our system works is occurring. This is obviously not as extreme as the dismissal but it’s in the same vein because here we are expanding, extending, or potentially extending, the powers, enormous powers, the Government’s given to itself, or the Parliament has given to the Government, under the existing COVID-19 Act. They want to just have a very short select committee process and not allow the Health Committee to do its job and examine the bill properly.

There are two particular things I think the committee needs more time to look at. The first is the penalties. Now, I’ve been reading through the regulatory impact statement in relation to the penalties for non-compliance, and it is actually very concerning because the Legislation Design and Advisory Committee says, as a matter of public policy, that in general infringement fees should not exceed $1,000, and if they do exceed $1,000, preferably the amount is fixed in primary legislation. Well, somewhere between the drafting of this bill and the draft bill prepared and the actual bill that we have before us, the Minister decided a good penalty would be $4,000. Now, I’m not saying that’s necessarily the worst idea but we’re going to have to get to the bottom, as a committee—and I’m on the Health Committee now—of exactly why that happened, and how we’ve ended up with this very large increase in the penalties for breach of managed isolation and quarantine (MIQ).

Obviously, we’re in favour of penalties and infringement notices, but that is a massive increase, and the officials actually advised against it. They didn’t just advise against it. They said 25 percent higher would be the right thing to do—an infringement fee of $1,250. They gave two other options, $1,500 or $2,000, and the Minister’s gone for $4,000. So I strongly suspect he’s just kind of put a finger in the wind and said “What sounds about right? Four thousand bucks. Well, that’s tough. That’ll give me a headline.”—‘Minister cracks down on MIQ absconders’ or something. You know, it probably did give him a headline. I suspect the reason I know about it is because it was in the news. That’s all good. But we’re going to have to find out exactly why we’ve gone for $4,000 because we’re dealing with issues of rights here. So that’s very important. I, for one, would want would want to hear from the legal beagles who monitor these things. Graeme Edgeler’s going to make a submission, I’m sure. We’re going to want time to consider Mr Edgeler’s submission alongside others.

The other thing that we’re going to have to consider—and this actually goes to the heart of the legislation and is another reason for a decent look at it at the select committee—is how long are we going to need this legislation for? That kind of goes to the heart of our COVID response. I heard the Minister’s speech. The Minister said “Well, even under National’s plan you’ll need various elements of it.”, and that’s true. No one’s ever denied that. He seemed to think it was a slam dunk argument, but we accept that, of course. In responding to COVID the Government does have to give itself the ability to move with flexibility, and I think that, in general, the orders that the Government passes in relation to mandatory testing and things, when they’re actually enforced—because there was quite a long time there where the Government had the orders in place, or they said they had the order and no one was actually doing the enforcing. It’s only in the recent last couple of weeks or the last few weeks that there’s been a huge enforcement. Generally that’s worked pretty well.

So no one’s pretending that we’re not going to need some piece of legislation, but how long for? The Minister said, in his contribution, and I give him credit for this, no one wants a piece of legislation like this for longer than is absolutely necessary. I know Chris Hipkins is a—to be fair to him—dedicated parliamentarian who believes in the rule of law and believes in Parliament for the sake of a Parliament, and the benefits that a Parliament brings. Some of the things that Mr Seymour talked about are relevant here as well. I know that Chris Hipkins believes in that. But we are going to have to get to grips with the issue as to how long the Act is going to have to be extended for. That is a difficult, tricky issue because it involves the operation of MIQ. It involves our border restrictions and how long they might be there for. It involves whether or not we’re going to gradually open up.

