COVID-19 Orders — Approval

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) Amendment Order (No 7) 2022 (SL 2022/113);

COVID-19 Public Health Response (Maritime Border and Other Matters) Amendment Order 2022 (SL 2022/125);

COVID-19 Public Health Response (Vaccinations) Amendment Order (No 4) 2022 (SL 2022/131).

This is another in the series of motions that ask the House to approve COVID-19 orders to ensure that they are not revoked within certain time frames. Today’s motion approves three orders that came into course at various states between 16 April and 15 May. As Minister Hipkins has noted, when moving similar motions in the past couple of months or so, there are a couple of trends in their content.

First, the number of orders to be approved is diminishing as COVID-19 and our response to it evolves. This is to be welcomed as it signals a move away from the use of the extraordinary powers conferred upon the Minister by the COVID-19 Public Health Response Act 2020. The second positive trend is that the Regulations Review Committee has once again expressed no concerns about any of the orders covered by this motion. This should not be taken as an indication that the committee has relaxed its vigilance. It has, again, produced comprehensive reports on all three orders and I thank the committee members and their chair, Mr Chris Penk, for their work. It is, instead, a result of the maintenance of the high standards that the scrutiny of the Regulations Review Committee has done so much to create. Thanks are also due to officials at the Ministry of Health and other contributing agencies, and the Parliamentary Counsel Office—which has coped so admirably with the pressured workload that COVID-19 has brought in.

The first order that the House is being asked to approve amends the COVID-19 Public Health Response (Protection Framework) Order 2021 to extend medical grade face mask covering requirements to vaccine mandated workers under the orange setting. It also allowed tertiary education providers to deny secondary school students entry to their premises if those students are not vaccinated and would carry out vaccine-mandated work as part of their programme.

The second order represents an important step in the COVID-19 response as it removed the previous isolation and quarantine requirements and replaced them with the self-isolation regime. This aligned the maritime border with settings at the air border at the time it was passed.

Finally, an amendment to the COVID-19 Public Health Vaccinations Order 2021 expanded the range of vaccines a person may have so as to be recognised as having had a booster dose, and provided for a new person conducting a business or undertaking - led exemption process that authorises an affected person to carry out certain work for 100 days without being vaccinated or receiving a booster dose.

It is our intention not to bring too many more of these approved motions to the House. But we should recognise that the system put in place by the COVID-19 Public Health Response Act has underpinned our response to COVID-19, allowing the Government to respond quickly as COVID-19 has evolved, supporting New Zealand to emerge with a strong economy and record low levels of unemployment.

The question is that motion be agreed to.

Thank you very much, Mr Speaker. I want to thank the Associate Minister of Health for her excellent introduction for these various orders that we’re approving, and I just want to echo what she said in relation to the excellent job that the Regulations Review Committee does. We have the chair of the committee here in the House: Mr Penk. When he took on this venerable task at the start of this Parliament, I suspect he didn’t quite know just how many orders would be presented.

💬 David Seymour: How venerable it might be.

David Seymour’s mocking the venerable nature of the committee, but it is a very hard-working committee.

💬 David Seymour: I’m mocking the member’s diction.

Oh, he’s mocking the member’s diction. Oh, OK, righty-o. Anyway, the committee does a good job and it’s very well chaired. It’s got some excellent members on it, as I’ve commented previously.

I want to make a couple of points in relation to the orders that are being sought for approval, and we’ll be voting for the orders, on this side of the House. The first is in relation to the COVID-19 Public Health Response Vaccinations Amendment Order No. 4 2022, SL2022 1-31, which is the most recent report of the committee. I just want to signal that we’re supportive of what this order does but we are concerned by how long it took to make this order. So, basically, what this does is creates an authorisation for a person who’s not been vaccinated, or not received their booster dose, to undertake work that would otherwise require a vaccination or a booster dose, and it’s, basically, for people who have tested positive and therefore can’t get vaccinated, but they are still caught by the various vaccine mandates. I have had a bit of correspondence in relation to this. Other members around the Parliament may have as well—so people who work in mandated workforces who are, essentially, required to go and get boosted and have been unable to do so because they’ve tested positive for COVID. So sensible change; concerned by how long it took.

