COVID-19 ORDERS — Approval

I seek leave to revise the wording of Government notice of motion No. 2 to correct the title in one order by inserting the word “requirements” after “self-isolation” in the order COVID-19 Public Health Response (Self-Isolation and Permitted Work) Order 2022 (SL 2022/46). Just to explain what I’m seeking leave for, it was discovered earlier today that there was a typographical error in one of the titles of the orders to be approved by the House, and so this leave is simply correcting the title of the order in the motion before I move the motion.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Ian McKelvie): Is there any objection to that course of action being followed? There is none.

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

COVID-19 Public Health Response (Protection Framework and Other Matters) Amendment Order 2022

COVID-19 Public Health Response (Protection Framework and Other Matters) Amendment Order 2022 Amendment Order 2022

COVID-19 Public Health Response (Vaccinations) Amendment Order (No 2) 2022

COVID-19 Public Health Response (Isolation and Quarantine and Maritime Border) Amendment Order 2022

COVID-19 Public Health Response (Isolation and Quarantine) Amendment Order 2022

COVID-19 Public Health Response (Self-Isolation Requirements and Permitted Work) Order 2022

COVID-19 Public Health Response (Air Border) Order 2021 Amendment Order 2022

COVID-19 Public Health Response (Isolation and Quarantine and Other Matters) Amendment Order 2021 Amendment Order 2022

COVID-19 Public Health Response (Air Border) Amendment Order 2022

COVID-19 Public Health Response (Isolation and Quarantine) Amendment Order (No 2) 2022

COVID-19 Public Health Response (Testing for COVID-19) Order 2022.

This is a regular fixture for the House at the moment as we deal with a global pandemic and as we particularly enter a phase of the global pandemic where things have been moving and changing at a fairly steady clip. Under the COVID-19 public health legislation, the Government is able to move quickly in order to put in place and in order to remove certain restrictions, certain rules, and certain processes that are required for our management of the COVID-19 response.

This motion today approves 11 orders that have come into force on various dates between 3 February and 2 March this year. Though none of these orders are more than two months old, it is worthy to note that some of them have already been amended or replaced. A significant number of the provisions in the orders that we’re confirming today are actually now obsolete, which I think shows how nimble and flexible and responsive our overall response to managing COVID-19 has been and how it will continue to be.

We are moving pretty rapidly through the post-peak plan, and life is starting to return to something that feels a lot more normal. So aspects of the response that are covered in the orders today include changes around the rules for face coverings—those still largely remain in place; reductions in period of isolation and quarantine—most of those have now been superseded; changes in some of the rules for people who are self-isolating—some of those do continue in place; the loosening of some travel restrictions—in fact, there has been a much, much more liberal loosening of travel restrictions since those orders were put in place; and the lifting of the requirement to self-isolate or for managed isolation and quarantine (MIQ) for some travellers arriving in the country—and I would note that, in fact, again there’s been a significant extension of that since those orders were put in place.

So the great majority of the amendments that these orders brought about were to ease restrictions as part of our managed transition, as we wound back many of the restrictions and many of the aspects of our COVID-19 response. There are some other significant ones still to come before the House, including removing vaccine pass requirements, removing vaccine mandates, and the changes that we’ve made to the traffic light system. Those will be covered in a subsequent motion; they’ve yet to be reviewed by the Regulations Review Committee.

I do want to acknowledge the work of the Regulations Review Committee in very conscientiously going through all of the orders that I have made under the COVID-19 Public Health Response Act and identifying a range of very useful questions, some of substance, some of style, but all of them, I think, underpinning that the committee has not in any way regarded this as a rubber stamp exercise. It has been a very important part of our continual review and improvement cycle. Often issues that have been identified by the Regulations Review Committee have been picked up on the next iteration of the orders in question. These orders have regularly been amended, regularly been updated, and are regularly changing; so the suggestions and the feedback from the Regulations Review Committee have often been incorporated.