There’s been a lot of heat and light today, and, you know, a few Labour Party backbenchers very unfortunately said a few things that I think are going to come back to haunt them in the next few months about how the National Party wanted to kill people because they wanted to open the borders. By the way, news flash to the New Labour backbenchers, that’s Government policy—or at least apparently it is, purportedly it is, Government policy to gradually open the borders. So I look forward to you castigating the Prime Minister when she duly stands up in a few weeks and gives a speech about how double-vaccinated travellers are going to have greater freedoms to come back to New Zealand. So all of the criticism about National wanting to kill people in their beds, which have been lobbed by Labour members today, will sound reasonably delicious when the Government announces a similar policy, because we all know that’s happening. In fact, it’s kind of already been announced, at least ostensibly a couple of weeks ago, in the Prime Minister’s reconnecting New Zealand speech. So those comments will haunt them. But we’re going to have to get to grips with that. What does that mean in terms of our overall COVID strategy, and what does that mean in terms of our response?

One issue we’re going to have to grapple with is rapid antigen testing, for example. It’s explicitly banned in New Zealand. One of the orders that has been issued pursuant to this Act basically—or it doesn’t basically; it does—prohibits people from bringing rapid tests into the country unless the Director-General of Health allows them to, and so far, he’s said no, apart from 30 or so cases which he’s allowed for the ministry. So if you’re the Ministry of Health you can have a rapid test to test it or for various reasons, but if you’re a pharmacist, or you’re a school, or you’re a trucking company who wants to test your workers at the Auckland boundary on a daily basis—that would be a sensible thing to do—you can’t. You are banned from doing that. So we’re going to have to get to grips with that through the legislation as well. I suspect there are going to be people who turn up to the committee and make that exact point that I’ve just made, and we’re going to want to hear from them.

I think we’re going to have a lot of submissions, and that’s the final point I want to make as to why we need more time. I think there’s going to be a lot of people who go and make submissions in relation to this. I haven’t even mentioned the Borrowdale litigation before the court, which actually is relevant. Andrew Borrowdale—I’ve never actually met him, but I’m told he is a former parliamentary draftsperson. You could describe him—since we’re talking about history; I started my speech talking about the dismissal. To go to the 1970s again, he’s sort of like a modern-day Fitzgerald. For the listeners with long memories, Fitzgerald was the man who back in 1975 said to Muldoon, “Actually, Robert, Prime Minister, just because you said on the election campaign trail that you’d get rid of the Labour Party superannuation fund mandatory contributions”—that operated from 1974 to 1975, I think; about nine months—“doesn’t mean you actually have. You have to legislate for that.”

One of the greatest things I ever got when I first became an MP was from very good lawyer friends of mine, Gareth Richards and Jonathan Orpin, both barristers. They gave me a framed copy of the whole Fitzgerald v Muldoon judgment, and it’s on my office wall. The reason they gave it to me is because it’s a tribute to the power of Parliament and the rule of law. The whole principle is Prime Ministers don’t get to make the law by themselves. Parliament makes the law, actually. The Prime Minister can’t just decree things to be the case; only Parliament can do that. Why is that relevant for this? It’s relevant because we’re going to have to grapple with the powers that the Parliament gives to the Governments to make orders under this Act. In relation to the Borrowdale legislation, that goes all the way back to the powers that the director-general exercised under the last COVID legislation and the last COVID lockdown. So those fundamental issues of constitutional importance raised by Mr Borrowdale, harking back, as I say, to the Fitzgerald v Muldoon days in 1975, we’re going to have to grapple with again. Those are deep, fundamental issues, and the committee needs time to deal with it. November 11 is too short a time to do that properly. Thank you, Madam Speaker.

Well, thank you, Madam Speaker. Hubris is a word we hear a lot on this side of the House when referencing what this Government does. And this piece of legislation and its truncated process is just another illustration of a Government that seems to think that urgency is the best way to offer sensible public policy and lawmaking.

I think we’re acutely aware of the difficulties that this country’s facing with COVID-19, especially given the Delta variant that we’re all, as a country, dealing with. But when you look at the legislation, the lack of rapid antigen testing, as I think the previous speaker alluded to, that this bill would not have the oversight for, the managed isolation and quarantine facilitation and border restrictions, this warrants a select committee process. We need the Government to allow the public to weigh in on this. This is a truncated process and this legislation speaks to a wider concern and the public should have a position to weigh in on it.