The second thing I want to talk about is the COVID-19 Public Health Response Protection Framework Amendment Order No. 6, which is SL2022 1-07. This moved the whole country from red to orange. I want to signal now that, on this side of the House, certainly for the National Party—and I think I’m right in saying Mr Seymour agrees with me on this—the utility of the traffic light framework, I think, has really been called into question.

💬 David Seymour: It’s a roundabout.

“It was irrelevant.”, says Mr Seymour.

💬 David Seymour: It’s a roundabout.

Oh, it’s a roundabout. OK, I thought you said it was irrelevant, which would definitely—definitely—be true. I think the key point is that the traffic light framework was of its time. It reflected a scenario in which we had vaccination rates that were increasing and it reflected it, and it was devised in a time in which Delta was the dominant strain, certainly in New Zealand, if not, worldwide. And, of course, now we have Omicron, and our vaccination rates have now increased to the point where we have widespread coverage in many parts of the country. I was looking at the numbers the other day, the number of—I think I’m right in saying—people who are aged 65 and above who have had a booster is over 90 percent in every DHB. That’s fantastic, because those people are the most vulnerable to COVID and they benefit the most from having the booster, so I’ve kept a track of how we’re going on the booster numbers and I think I’m right in saying that almost in every DHB we’re over 90 percent, and most DHBs are approaching 95 percent.

So it’s a great credit to the vaccination teams out there, who’ve done such a fantastic job getting around the country. And once we got the mechanisms right and once we gave a bit of power to the people, so to speak—involved community organisations and Māori and Pasifika health organisations and empowered them a bit more than maybe the officials wanted to at the start—fantastic job.

But all of that is to say that things have changed. Delta is no longer the dominant variant. We have Omicron—it’s milder—and we have very high levels of vaccination coverage. So I think it’s time—and we’ve said this for a while now, but I’m just flagging it up and in this context—to transition away from the traffic light framework. It’s not to say that we don’t need rules around what happens when you get COVID and what happens if your whānau gets COVID, and it’s not to say we don’t need rules around mask-wearing, but my personal view, and the view of the National Party as well, is that we’re better to have some simple rules in place that everybody can get behind, rather than the confusing nomenclature of the traffic light framework where we’re at orange and we’ve been signalled that we’ll be at orange for quite some time to come. So I think that would be very sensible.

Of course, we’ve largely now done away with vaccine passes as well. I haven’t seen a cafe or bar in the recent past that is actually utilising them. As a strong believer in private property rights, I’m completely comfortable with restaurants or hospitality venues that want to choose to use them—go for gold. But I have yet to come across one that actually is, and that, in and of itself, I think, is quite interesting. I think I’ve seen some stuff on Twitter that some cafes are, but I don’t tend to pay too much attention to that.

The final point I want to make is in relation to vaccine mandates more generally. I want to say to the Government that the time is soon going to arrive when the time line for the phasing out of vaccine mandates across the various professions that are covered by mandates will arrive. We do need some clarity and some certainty from the Government as to when that will be. There are big swathes of our workforce that are covered by the requirement to be vaccinated, and there is considerable unease in various parts of those sectors and from a considerable number of people at the imposition on rights that those mandates provide. And we accepted, on this side of the House, vaccine mandates for the bulk of 2021, because there was a clear nexus between vaccination and the prevention of transmission of COVID-19 and the severity of Delta and the severity of the disease when people did get COVID, and we supported them as time-limited measures that would help get our vaccination rates up and that would have an impact on the flow through of COVID into the New Zealand community.

