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

We come first to the COVID-19 Public Health Response Amendment Bill (No 2). The question is that Part 1 stand part.

Well, thank you very much, Madam Chair. This is going to be a very interesting debate, because the Opposition has laid out some very interesting Supplementary Order Papers on the floor of the House, and we’re looking forward to a long and extended debate on the COVID-19 Public Health Response Amendment Bill (No 2). And isn’t it interesting what’s not in this bill? I tell you what’s not in this bill, and that’s the traffic light framework, which starts at some point in the future: we don’t know when. It’s definitely after 29 November when the Government deigns to make another announcement about when it will start. So at some point post - 29 November, I’m willing to put money on the fact it won’t be 30 November, although you never quite know with this Government. So I think it will be December—

💬 David Seymour: December 1.

Oh, and I welcome my good friend David Seymour to the Chamber, and I know he’s got many things to say.

💬 David Seymour: Many, many things.

Many, many things. I think it will be December, but the traffic light framework is not in this bill. And we find ourselves in this quite extraordinary situation where Parliament is belatedly going to pass through the second COVID-19 public health bill which does a variety of sometimes sensible things but is based on a fundamentally flawed premise, which I’ll come back to. But we find ourselves in a situation where the traffic light framework—or, to use its formal title, the COVID-19 Protection Framework—is not there. And the Minister, I know, will probably tell us that the House will consider that at some point in the future, but I just make the point to the committee that that is not going to be very much time before it comes into effect. In fact, I think it’s already been signalled that the House will be in urgency to consider that, and that is a terrible way of making law.

We kicked this around at the select committee and we had a good discussion on a variety of issues at the committee. There’s a couple of things that I want to flag up now that we’re going to want to get into on this side of the Chamber. The first is the fundamental architecture of the bill, which relates to the managed isolation and quarantine system—which is MIQ. And we now are in this bizarre circumstance where Parliament is layering further and further infrastructure around MIQ, when fundamentally we should be doing the opposite—fundamentally we should be dismantling the entire regime [Interruption]. What’s that? Oh, there was a remark, but not repeated. We should be dismantling. Oh, she said you wanted to build it. Well, we do want to build it. We want to build quarantine facilities, that’s the point. We should have been building quarantine facilities 12 months ago—MIQ, to give it its vernacular title. Of course we should have been building purpose built quarantine facilities, because for the last 14 or 15 months we’ve been—

💬 Hon Chris Hipkins: That’s not what your policy said.

Well, no, the policy is to build quarantine for people with COVID.

💬 Hon Chris Hipkins: So MIQ.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, MIQ because—

💬 Hon Chris Hipkins: That was your policy.

Yeah, that’s right, because if the Government had built purpose-built MIQ 12 months ago, we would not have people with COVID in the centre of Auckland, in the Crowne Plaza, and that’s how it eventually escaped into the community. But now we, finally, have full or at least a very high level of vaccination from people coming in through the border, so it doesn’t make any sense to have purpose-built MIQ, but of course it still makes sense to have purpose-built quarantine facilities, like the Australians have at Howard Springs and like the Victorian Government is still building or is going to build near Tullamarine airport in Victoria. Of course that makes sense, because there are going to be New Zealanders who turn up unvaccinated and we’re going to have to do something with them.

One good thing we could do with them is make them do a period of isolation in a purpose-built facility. We find ourselves in this situation where people who have COVID for the better part of this year have found themselves in the centre of Auckland, and that is a ludicrous scenario. But, you know, the Government has not done that, although we do hear rumours round the traps in Wellington that the Government is still looking at a business case for purpose-built quarantine. So we’ll wait and see what happens there.

But I want to make the point, at the outset, that the fundamental premise of this bill is flawed. The fundamental premise of the bill is that New Zealand should remain a fortress for a long time to come, because the bill extends the expiry date of the Act until May 2023, not May 2022, which is when the current Act expires, but May 2023; a long, long time away, about 18 months away. What we say, in Opposition, is that it is impossible to envisage a scenario—I would hope it is impossible to envisage a scenario—in which we have this elaborate architecture and infrastructure around MIQ in May 2023. What does that say about our attitude to the outside world? What does that say about our attitude to opening up to the rest of the world? It says that we’re so limited, our ambition is so small and so reduced and limited that we will still be shut away in “Fortress New Zealand” in May 2023.

We find ourselves in this scenario where—I checked the numbers—there are 34 people with COVID in MIQ right now—34.

💬 Hon Member: Thirty-four seeding events.

Thirty-four seeds, I think we hear. Here we go again. See, this is the attitude that the Government Ministers—

💬 Hon Member: That’s not what I said.

What did you say? I heard “seed” sorry.

💬 Hon Member: Listen up.