So look, we’re quite clear on it as the ACT Party: we’ve got a Government that seems to use urgency to expeditiously create policy on the fly. We cannot support this in this current iteration. It’s an erosion of all things we do as legislators representing New Zealand.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. Well, we’ve talked about this date of 11 November, and I’d have to say, as a member of the Health Committee, it was only today that we were looking at all the DHBs that we have to review. I’m quite concerned that if this bill comes and takes our time in the next four to six weeks, we’re going to be pushing back on how many DHBs we will be able to look at.

But I was very, very concerned when I looked across at the vitriol, really, of some of the backbenchers from the Government to the discussion that I was having about the ratings and rankings of New Zealand in this world ranking of who’s doing well with COVID. It’s interesting. It’s not too long ago that the Government were crowing about being number one, and very, very quickly they wanted to shoot down how reliable any ranking might possibly be, and wanting to explain to me how wrong I was. Well, I can assure the Government I wasn’t doing the ranking. It was Bloomberg’s ranking, and it was the same one that they were very, very keen to be proud of not too long ago.

But what it does show how incredibly inward-looking the Government is becoming, and how concerned they are with any criticism. So that really relates to this needing more time to ensure that more people can critique this legislation. As I said today in the Health Committee, we had Māori health experts, we had Pasifika health experts. I’d have to say there was an enormous amount of reluctance from the Health Committee Labour Government members to hear from these people. That keeps reinforcing to me how concerned this Government is about only looking inward and about stifling any consultation or any discussion or any support or suggestions that may come from a consultation process.

So I’m really concerned that if we don’t have that more extended amount of time to hear from people, it’s going to be very easy for the Labour members on our Health Committee to be very, very selective about what they listen to. After all, this is the consultation process for people who might have better ideas for this Government—from Māori health experts, from Pasifika health experts, from advocates from the disabled community, from business people, from those who have had to go through managed isolation and quarantine. This is the one and only opportunity that they get to have some input into this.

I’ve been sensing frustration from constituents who email on an almost daily basis saying, “How do we have a say on what’s happening? How do we tell this Government how undemocratic they are getting? How do we express our concern for the way they are running this country?” The reality is the select committee is how and when they get an opportunity. People are becoming increasingly cynical and sceptical about whether this Government actually wants to hear from them and whether this Government is genuine in wanting to carry on with the democratic process that these people have a right to be involved in. I see that on a daily basis—that scepticism: will there be any opportunity for them to have any input whatsoever into what is happening in this country? I’d have to say many of them are people who were Labour voters who have then said, “I’m disillusioned with the direction of this Government. I’m disillusioned with how inward-looking they’re getting, with how they want to shortcut the democratic system and process, with how they are so reluctant to hear from anyone from outside their own circle.”

There’s a huge increase in fines for the infringement offences. I would have to say that goes against everything we heard in the select committee today about engaging with the community, working with the community, being in touch with the community—be it Pasifika or Māori or disabled community. Putting higher infringement offences into this legislation gives a very clear message that we have no intention of educating and working with you; we just want to punish you. Sorry, I’ll be careful about using “you.”

So I’m quite concerned, again, that the shortened time will not give key people the opportunity to explain to us how counter-productive this increase of infringement offences could be in the legislation and in the management of COVID. So I won’t take up too much more time other than to say, for the same reason that we have been opposing these shortened select committee processes all night, really—all night: it is because it is eroding the democratic process that people in this country in this extraordinary time expect to still be able to have a say. The select committee process is the one time and place they can. We oppose it.

I rise to oppose a shortened report back for this piece of legislation, and in doing so, I want to remind members of this House about how serious a piece of legislation this is and how, in fact, that warrants more thorough scrutiny than normal pieces of legislation. Yet we are here tonight being told to do the opposite. Here we have the Government asking for an extension of the most extraordinary powers a Government has granted to itself possibly in decades, and the Government, in asking for an extension of those powers through to May 2023, has said that it does not wish for that to be thoroughly scrutinised through a normal-length select committee process. On this side of the House, we raise our objection to that because we think it is more important than ever that there be appropriate democratic scrutiny of the measures contained in this bill.

