COVID-19 Response (Courts Safety) Legislation Bill

Members, we now come to clause 2. This is the debate on clause 2, “Commencement”, and I’d remind members and the Minister that this is a debate on clause 2 and it’s a very tight debate.

Clause 2 says that the Act comes into force on the day after Royal assent, and a number of members have made comment on the time frame which this piece of legislation is tracking on. Mr Penk also made a contribution about making sure that our court system is efficient.

I can guarantee you one thing, and that is if we pass this legislation as soon as possible, we’ll give the judiciary and the Ministry of Justice the ability to ensure there is efficiency and safety in our courts. So that is why we’re making sure that this piece of legislation is available to them, and the faster that it is passed, the quicker that will give certainty to those arms of Government to make sure that the efficiency that we’re after and the safety that we’re after comes into force as soon as possible.

Thank you very much, Mr Chair. I acknowledge the Minister’s responses in relation to clause 1. There was one aspect of that which was not entirely satisfactory to me, so I’ll attempt to shoehorn that into a subsequent clause.

For now, though, clause 2 at its heart goes to the timing of the legislation going into force, and, of course, the day after Royal assent will be reasonably short order after it has passed through this House, perhaps as early as tomorrow. But the point, really, that the Minister must address in boasting that the court system will be able to be more efficient and more safe in the time that the bill is passed begs the question why on earth it is that it has taken until April 2022 for such measures to be put in place. If they are so necessary, then why is it that they have not been at least attempted earlier—for example, at the time that the COVID-19 Protection Framework, aka, the traffic light system, was passed in late 2021 by that Government?

So I say to you, Mr Chair, and to the fellow committee members that the Minister can’t have it both ways. He can’t claim that this is terribly important in the interests of safety and efficiency and that it’s going to do all kinds of important and valuable things and necessary things without acknowledging that, surely, he’s saying that these things haven’t been able to be done in the meantime. With all due respect, the position is simply not a logical one for him to sustain.

So I have a number of other calls that I would like to make or questions that I’d like to put to the Minister in relation to clause 2—I’ll just put that on your radar, Mr Chair—but in the first instance, I would like the Minister to respond to that point: how he can be so positive about the changes that this bill will be introduced without appearing to be in the least bit embarrassed about the fact that it’s taken him and his Government so long to arrange them.

During the debate on clause 1, I outlined the time frame at which both the alert level and the COVID protection framework were in place. The Opposition can’t have it both ways either, because if we had introduced this piece of legislation when the COVID protection framework came into being, then I’m sure there would have been cries and howls that this was being done under urgency and not given due consideration. We took that into consideration, and that was the opinion of the Government to make sure that there was at least the ability to have a considered policy discussion about this and for it to have a relatively thorough parliamentary scrutiny, as well. If we had put it on the normal legislative track, then we’d probably still be here in June, July, and August trying to get this through, and the same howls of anger would be coming from the Opposition.

We don’t know what is going to happen over the next three or four months. We’re still kind of hoping for the best, but we’re watching the winter season very closely, as well. That could—and, hopefully, it will not—have an impact on the public health situation in New Zealand, but if it does, it, again, will have an impact on the efficient and safe operation of our courts, and, again, the Opposition can’t have it both ways, as well. If we aren’t prepared for that, I’m sure there’ll be howls of opposition. We are in this House today, making sure that we are prepared for the worst by making sure that this piece of legislation goes through.

Thank you very much, Mr Chair. With all due respect to the Minister’s response, I find that actually somewhat fatuous, and it ignores the reality that National supported this bill at first reading because at that time it was better than nothing. We made it very clear in our first reading speeches that the bill should have been introduced long before, certainty should have been provided to the courts, the safety and efficiency mechanisms should have been available much sooner, and the backlogs that now plague our court system would be that much less, accordingly.

But, in good faith, we did support the bill at first reading for all the reasons that the Minister has said—that it was better later than never; that’s my phrase, not his, to be fair—but in the intervening period of time, the Minister needs to acknowledge the fact that the Prime Minister, who is, obviously, part of the same Government, has put in place rules reducing vaccine mandates and pass requirements. For him not to acknowledge that and the fact that the world has changed, not only in terms of the shape of the pandemic but in the Government’s whole-of-Government response to this thing—for him not to realise that there is a difference between the environment in which we are living, from a policy perspective, from the first reading to now, and the intervening months that we’ve had, with a shortened period, as it’s been, at select committee, is, frankly, negligent. I take issue with the Minister suggesting that there be some sort of politicking involved in terms of the National Party’s response.