All I heard was “seeds”. I accept the Minister didn’t say that, but she seemed to take some sort of alarm at the idea of 34 people in MIQ with COVID. So there are 34 people in MIQ with COVID, and there’s over 4,000 people isolating at home with COVID or close contacts, likely to get it, around the upper North Island, in Auckland and Waikato. So where’s the relative risk here? Is it MIQ or is it actually out in the Auckland community?

Now we find ourselves in the situation where Aucklanders, from December 15, will be allowed to leave. The Government’s argument prior to the announcements today was that we couldn’t have people arriving into New Zealand and going into the community, because they might arrive into Auckland, which is the predominant major entry point to New Zealand, fair enough, and go into the community and they might spread COVID. Well, now Aucklanders are going to be allowed to leave Auckland from December 15, and they have to be fully vaccinated, which 98 percent of people coming into MIQ are, or they have to have a test before they go. So Aucklanders are going to leave, people are going to leave Auckland, and they’re going to spread around the country, and they’ll probably take COVID with them, and in the Minister’s own words “COVID’s going to spread around the country.”—he’s admitted that.

So the Government’s one rationale for MIQ not being liberalised and deconstructed has fallen away because they’ve changed their own policy. So the real question—and it goes to the fundamental premise of the bill that the Government is asking the Parliament to consider again and to extend—is: is it really the intention of the Government that we will still have this elaborate infrastructure and architecture around MIQ as late as May 2023? Surely we should be more ambitious for this great little country, down at the bottom of the world, that makes its way in the world and makes its income in the world from its connections with the rest of the world. It is not just about trade, it’s not just about the agricultural exports. Those days have long since gone, when New Zealand was just Britain’s farm. It’s actually more about the Kiwi entrepreneurs who jump on a plane and head up to San Francisco, the tech entrepreneurs. It’s about the Kiwis who and turn up in London and pitch a business idea. It’s about the people who go and scout for foreign investment and go and scout for business ideas in China, Paris, London, San Francisco, Washington, Africa, Europe, all around the world. We’ve got to be a country that is connected to the world and is globally open. There’s no future for New Zealand with this autarkic approach that the Government is locking us into in relationship to this bill.

So the question I want to ask the Minister goes to the fundamental premise in relation to the dates, because it’s the starting point of the bill to extend the existing COVID-19 public health Act, and it is: is it really the Government’s intention that MIQ will still be here in May 2023? And if it’s not the Government’s intention, can we not wind the expiry date of the bill back? We’d be prepared to put some tabled amendments on the floor of the House to wind the expiry date back closer towards where we are now. And if the Government’s prepared to do that and we’re prepared to put them on the floor of the House, we could get some consensus here, and just make not a particularly good bill slightly less bad. Thank you.

What a fanciful effort to rewrite recent history that the committee just heard. Let’s turn our minds back to when this bill was introduced to the House, on 21 September. Back at that time, the very member who just resumed his seat, Chris Bishop, was demanding to know how COVID19 could possibly have made it out of an managed isolation and quarantine (MIQ) facility and why the Government hadn’t done more to make MIQ facilities more robust, and make the systems more robust—those very things that he is now arguing we shouldn’t be doing. And yet, when the bill was introduced, he was arguing that we needed to be doing more.

He then tried to argue that now we should be closing MIQ facilities, right about the time that the purpose-built facilities he was arguing a year ago we should have started to construct might actually, even if they were fast-tracked, be starting to come on stream. They weren’t quarantine facilities—I’m happy to remind Chris Bishop of his own public statements that they were MIQ facilities, purpose built to allow more people in from overseas. Those were his own words, his own media statements, his own claims that were suggesting that we should do that. We would have built hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of white elephants had we followed the National Party’s approach at that particular time. They were wrong then and, of course, they’re wrong now.

I would just remind the member of why we have border controls in place at the moment, and it is still to contain the outbreaks of COVID—the potential outbreaks of COVID-19—within the community, because, if we follow the member’s train of thought, which is that we allow this Act to disappear, we say we don’t need it any more, then we would have no controls at the border around COVID-19 at all, no ability to stop someone who wasn’t vaccinated coming in at the border, which is still the National Party’s policy. And yet they’re proposing to do away with the legislation that would allow them to enact their own policy. They’re proposing to now do away with it. So we would be saying the border is open—anyone can come in, vaccinated/unvaccinated, tested/not tested. There’d be no legislative framework whatsoever to allow any of that to happen, which means hundreds of cases of COVID could arrive at the border every day and there would be nothing we could do about it, because the law that allows for a vaccination requirement, the law that allows for a pre-departure test requirement, would be gone. And those requirements would no longer be in place, because, by the member’s own statements, he believes that the law that allows those requirements to be put in place should no longer be there, that the Parliament should not extend it for the next year and a half. In other words, it should remove those requirements. Because, once this law is no longer in place, none of the requirements that have been put in place under it, including the border restrictions that the member’s party’s policy requires, would no longer be possible. And that’s what he’s just argued in the Chamber.