The committee was particularly concerned, for example—just to highlight a few of the examples, but to highlight one—that a provision that was designed to mean that you wouldn’t necessarily need to turf someone out of an MIQ facility in the middle of the night could result in people having to stay at an MIQ facility for longer than they might otherwise be required to, and that wasn’t the intention of the order. The intention of the order was simply to make sure that, if somebody had nowhere else to go, they were able to stay there, because under the old order they would have had to be turfed out. So what we had to do was make sure that we got the balance right there, between saying, “Yep, you can stay if you need to stay for a bit longer, but you’re under no obligation to do that.” So, I think, with the exchange that we had with the committee, we were able to actually provide even better clarity in the next iteration of the order, which, of course, is now superseded because no one’s going into MIQ now in the way that they were before. So I think that is a really good example of how the committee was able to contribute constructively to the process in order to keep improving these orders.

The orders—I do want to again acknowledge that they were often drafted and put in place with a sense of urgency because they were responding to a particular situation, a particular series of events, and so there has been ongoing, regular improvement as the opportunity has allowed.

In regard to the COVID-19 Public Health Response (Self-isolation Requirements and Permitted Work) Order of 2022, the committee was concerned that people who had to go into quarantine because they were unable to self-isolate in appropriate surroundings might face greater restrictions than they would if they were in self-isolation. We were able to explain that this may reflect the wider public health circumstances of why the person needed to go into MIQ facilities in the first place, and there are provisions there that allow for them to leave early, as that is required. The good news is that most of that, as I said, is now redundant, because we’ve moved to a new phase where the use of MIQ now has significantly diminished and, in fact, for most of those in MIQ—and there’s very, very few—it is because they are in a particular category. So, for those who are interested in MIQ, as of today it’s a couple of hundred people; mostly refugees, people who are coming from other parts of the world where they need a place to land when they get into the country, effectively—that is who MIQ are accommodating in their facilities at the moment.

The Regulations Review Committee, I think in their diligent scrutiny, looked right at the detail of some of the orders, including, I’m told, a detailed discussion of what “contactless delivery” actually is. I can say that the Cabinet committee had very similar conversation as we’ve unfolded our COVID-19 response over the last two years. So I welcome those kinds of conversations.

In May—so we’re not far away from May now—it will be two years since the House passed the bill that became the COVID-19 Public Health Response Act of 2020. The powers given by that Act have given the Government the ability to move quickly to respond to the challenges that COVID-19 has brought about, and we’ve continued to evolve as the response to the virus has needed to evolve. It has been a big part of us being able to come through the global pandemic in a very strong position. We’ve got a strong economy, we have record low unemployment levels, and we are now in a very strong position to accelerate our recovery from COVID-19. It has been the orders made under the COVID-19 Public Health Response Act that have put us in that position.

But I also want to acknowledge, given that—I’m hoping—there may not be many more of these motions in the House, that there have been some really difficult trade-offs that have been involved in the response. There have been limitations on people’s rights and freedoms—there’s been no question about that. For many people, that’s resulted in some hardship. So I want to acknowledge that, and I also want to acknowledge that I think everyone is feeling a degree of relief that we are getting to the point where our restrictions are much fewer than they have been for much of the response. We are returning to something that is much more normal. I look forward to continuing along that particular path.

Thank you very much, Mr Speaker, and it’s a pleasure to speak to these COVID-19 orders and the examination thereof. I wear a couple of different hats, so to speak. One is that I am the chair of the Regulations Review Committee. I am grateful to the Minister for his engagement with us throughout. He’s been kind enough to acknowledge the committee in his remarks tonight, characterising our diligence as not seeing ourselves merely as a rubber stamp, and that’s true enough, but I do also think that, because it takes two to tango, it’s only fair to acknowledge that we’ve had a really good quality of interaction with the Minister in his response to the points that we’ve been making. So it has been, actually, an enjoyable task, believe it or not, which says something probably quite sad about the members of the committee. But, nevertheless, we have enjoyed our work, and we’ve been well supported in that work by the legislative counsel, as well as the committee staff more generally.