But Omicron has changed the circumstances that we’re dealing with. We already have a very high level of vaccination, and Omicron is a different type of COVID to Delta, and the wild strain of COVID. And we know, as I’ve commented previously in the House, Omicron busts through vaccination, double vaccination, even triple vaccination, and so the impact on transmission is far less effective, and, because of that, we have to bear in mind the impact it’s having on rights and the ability for people to opt out of medical treatment. What we are saying to people is that if you choose to work in a particular profession—be it Corrections or be it at an allied health workforce, for example—you have to be vaccinated. That is a pretty big thing for the Government to do. It’s a pretty big thing for the State to say to somebody. Now, it’s not to say that that can never be justified, but it’s to say that the Government has to go through a rigorous rights analysis to figure out when the intrusion on rights is justified and whether or not the efficaciousness or the efficacy of what the Government is doing justifies the intrusion on the right. I would put it to the House that we have approached that point when it comes to vaccine mandates more generally.

So we do need a time line from the Government as to when these mandates will be phased out altogether. We’ve already seen that in relation to vaccine pass settings—for example, cafes, bars, things like that—but there is a vast part of the New Zealand workforce that are still covered by our vaccine mandates more generally and we do need to see from the Government a time line for the phasing out. That, in and of itself, even the Government publicising exactly how that will work, would actually provide comfort for a lot of people. So we look forward to that. Of course, we do look forward to considering more orders as they come before the House.

Just a final comment in passing, I think this has been a really good mechanism for parliamentary scrutiny. Clearly, in this back and forth in the House, we’re essentially pro-forma going through the motions a little bit when it comes to the actual scrutiny—the scrutiny that happens in the committee process. But that, in and of itself, is a really important process and it’s something I think the Standing Orders Committee would like to consider for future issues that we may confront in this House. Thank you, sir.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I just wanted to pick up what the last speaker, Chris Bishop, said about rights, because I agree. But let’s talk about workers’ rights. Let’s talk about the right for workers—for when they go to work—that they feel safe, that there are processes in place that make sure that they are protected from COVID, that they are protected from other winter illnesses as well. And let’s think about that not just purely from an economic perspective as well, because we have had a lot of noise, people banging on the business drums saying, “We need to open up.”, and all this kind of stuff. And I get it, you know, we all need a buck to keep the lights on. But there are other voices that we need to keep in mind; the voices of our immunocompromised whānau, our disabled whānau, those communities whose booster rates are not up—that are not near the 90 percent mark as well—and making sure that we keep that on our minds as well.

But I also want to thank the Regulations Review Committee for the work that they’ve been doing. It is an important mechanism for them to actually go through the detail and to look at and to get into the weeds of these regulations and for that to make sense for them—and I do want to thank them for doing that. They seem to get on well, and I don’t know if they do that just for the pantomime of Parliament, but I do appreciate the thorough work that they do as well.

But here’s the thing: that when you’re getting into the weeds and picking the pūhā and making sure you’re getting all that nourishing kai, it’s important to step back and actually take a look at the garden—the whole garden. And that’s a metaphor—it’s Greens speak, if you like—about asking, “Where is the plan?” Where is the plan?

I appreciate the detail that the Regulations Review Committee went through, and the various orders and motions that were brought up as well, but, in order for those things to make sense, you’ve actually got to be able to hang it on top of a framework, and I think that we have lost sight of that. I think this Parliament is starting to move away from that. And, yes, the number of orders are drying up and that would be a good thing if the current COVID rules and regulations were keeping the community safe, but here’s the thing: the pandemic is not over—it isn’t over. Aotearoa currently has one of the highest case rates and death rates in the world; although it’s likely other places have much higher rates than reported. Our vaccination rates have stagnated, with only half of five- to 11-year-olds having received a single dose of the vaccine, and only 25 percent have received a second dose. I did hear the numbers about the district health boards and so on and so forth, however, booster levels for adult Māori and Pasifika populations are barely above 50 percent as well.