Does it mean, by extending this Act, that every order that is currently unmade under this Act will continue for that entire duration of time? No, it won’t. That’s the beauty of this Act. It’s the reason it was designed as it was, to allow orders to be issued and removed at relatively short notice. So, when we’ve needed to escalate alert levels, we’ve been able to do that at short notice, and we’ve been able to bring them down just as fast. It means, for things like MIQ, at such time as we want to dial that back, and as we’re ready to dial that back, we will be able to do that, but we’ll be able to step our way through that. And it might be that additional protective measures are required instead of MIQ, such as home isolation, which is one of the things that we think will be part of the transition to a more open border. By removing this legislation in its entirety, none of that would be possible. And yet that seems to be what the National Party are now arguing for, and yet none of the things in their own policy suggest that that’s what they want. So they want to remove the law that would allow them to enact their own policies. It’s bizarre.

Well, thank you very much, Madam Chair. I welcome the speech the Minister’s just given, which for the most part was a bunch of political attacks on the National Party and what their policies are and what they’ve proposed, and whether they should have proposed it and what that would have meant. The reason I welcome those attacks is that it really casts the net wide for a very wide-ranging debate throughout this committee, and I sense that there’ll be quite a lot of matters to be canvassed and it could go on for quite some time. So I thank the Minister for taking that and also you, Madam Chair, for entertaining it.

I think, for people who are watching this at home, probably thinking “What on earth is going on here?”, that’s a reasonable reaction to Parliaments around the world that citizens often have. I think it’s important just to take a step back and see how we got this COVID-19 Public Health Response Act that we’re now amending with the COVID-19 Public Health Response Amendment Bill (No 2).

Cast your mind back to 23 and 25 March 2020. We had an extraordinary thing, something that even months earlier nobody would have thought possible outside of a totalitarian State, and that was the order for everybody to go home. And shortly after that, this Parliament, of course, was shut and the Epidemic Response Committee was established in its stead. One of the first things the Epidemic Response Committee discovered, on behalf of New Zealand, effectively acting as a kind of de facto Parliament at that time, was that actually all of those instructions for New Zealanders to go home were illegal. They had no legal basis. They had completely forgotten to get the paperwork done—

💬 Hon Chris Hipkins: That’s not what the courts found at all.

—and there was a tremendous difficulty. And, of course, the Minister’s now saying, “Oh, that’s not what the courts found.” Well, you know, if that was true, I wonder why David Parker didn’t just point the committee to the legal basis. He couldn’t for a very long time. They actually had no basis for the first week of the lockdowns. That was the problem and actually, you know, that showed a real difficulty. That’s why this bill, at least in its first reading when it was introduced, ACT was very keen to support it, because at least we would have a system of law passed by Parliament, debated democratically, where people could actually go and read what my rights were.

In the early days of the 2020 lockdown, that wasn’t true. And as a constituency MP, I was frequently approached by people—and I remember some of them very clearly. An elderly couple had walked down to the beach at St Heliers, and they had taken some chairs with them because their knees were not very strong and they couldn’t walk on the hills. The police came along and said they weren’t allowed to take their own chairs to sit on, down at St Heliers. Now, having the law written down, and it wasn’t really clear whether they were or not—that’s how absurd things were in those days. So having the COVID-19 Public Health Response Act, a legal basis for specific orders that set out what people can and can’t do, is actually really important—that we have the rule of law in place; we didn’t initially. So that is why this law in itself is not entirely a bad thing.

However, there is a real problem with the fact that we seem to have almost no evolution whatsoever from that kind of crisis management, that continual approach of issuing public health orders under this Act on what seems like almost a daily basis. Just yesterday in Parliament, we had to approve a dozen that the Government had recently posted—a dozen orders. It seems with the first thing that this bill does, extending the COVID-19 Public Health Response Act by a further year, that what we’re really saying is that we don’t see a lot of scope for the Government’s overall approach evolving. We’re saying that well into 2023 we expect to still be in this paradigm of crisis management, where we require an Act of Parliament that allows a Government to make orders willy-nilly, only to be retrospectively approved by Parliament—that we don’t see anything like a return to normalcy. I think that is a real problem in and of itself.