So, while it’s tempting to view these debates, at 9.30 at night in this case, as being almost a moot point—from the perspective both of the Regulations Review Committee, in the sense that we make recommendations and the House will confirm the orders even if we were to recommend otherwise, potentially, and from a National Party perspective, if I were to adopt that hat for the moment, in that we’re a minority in this Parliament—but, nevertheless, these are important accountability mechanisms. I guess, the other one to acknowledge—and the Minister’s alluded to this in his own remarks—is the temporal restriction on the usefulness of the exercise; that is to say, a number of the orders have actually already been revoked, or are in the process of being revoked or, effectively, overtaken by events. So here we are, discussing and debating, but I think it’s still worthwhile, because, as the Regulations Review Committee is a creature of Parliament, and Parliament itself now is sitting to consider these motions, it’s an opportunity for us to provide some accountability for the executive, in the person of the Minister for COVID-19 Response in this case.

So I don’t intend, obviously, to attempt to cover all the detail. I’d rather take the approach, actually, as the Minister did, of providing a couple of examples, by way of illustration, of the approach that we took throughout our consideration of these orders—which, as he’s quite rightly noted, actually only cover the span of a couple of months, but, nevertheless, a high volume of secondary legislation in that time, for obvious real-world reasons, namely the evolution of the pandemic and its response at that time. One of the issues that we looked at, for a start—and I take you back to early February, which seems so long ago—there was an order providing, and I’ll use shorthand, “Protection Framework and Other Matters”. Well, that’s not very descriptive, is it? Anyway, it’s the first one, so “start at the very beginning, a very good place to start,” as they say.

💬 Hon Chris Hipkins: You need to sing it.

Ha, ha! There’ll be no Mary Poppins in the House tonight, Mr Hipkins. “Definition of a medical-grade face covering”—so that was extending the application of that rule to younger people, and from a National Party perspective we had views on the anomalies that we said were created in terms of the way that that played out, for example, on sports fields—school versus club. But, nevertheless, the committee had no concerns about the order. The rule, we thought, was well expressed and was not problematic from the point of view of the appropriateness of the order or the way that it was made—as distinct from the policy.

The next one I actually found quite interesting. It was an amendment order to an amendment order. It said it was to come into force at 11.58 p.m. that day, and that’s kind of a funny time; 11.59 p.m. we’re all very familiar with, because, of course, it’s ambiguous to say “midnight” on a particular day; it might be the start or the end of the day. And in the military, the 24-hour time, the last minute of the day is 2359, and the first minute of the following day is 0001, so there’s a minute that’s 120 seconds, because, of course, you don’t want the confusion, again, of all the zeros. Anyway, so this is 11.58, and the specific reason for that was to do with sequencing in relation to other orders coming into effect, and the relevant one at 11.59—so this one had to get in ahead. I found that interesting, anyway. I’ve spent, now, more than a minute discussing that, so it would be disproportionate for me to continue.

Talking about the language used in relation to premises used for a private function in this particular order—just by way of example, a bit of flavour if you will—the amendment was needed to clarify that the order applied to premises whether or not they’d been hired. Logical enough, I suppose, to apply restrictions regardless of the way that a venue was coming to be used, from a public health perspective come to the same thing.

The other one, in relation to this first tranche, which was 2 to 14 February, received on 14 February—what could be more romantic than a COVID-19 order on Valentine’s Day? But the purpose of the order was quite expansive; it was talking about not only avoiding adverse effects of the outbreak but also ensuring continuity of services. The scope of the purpose of the order was a theme to which we returned in relation to some other orders which were a bit narrower in the way that they stated their particular intentions.

