COVID-19 Response (Vaccinations) Legislation Bill

on behalf of the Minister for COVID-19 Response: I move, That the COVID-19 Response (Vaccinations) Legislation Bill be now read a third time.

The bill that has made its way through the House to this point is a very important part of New Zealand’s evolving response to COVID-19. New Zealanders have worked hard over the last two years. We’ve been through some tough times, and I stand here as an Auckland-based MP who’s experienced that with people over the last three months. But the work that we have undertaken, the shared commitment of New Zealanders to keep themselves and one another safe, and the clear guidance that has been provided by the Government through the COVID alert level framework has meant that as we stand here today, New Zealand as compared to many other countries around the world has lost fewer of our citizens, has seen fewer of our citizens become seriously ill, has a record low rate of unemployment, and has extraordinary economic resilience. None of that diminishes at all some of the very real challenges that people, organisations, and businesses have experienced, but collectively we have done well.

But now, as one of the more highly vaccinated countries in the world, we have the opportunity to move to the next phase—to build on our successes; to build on our high rate of vaccination, which is now close on 92 percent first dose across eligible New Zealanders; to move into a new framework that helps to keep people safe, that deals with the realities of Delta, an enormously transmissible virus, and at the same time allows Kiwis, having done the enormous hard work of the past two years, to get back to the things that we love. That is what the COVID protection framework offers.

We’ve heard a lot in the debate so far about the challenges and the difficulties. I think we all accept those. This is the way that we move forward. This is the way that businesses can operate. This is the way that people can attend social gatherings. This is the way that everyone can go back to work. I think one of the enormous disappointments of this debate is that, actually, what we have heard from the other side is opposition to moving forward. The position of the other side, by definition, is that they want to retain the current settings that they complain so much about. We have heard no alternative whatsoever, and their position is confused, because if I recall rightly several weeks ago, none other than the Leader of the Opposition, the Hon Judith Collins, said it was wonderful—the word was “wonderful”—that we are moving to introduce vaccine certificates. Well, one cannot just leave it at words; one actually has to have a legislative framework to bring that into legal effect. That is what this Government is doing today, and that is what that side of the House has opposed. So they have no credibility at all to stand to try and draw political capital from noting, in some cases rightly, how difficult the current settings are but to oppose anything that actually helps to move us forward, socially or economically, to do things in a different way. But that is what this piece of legislation does.

There are two core things that the legislation achieves. The first is that it brings measures in to enable the COVID protection framework. It provides clarity to enable us to issue orders—for example, to be able to enable those workers who are working in COVID vaccine certificate areas to be required to be vaccinated. That is something, again, that I’ve heard support for from the other side of the House, that we should do that—that when people go to have a meal or have a drink or go to the gym in a COVID vaccine certificate area, which they support, the workers should also have to be vaccinated. That is what we are enabling, but, again, they vote against it.

This Government is showing leadership in putting the framework in place. It’s not easy. There are complex rights issues to balance—

💬 Chris Bishop: Exactly!

—but we are moving forward with that, and he says, “Exactly.” Their demand is to push, to go as fast as possible, and to complain why things weren’t changed yesterday, but then they want us to spend more time and delay it further.

The second core part of the legislation, which is in Part 2 of the bill, relates to giving employers a vaccination tool. This is about enabling employers, through a very simple mechanism, to be able to make decisions about whether work can reasonably be required to be done by vaccinated workers only. This is a very important provision. It’s been raised in this debate, including at the committee stage, that the Government mandates are a very strong and very blunt tool, and we have used them, or indicated that we will use them, to date to require vaccination for up to 40 percent of the workforce. We do not take those decisions lightly at all. They are very carefully considered decisions that include public health advice, consideration of New Zealand Bill of Rights Act issues, employment rights issues, and broader social and economic considerations. We think that in addition to those tools that are used, it is important that employers have clear, simple tools that they can use with a high degree of legal certainty. There are existing health and safety assessment tools that they can use, but the business sector itself has told us and has requested that we provide simpler tools for them to use.

It was noted by the Hon Mark Mitchell in debate earlier on that a number of larger employers, for example Countdown and The Warehouse, are using those existing health and safety risk assessment tools. But the vaccination tool that this piece of legislation will enable is actually mainly about the small guy. It’s about the small business that doesn’t have an HR department or a legal department to conduct a full and wide-ranging health and safety risk assessment with confidence. It’s about enabling a very simple tool that they can look to that has objective measures in it that enable them to make a decision about quite a weighty matter in a way that balances up the rights of employees and employers.

Here I do have to note the way in which we have tried to carefully balance these matters. There has been criticism from the other side of the House on two grounds, the first of which is that, apparently, the legislation tramples over rights and goes too far and overreaches. But then what we have heard in the debate which has just finished is that we should actually strip, apparently, all employees of their rights if their employment is terminated under this Act, and we do not agree with that. We have tried to strike a balance of providing simplicity and clarity for employers in respect of these issues but continuing to believe that people should act reasonably and in good faith, and that is, I believe, the balance that needs to be struck.

By way of conclusion, I just want to acknowledge all New Zealanders who have been part of this extraordinary and difficult journey that we have been on, along with every other country around the world. The other side of the House acts as though costless decisions can be made, as though we can just remove restrictions without there being any health consequence whatsoever, because that is the level of dialogue from them: it’s to point to the difficulties but never to point to the solutions, to never actually show and describe how we can move forward and get the balance right. Then, occasionally, when they do it, as they did when they launched a policy that at least had some coherence back in September, they then rapidly contradict themselves on that. Again, I note that as this Government proposes a COVID protection framework that enables many of the things to happen that they are asking for, they vote against it.

Well, what I’ve said before and what I will say again is that showing leadership in a time of public health crisis is not just about making the easy decisions that make everyone happy all of the time. There are decisions that have to be made that are difficult. There are trade-offs to be made in those decisions. There are complexities that have to be worked through. There are complex intersections of rights. This piece of legislation, which takes us into the next phase, retains many of the protections we have but enables important social and economic activity to occur. It provides more certainty about workplace vaccination rights, and, after all of the hard work, it enables our country to move forward as one of the most highly vaccinated countries in the world, one of the countries in the world with the strongest-performing economy, and one of the countries in which people have now the ability to move forward into a new era in which we deal with COVID-19 in a safe way while getting back to the things that we love. I want to thank everyone for their work in getting to this point, and I commend this bill to the House.

The question is that the motion be agreed to. This debate is interrupted and set down for resumption after oral questions this afternoon. The House is suspended until 2 p.m. today.

Debate interrupted.

Sitting suspended from 1.03 p.m. to 2 p.m.

E noho. The House is resumed.