We’re in the middle of winter. There’s a number of us that can’t be in Parliament because of having to home isolate and all that—winter and flu and all that kind of stuff—and we face a possible second COVID-19 peak over winter, at the same time as open borders and bringing in new viruses into our communities. And yes, people can—are—getting reinfected with COVID. We need to make sure that these indoor spaces are safe for everyone. It’s important that the Government should be subsidising organisations that upgrade their ventilation and air filtration systems as well. I think about this around our schools, and I’m mindful of this as a parent—I’m sure this is true for many of us. Many of us at Parliament are parents or we’re grandparents or we’re aunties or uncles or we’ve got relatives who are teachers, or, at the very least, we’re at a school where we were taught by a teacher as well—and experts and also school communities have been calling out for a comprehensive plan. We need an expert plan to support children’s access to education and to protect children, school staff, and their families from COVID-19 and other respiratory infections.

I wanted to note a bunch of quotes that came across my newsfeed, from RNZ, quotes from teachers. Some teachers are feeling angry and unsafe because of the risk of catching COVID-19 in their classrooms. So let’s talk about rights. Let’s talk about workers’ rights. And here’s a quote—and I’ve got a couple of them—it’s from a relief teacher who worked across several schools and said her risk of catching COVID-19 varied from school to school. And this is what she said: “It feels like you’re playing Russian roulette with your health because you don’t know what you’re going to be encountering. Schools are not universally endorsing mask wearing, so I’ve been in some schools where only a handful of staff and students are wearing masks,” she said. “I’ve been to a school where they’ve got a pool on which staff member is going to be infected next.” Here’s another quote: “There’s definitely a group of us at my school who are looking at resigning because we don’t feel safe going to work. There is a real split between staff and those who feel unsafe in assemblies … where there are not many masks are definitely disadvantaged.”

Another said COVID-19 had made work much harder. This is another quote from the same article on RNZ; I encourage you to check it out: “Long days, lots of relief teachers, meetings being repeatedly bumped, kids missing heaps of school, trying to plan when we don’t know what the heck will happen next, and on top of all of this I’m bloody freezing from the state-of-the-art ventilation system”—i.e., open windows and doors.

We need this plan. It’s a plan that should be an expert-led plan from the Government—an action plan for schools which will require mask use in schools in line with red settings, free N95s for students and teachers, urgent steps to improve vaccine uptake against COVID-19 and the flu and other winter illnesses, and a very strong focus on indoor air quality, ventilation, monitoring, and filtration. And we also have to make sure that we support those that are supporting us—those are our teachers—by making sure that they have guaranteed sick leave so if they max out their sick leave the schools actually, themselves, have enough discretionary leave in their back pocket to make sure that they can isolate and look after their families if they have to.

So we will not be supporting these motions. I appreciate the work that the Regulations Review Committee has been doing, but this needs to be put up on a stronger framework that is simple and easy for people to understand but actually puts the focus back on our tamariki, our immunocompromised whānau, our disabled whānau, and those communities that need to have a stronger uptake in the vaccines. Thank you, Mr Speaker.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. There used to be an old joke: when the world ends, I want to be in Dargaville. Why? Because they’re 20 years behind and I’ll live for an extra 20 years before the world ends! Now, I say that out of love and affection for the good people of Dargaville. My family arrived there when my great-great-grandfather was digging gum and cutting down kauri trees at the turn of last century, and my mum was born in Te Kopuru Hospital. But I just thought of it because it feels a bit like that in New Zealand today—20 years behind the rest of the world, which has moved on from COVID-19, and here we are still debating COVID orders.

For the people watching at home who may wonder why Parliament is still doing this, here’s the Coles Notes version. A couple of years ago, Parliament passed a law—the COVID-19 Public Health Response Act—and that law got around a little problem. The little problem was that, in the context of a pandemic the Government—over there; not the whole Parliament—needed to be able to make laws rapidly to respond to changing events: new vaccines, new variants, new technologies, if our Government was inclined to use them. At the same time, we didn’t want such sweeping powers over people’s lives to be exercised only by the Government. So the deal was that the Government over there could make these orders but only if they were examined by the Regulations Review Committee—of which my colleague Toni Severin is a member—and then debated in this House.