Moving ahead now—we’re in mid-February if you’re following along, Mr Speaker, on your Order Paper or indeed on your calendar—we had an extension of a deadline date for student workers in the health and disability sector to receive a booster. This is an example of an order that had a liberalising effect, as restrictions began to be removed. While the National Party had mixed feelings at times about the regime as a whole, nevertheless in these orders we saw a move away from restrictions in a way with which we agreed and approved. I should actually point out before going any further, having left it almost to the end, that National will be supporting the confirmation of the orders by the House.

Similarly, the reduction of the period of time in which a person needed to remain in isolation, or quarantine, down from 10 days to seven days—again a sensible move in the context of what was happening at that time. Minister Hipkins already talked about the need for flexibility in relation to when a person would leave a managed isolated quarantine facility—not wanting to have them arbitrarily detained for longer, or by way of unintended consequence, given that the intent we accepted in the committee was to allow an orderly departure and not have someone thrown out on to the street at midnight, not to put too fine a point on it. So this was an example of an engagement with the Minister, by way of letters of course, and it happens over a period of time, but the response was along the lines that the Minister stood by his interpretation, I guess, in terms of the way that order could be interpreted. We were satisfied that that point had been noted and understood, and as the Minister has already said, sometimes these things would flow through to subsequent orders—a lesson having been learnt, as opposed to necessarily meaning that the order would be amended on the spot, or let alone struck down.

A couple of other ones, if I may, Mr Speaker, in my remaining time. The order that was presented in now late-February regarding requirements for close contacts that was talking about—and we did have a few concerns with that one—requiring that close contacts have the ability to stay in touch with the Government. For those who are not able to do that—whether it’s a limitation of IT, or perhaps mobile phone coverage, or internet access—we thought that it wasn’t reasonable to state, in mandatory terms, that a person must stay in contact with the Government agency if they were not physically able to do so. So we made that point, and I think, again, we got a pretty fair hearing from the Minister; and at the point that we’d had that interaction, in fact, that order was revoked and had been replaced in any case. So that was, I suppose at that point, a moot point but nevertheless illustrated the kind of serious attention to detail with which the committee was approaching its task.

Moving quickly through now my remaining minute, we did talk about the purpose of orders quite considerably, because, with such great powers being given to the executive, it was important at least to be able to constrain his powers by saying at least that the detail of the order should match its purpose. And, in a particular case regarding self-isolation requirements and permitted work, we pointed out that the purpose appeared to be relaxing restrictions, so it couldn’t fairly be said to fit under a purpose that was merely about preventing an outbreak. Of course, an order that imposes any restrictions at all is preventing an outbreak relative to not having the order at all, but nevertheless we thought that it would be helpful to have a more expansive purpose, and so we got there in the end.

Discussions about navigability and accessibility of orders I won’t trouble the House with, but suffice to say that we, obviously, had a pretty detailed look at all the detail, including even being so precise about what contactless delivery means—whether it’s just physical distancing to be maintained or specifying a 2-metre limit, which is, of course, much more quantifiable, measurable, and enforceable. So, anyway, Mr Speaker, I hope that’s given you a good insight into our work in examining the orders, and as I’ve said we do in fact support these orders in the House tonight.

Thank you, Mr Speaker, and also thank you to the previous speakers as well. I’m like the last speaker, Chris Penk: I wear a bunch of hats. I’ve literally got one on my head right now! Thank you for the detail that you went through with the Regulations Review Committee. Going through that detail, I think, is really important, as is acknowledging how fast things are moving. Things are moving very, very, very quickly.

My understanding with these orders is that they were predominantly made during the period of phase one and two of the Omicron outbreak, as case numbers initially grew slowly while contact tracing was able to limit the spread. They also cover the beginning of phase three, as numbers increased quickly and contact tracing and isolation requirements subsequently changed as well. As I flicked through them, I noted that the main issues that were covered were self-isolation requirements for contacts at various points of the outbreak, and border controls, isolation, and testing requirements for incoming travellers. The Minister and the member before both picked those things up.