So let us remind ourselves of the substance of what it is that the Government is saying we need a shortened process for. Well, possibly the most significant clause in the bill is that which extends the sunset clause for the COVID-19 Public Health Response Act to 2023. This builds on a piece of legislation that was introduced in 2020 that includes powers to require people to stay in a particular place; that require people to stay physically distanced from any person; that can give the director of health or the Minister of Health the power to tell someone that they must refrain from participating in gatherings, that they must refrain from travelling; gives a Minister or the Director-General of Health the power to say that someone must be isolated or quarantined in any place, in any way; that a person must report for medical treatment or must undergo medical examination or testing; that they must provide information for contact tracing. These are significant powers for the State.

New Zealanders over the past 18 months have by and large cooperated, because the view that people have taken is extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures. They have placed enormous trust in institutions and individuals and public health advice and have given up their freedoms because they’ve been told that that is what is required to keep one another safe and to prevent death. But it is appropriate that when those measures move from being temporary in nature, from being a one-off response to an emergency in 2020, to being an extended set of powers to last right through till 2023—another 18 months—the New Zealand people have the opportunity to thoroughly scrutinise the measures and to thoroughly scrutinise the additions to those.

In this bill, we also have new measures, and what I would point out is that a number of the measures that are being proposed in this bill are things that the Minister for COVID-19 Response says are needed now and needed in a hurry but yet it would be perfectly reasonable to expect that a diligent Government would’ve anticipated, ahead of right here and now, and made changes with a thorough scrutiny and thorough process—things like “enabling the chief executive of the responsible agency to make rules for the day-to-day operation of MIQ facilities”. Well, managed isolation and quarantine (MIQ) facilities have been operating in New Zealand for months, so it should’ve been perfectly reasonable to expect that the Minister would bring to this House legislation to clarify that power in advance of today and, in doing so, would invite appropriate and thorough scrutiny. A shortened report-back period simply damages the trust between the elected and the electors because it says, “We don’t need your input on this one.”

The bill also does things like recognising “the ability of the chief executive of the agency responsible for MIQ”—which is, of course, right now the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment—“to impose room restrictions on people undertaking isolation or quarantine”. Again, this is a measure that, actually, many, many New Zealanders will take a view on, and, actually, there should be no reason for the Government to fear scrutiny of whether or not that power is appropriate, to invite scrutiny of whether or not it’s been framed up correctly and whether or not it fits within the right parameters. The trouble is, when you’re doing extraordinary things, it is more important than ever that people have faith that robust processes have been used to form restrictions, that appropriate risk assessments have been done, that there has been the necessary balancing of the need to do something in order to protect public health against the potential incursion upon freedom. We are best as a Parliament when we let sunlight upon those judgments, and the problem with shortened report-back periods is there is a sense that someone is trying to reduce the window for that sunlight to peer through.

I would put to you that one of the challenges we have in New Zealand right now is that there are some people who are sceptical, and I say that we should actually be open about everything that we are doing and we should allow absolutely thorough scrutiny and we should oppose motions to shorten the scrutiny of some of the most serious legislation this Parliament has passed in my lifetime with significant powers and extension through to 2023. I put this to members opposite: when the Government first locked down in 2020, did anyone expect that they would then be saying, “We need the same powers to lock down right until May 2023.”? I would argue that that is something that should be discussed fully and that New Zealanders should have the right to have their full say on. Thank you, Mr Speaker.

I move, That the question be now put.

The question is, That the COVID-19 Public Health Response Amendment Bill (No 2) be reported to the House by 11 November 2021 and that the committee have the authority to meet at any time while the House is sitting (except during oral questions), during any evening on a day on which there has been a sitting of the House, and on a Friday in a week in which there has been a sitting of the House and outside the Wellington area, despite Standing Orders 193, 195, and 196.

Motion agreed to.