So that was the strategy to get rapid lawmaking but also parliamentary scrutiny, even if after the fact. Now, we’ve seen a nimble approach to a pandemic, with democracy. ACT, at least at first, supported that initiative because it was far better than what we had had previously, when, for example, the whole country was put under lockdown and we had the then Police Commissioner Mike Bush menacing the public and saying, “You better get a ride around to our place, and maybe we’ll be checking where you’re going.” Back in those days of an illegal lockdown, with illegal coercion of New Zealand citizens, it seemed like the right thing to do to have a legal basis for COVID restrictions. We find ourselves, nearly two years later, still debating COVID-19 Public Health Response Act initiatives, or orders, while the rest of the world has moved on. That’s the first point.

What are we debating today? Well, for example, we have an order that took New Zealand from the red traffic light to the orange. Now, at the same time, the traffic light system, which used to be a system of crowd size limits, vaccination requirements, masking requirements, and scanning or contact tracing requirements, has been blown to smithereens. Contact tracing: don’t have to do it anymore. Vaccine mandates: don’t have vaccine passes in public settings anymore. Crowd size limits: we don’t have those anymore. So what is the difference between green, orange, and red traffic lights? Well, almost nothing except for a limit of a crowd to 200 and having to wear masks in some places such as shops, but not other places such as nightclubs. There is no longer any rhyme nor reason, because none of the factors that made up the traffic light system remain in place. We shouldn’t be debating the traffic light system; we should just dump it. And it would actually be better because the Government says, “Well, maybe we should keep the traffic light system around so we can bring it back in case there’s a flu or something.” Well, it would be easier if they dropped it intact than gradually dismantled it until the colours were meaningless, because if they do bring it back, no one will know what it means because of the way they’ve dismantled it. So we should just dump the traffic light system. It’s time to move on from that restriction.

I heard somebody on the screen here, a Green Party member, saying that he knew someone who said it felt like they were playing Russian roulette by teaching at a school where kids might have Omicron. Well, that’s a reality. We can talk about the stand-down periods, but I just make the point that I think we’ve got an obligation in this House not to spread misinformation. I’ve just been reading the Financial Times of London. It says the infection mortality rate for Omicron in a highly vaccinated population such as the UK is the same as the flu. Now, would we really have said that relief teachers going from school to school were playing Russian roulette with their health during a flu season? Really? And if Omicron is statistically just as dangerous, then is it responsible to say that to people in this House, adding to the fear that there’s already too much of? I think that Green Party member should seriously consider what he was saying and what the statistics mean and what he quotes, because we shouldn’t be spreading that kind of misinformation.

Back to schools—one thing that’s not in these orders and should be is actually an end to unworkable isolation periods. I’m at the time of year where, as the MP for Epsom, I go and visit all the principals of schools in the Epsom electorate—20 square kilometres, 30 schools. That’s 1.5 schools per square kilometre. That’s why we’re called the education electorate. Do you know what they’re telling me? Well, many things, which I’d love to get to for some of the members on the other side. One of them is that they’re losing a teacher for two weeks. How does that work? Well, the teacher’s partner or kid gets COVID, so they’ve got to isolate with them in the household, and then the teacher gets it, and they’re sick for a few days and they recover and they’re no longer infectious, but they have to isolate for seven days. So they lose a teacher for two weeks even though the teacher was only infectious for a few days. That’s nuts.

The policy should be as simple as, “You’ve got to isolate for three days. Negative test and you’re out.” It’s that simple. That’s what they do in Singapore. In the United States, it’s five days. But, instead, we have a system where schools frequently lose someone for 14 days because of unworkable isolation. If you think about inflation, if you think about too much money chasing after too few goods, if you think about supply chain constraints and there not being stuff to buy in the shops so the price goes up, because the Reserve Bank is printing money like mad, well, all of this stuff adds up. Are we really saying New Zealand’s so wealthy that people’s budgets are stretching so far that we can afford unworkable isolation laws? Because that’s what we’ve got and that’s what we’re doing. Ironically, if you’re worried about public health, a lot of people who can’t afford two weeks off just don’t report and then keep spreading it. So it’s not even the best public health response. We should get rid of unworkable isolation rules.