Some of the orders—there’s a few of them, and I do appreciate that they have moved quickly. I’m just looking at a couple of them here, like the COVID-19 Public Health Response (Protection Framework and Other Matters) Amendment Order 2022—that’s such a long, long name—which was an order made to strengthen the rules around masks and face coverings to make it mandatory for a mask to cover both the mouth and nose and have straps that go around the ear or head and extending the mask mandates to children under 12. For some of those ones, we’re here to confirm it, but, actually, the deadline has been and gone because things have been moving so quickly, such as the COVID-19 Public Health Response Amendment Order (No 2) 2022—another long order name—“SL something or other”. This was to change the deadline from 15 February to 25 February to get a booster shot for someone who is in the health and disability sector.

I appreciate how fast things are moving, and we do need to be nimble. It’s great to see that the Parliament has seen that we can make our response as quick as possible and as nimble as possible. I do worry, though, sometimes—particularly within the context of the announcements made last week—whether we, in moving so fast, have missed the opportunity to actually take a pause to really ground ourselves on those sorts of issues and those sorts of voices that we should be listening to. For me, there’s been a lot of noise. There’s been a lot of banging on the business drum, and folks outside on the Parliament lawn were loud. We could hear all those issues. But then we couldn’t hear the voices of some of the other communities. I worry about the speed of things and the shifting of focus away from immunocompromised and disabled whānau and what this means for Māori and Pasifika leaders, and—as a parent myself—what this means for parents and teachers. And I know that people have been reflecting on how it feels like we’re going back to normal, but the pandemic isn’t over—we’ve had a number of deaths today, as well as over the past week as well—and I think it’s really important for us to continue to hold on to that. Yes, we need to be nimble. Yes, we need to be quick. Yes, we need to adapt to the situation as best as we can. But we also need to remain grounded in the fact that this pandemic is actually not over.

For me, that throws up a whole lot of issues—and I expect these will come up somehow, somewhere, and will probably show its way at the Regulations Review Committee in some way around what we do around clean air standards for adequate ventilation and air filtration, because that’s going to become a bigger issue. What are we going to do about what that means for schools and what does it mean for public buildings? Access around making sure that teachers and staff at all the schools get access to N95 masks as well. As I’d been talking to friends of mine about the impacts of long COVID—I mean, what does that mean, particularly when it impacts our rangatahi, when it impacts our children as well—then, I think making sure that we hold on to those things that have gotten us through. And sure, things have moved—and I was just thinking about the traffic light system and the system we had before, and the importance of kind of acknowledging that this pandemic is not over. We’re in this particular Omicron wave at the moment, but who knows what the next wave is going to look like? It could be more severe—so making sure that we hold on to those lessons, hold on to those details as well, and of course making sure that we have that equity in vaccine roll-out for boosters and for kids, particularly for Māori in rural areas, for our tamariki Māori. And I noted a couple of weeks ago the high levels of hospitalisation of Pasifika as well. And then, what does it all mean for workers as well around workplace health and safety, and those kinds of things?

So, yes, acknowledging the nimbleness and the speed at which we can do things—and that’s a great thing in being able to have that flexibility—but hey, let’s continue to be grounded and to filter out the noise and listen and focus on those voices that we need to be listening to: the voices of immunocompromised whānau, disabled whānau. What does it mean for Māori and Pasifika communities? What does it mean for school communities? What does it mean for parents, who are navigating all of this stuff with our parents at school? And then, of course, what does that mean for our young tamariki in early childhood education settings as well?

On that, we will be supporting these orders, but also a reminder to all of us, I think, that let’s continue to stay grounded and to recognise actually this is not over, that people are in hospital, and that people are dying. And let’s continue to reach out to each other and to really hold on to that whole idea of being a team of 5 million. And so, on that, I commend these orders to the House.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. Look, I apologise, my colleague has been waylaid. ACT won’t be supporting this piece of legislation. I think it’s clearly obvious the world is moving on, and, yeah, look, I have got nothing further to say on that matter. But, yeah, so we won’t be supporting this piece of legislation. Thank you very much.