As I said, we supported it in good faith. The fact is that this was better late than never, at first reading. We can see no reason for it now at second reading, given that for the courts to be in a more stringent environment than the world outside the courtroom makes no sense, just as it made no sense for the courts to have an uncertain environment when there was certainty in the rest of New Zealand from the time that the COVID-19 Protection Framework was passed. For the Minister to suggest that it’s important to have parliamentary scrutiny for legislation such as this in a very highfalutin kind of way that suggests that it wasn’t important for the remainder of the COVID-19 response legislation in late last year, I think will be viewed very dimly by everyone outside the court system who has, obviously, been affected by those strictures.

So I’d welcome the Minister’s response to that and, in particular, I would welcome his advice as to whether he thinks that the other changes that the Government has made in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic are in anyway relevant to this, or is he living and expecting the courts to live in some sort of parallel universe?

Can I thank the member for his vague references to the success of the Government in dealing with the current outbreak, because we are at the situation where we are able to lift the restrictions that we’ve had in place in order to keep New Zealanders safe. I’d also like to understand what his crystal ball was saying late last year when we started looking at this issue, when the Omicron wave had not hit yet, and we didn’t know how long the Omicron wave would be here with us. In order to deal with that in terms of the safety and efficiency of courts, we started the policy process and introduced this piece of legislation very early this year in order to make sure that we were prepared. Again, at the very beginning of this process, the Omicron wave had not hit. We had to make sure we were doing everything possible to make sure we had in place the measures, and we gave the judiciary and the Ministry of Justice the ability to deal with that.

It looks promising that we’ll be able to lift even more restrictions in the near future in order to give the freedoms that New Zealanders enjoyed pre-COVID back and that, hopefully, the likes of the operation of our courts can continue as close to normal as what it used to be. It is imperative on the Government, though, to ensure that there are protections and the ability for the judiciary and the Ministry of Justice to deal with anything if it were to get worse.

Well, it was very interesting to hear from the Minister around the commencement. This bill is to be enacted after it gets Royal assent, and the point we’re making, of course, is that that will be too late because the world has moved on, and that’s why we’re not, fundamentally, supporting this bill. But he used the excuse that, well, we would have been crosser if the Government had included these measures back in November when they were ramming it through the light-setting regulations in sort of a seat-of-the-pants response to the situation that we faced as a country.

The point that we would make, and have made consistently, is that we are two years into this pandemic and the Government has had many months and years to prepare for the inevitable outbreak of COVID in this country. I mean, if you go back to the strategy of this Government, it was to buy time for New Zealanders to be prepared for the arrival of COVID. Nobody ever dreamed that, somehow, New Zealand would never ever get it. We live in the world, and unless we’re going to seal ourselves off for ever, we would have had to deal with COVID at some point. So the strategy, as far as we could work it out—it has never been very clearly articulated by the Government. The strategy, I can only assume, was to buy time, and to buy time to do two things: (1) to get New Zealanders vaccinated when that was available, and, (2) to prepare the health system to be able to cope with a surge of infections when it came to New Zealand in numbers, which it inevitably would do.

Now, our criticism of this Government, of course, is that they didn’t, having bought that time at colossal expense—[Interruption]—yeah, it’s coming, Mr Speaker. Having bought that time at colossal expense, with $60 billion borrowed, what did they do? Well, they mucked around on the vaccines and took six months too long to get us started, because the rest of the world apparently needed the vaccines more than us, and, secondly, they didn’t prepare the health system. So, as a result, we found ourselves where we were. So that negligent slowness left the country exposed, as it were, and, in the meantime, they did nothing to prepare for basic things like making sure that the court system could work in the context of some kind of lockdown or restrictions regime, which would be inevitable when COVID came into the country.

It’s astonishing to hear from the Minister that they started the policy process of trying to deal with some of the issues raised in this bill only at the start of this year. We heard that—we heard that just now. Given everything that they could predict and the difficulties that they’ve been facing in the courts, this Minister finally got his officials to start looking at the policy issues at the start of this year, maybe after they had been camping over Christmas. They’d had a big year, they’d gone camping, he’d done his Christmas festivities, probably in late January—when he says “the start of this year”, it’s probably late January that he got back to work—and they started focusing on the issues in this bill. No wonder it’s so late, and no wonder the commencement date is so late as to be not very effective.

I don’t like to extrapolate too far on this, but it does seem to me to be a pattern. It does seem to be a pattern that has emerged in this Government that they respond to things very late in the piece and make it up as they go along, and then bring in stuff which demonstrates that they are doing something, but really doesn’t amount to a hill of beans, and that’s a tragedy. In the meantime, as we’ve said all along, if this bill did do something useful in terms of making it easier for technology to operate in the court situation and we had time to look at it properly, we would be keen to see the commencement occurring the day after its Royal assent.

I move, That the question be now put.