Do you know another thing we should get rid of? Three weeks ago, I was at the Health Committee and there was Chris Hipkins, the Minister for COVID-19 Response—there’s something we shouldn’t have anymore. He accepted that he couldn’t tell me how much difference pre-departure testing for people coming to New Zealand was making. But he accepted that it was a negligible difference and it’s had its day and we should get rid of it. But here’s the question: why are we getting rid of it now? Why haven’t we already got rid of it? Why do people continue to be infantilised and forced to do things that make no sense, that the cost-benefit analysis doesn’t stack up on, or that the Government hasn’t even done cost-benefit analysis for?

I was talking to a constituent. Their daughter was in a foreign city in the US—I guess all US cities are foreign to New Zealand, but she was in one of them—and in order to return to New Zealand, she had to get a pre-departure test. This is why I say we’re 20 years behind the rest of the world. It was very difficult to get one, because Americans couldn’t believe you had to. And in the end, at 1 a.m., she was so scared of missing her flight—and she couldn’t afford another one if she missed it—that she spent US$220 getting a sanctioned pre-departure test to come to New Zealand. Now, you think about it: we made one of our citizens do that—all that stress, all that expense for no reason at all, when the COVID Minister admits it’s not making a difference to our public health response whether we have pre-departure testing. So why don’t we just dump it?

There are so many restrictions that are infantilising us because we’re forced to follow rules while the rest of the world moves on. The sad thing is that young people, in particular, if they see the world moving on from us, might decide that their time is now and off they go.

The ACT Party is not going to vote for these orders. We are sick of the whole deal. We should allow the COVID-19 Public Health Response Act to lapse and let people get on with living their lives, taking responsibility and precautions as they see fit. If you look at it, that’s what most people are starting to do anyway. This Government needs to let go of its COVID-19 response and let New Zealanders get on. It should deal with crime and a cost of living crisis and catching up with the rest of the world.

Thank you very much, Mr Speaker. I intend to speak only briefly. Like most contributors to this debate, I’ve had an opportunity to do so on similar occasions. I do note that the Minister, the Hon Dr Ayesha Verrall, took the place of her usual colleague in that role, the Hon Chris Hipkins. I thank the Minister for her gracious comments in relation to the work of the Regulations Review Committee. It does have a number of excellent members—all its members, in fact, are excellent, with the possible exception of its chair. I’m certainly grateful for the hard work that they do. They are much smarter than me. They’re smart enough to make points that I’m just smart enough to understand, so we get on just fine. But thanks, as always, to the work of those who support us, namely the legislative counsel and the wonderful clerk committee staff who support the work as well.

I’ll just speak briefly because I only want to make one particular point, which is just following that comment that the Minister made that the committee remains diligent in scrutinising these orders. Of course, it does take two to tango, and the fact that there are fewer concerns we’re bringing to the House does reflect the fact that the relevant Government Ministers and ministries—ministry perhaps; singular; the Ministry of Health—have been taking heed of concerns that we’ve brought previously.

So, just by way of example, briefly, there was in one of the orders that we are considering today—one of those presented in mid-April, essentially—a provision whereby those who were staying at a managed isolation and quarantine facility (MIQF)—as defined: one of those facilities—would be able to stay there longer, and I say “able” deliberately because it would need their consent to be isolating longer in an MIQF than would otherwise be the case. Previously, the committee had advised the Government that we thought that someone who was is in that situation shouldn’t be penalised in terms of their rights and liberties, relative to someone who was able to self-isolate at home. So in a situation where a person doesn’t have adequate facilities to self-isolate at home safely and consents to be in the MIQF instead, then they are able to do so. So we thought that that probably reflected the policy intent of the Government, and, of course, we consider the way that regulations are made to reflect the policy intent rather than interrogating that policy intent ourselves. So we thought that that was a helpful interplay between the committee and the Government, as such.

So thanks, as always, for the opportunity to ventilate some of our thinking and some of the process around this. I won’t take up any more of the House’s time on this one, but, as I say, we have made it, I think, tolerably clear that we support the confirmation of these orders and will continue to examine them diligently throughout.

Orders approved.