Now, I’ve heard what the Minister has said, that actually the flexibility that the Act gives means that the Government can slowly wind down its COVID-19 response. I get that. But what it’s also saying is that it doesn’t really plan to do that any time soon. We will continue to be in a paradigm of crisis management. And I think that’s a real problem. You know, there’s an old joke: when the world ends, I want to be in New Zealand because they’ll be 20 years behind. It’s a long time since anyone’s made that joke about New Zealand, because we’ve been a very dynamic, leading country for many years now, but it’s actually starting to feel like that a little bit when you see people with full stadiums, going on with life, with air travel returning to above pre-COVID levels in North America, and so it goes on. We have a whole lot of people that are just moving on. The truth is that we know that the world is going to move on.

💬 Hon Chris Hipkins: Let’s see how the northern winter goes—let’s see how the northern winter goes.

We know that COVID is going to become endemic in the world, and we know that sooner or later we end up living with it. We’re all going to the same place. The question is how much we’re going to borrow and spend and how many other costs on people’s psychology and the development of children we’re going to pile on to people in the meantime, and how prepared we are to reduce the worst risks that COVID puts on people.

What we have from this Government in this piece of legislation is just a holding pattern. We’re going to carry on for the next year and a half, and we don’t really see any change in approach. In fact, actually, things may be exactly the same. Now, the Minister here has just said something very interesting. He’s heckling—he wants this debate to go on a while, I can see. He said, “Look, let’s see how the Northern Hemisphere winter goes.” You know, he thinks that the Northern Hemisphere is going to be in big trouble because they have endemic COVID. Well, that’s interesting, because New Zealand’s going to have a winter next year, if the seasons are still the same—hopefully the Minister agrees with that.

💬 Hon Chris Hipkins: Oh, what a profound statement!

Yeah, no, no—the Minister agrees with that. At least he’s got some science on him. And we, by that stage, by the Minister’s own admission, are going to have endemic COVID, because what he said to us is COVID is going to spread around the North Island and presumably then the South. So if that’s the case, then we turn to a whole lot of other questions, such as: how is the Government going at absorbing new technologies? How is it going at—and wasn’t it interesting at select committee today: there was the rapid review of the COVID-19 testing in Aotearoa New Zealand. I thought it was cool how the testing technical advisory group kind of trolled the Minister by putting “rapid” in the title. I actually thought that was quite good.

💬 Chris Bishop: Ha, ha! It’s like a rapid review of rapid tests.

Yeah, yeah. Well, I tell you what, it’s not very rapid when you get in there, is it? But, you know, this is one of the questions: how are we going to get better at integrating technology? How are we going to get better at working with the private sector? How are we going to get better at partnering with business? This Government’s not interested in having any of those conversations; they’re just saying, “Oh, you know what we’re doing? We got a bill to extend it another year and a few other things that we’ll get into.”

But I think the other thing that’s kind of interesting is that this bill has been passed relatively rapidly, but now there’s going to be another bill next week passed even more rapidly. And the thing is that the Government’s response is just so flat-footed. You know, like, you know what it’s like catching the ball at second-five and you’re flat-footed, it’s not a nice experience; well, they’re actually going backwards catching the ball. That’s how bad this Government is, because they were so unprepared for Delta; they really thought that they were going to hit a perfect home run, that there was going to be enough vaccination—I remember Ayesha Verrall saying it in the last briefing that the Minister invited me to, and, actually, the Prime Minister invited me to another briefing yesterday in question time, so we’re looking forward; we hope that the Minister will host us for another one now.

💬 Chris Bishop: Can I come too?

Well, we will invite Chris Bishop, of course. He invited me to the one he went to, so it seems only fair. And she said, because she’s too honest to be in politics, “Well, look, we’ve got vaccination; it’s all going to be fine.” You know, that’s the thing. They thought they were going to hit a home run. They didn’t count on Delta breaking through managed isolation and quarantine. They didn’t count on it being very difficult to get population immunity, and now they’re just scrambling.

So we’ve got this rushed law, which just says, “Oh, I don’t know, extend it for another year, you know, see where we go.” And then next week, they’re going to rush through another law to introduce the traffic-light system, which they obviously hadn’t thought of either. That’s the problem with this Government’s response. Once the great fortune of isolation and low-population density dissolved, they really aren’t sure what to do.

The way I’d sum it up is: once New Zealand was hit by Delta, this Government’s COVID response was helter-skelter. Unfortunately, while that may be amusing for some people here, it’s terribly disconcerting for people trying to plan their lives and their businesses. We’ll have a lot more to say as the debate goes on. Thank you, Madam Chair.

CHAIRPERSON (Hon Jenny Salesa): Members, the time has come for me to leave the Chair. The committee is suspended and I will resume the Chair at 9 a.m. for extended sitting tomorrow. Thank you.

Debate interrupted.

Sitting suspended from 9.58 p.m. to 9 a.m. (Thursday)