COVID-19 PUBLIC HEALTH RESPONSE ACT 2020 — Continuation

I move, That the COVID-19 Public Health Response Act 2020 be continued and that the relevant period under section 3(2)(b) of that Act is the period ending 31 December 2022.

This is probably—well, this absolutely is—my last formal act as Minister for COVID-19 Response, a job that I’ve already given over, in fact, to my colleague the Hon Dr Verrall. But it is a job that I have had the great privilege of holding, at least since the election, and then for a brief period as Minister of Health before that. I have been the Minister responsible for this Act almost since it was passed by the Parliament in 2020, as we came to grips as a country with what the global pandemic would mean for us. Let’s cast our minds back to 2020, when this law was first put in place. We still didn’t quite know what we were dealing with at that point. The world was still grappling with COVID-19. The science was evolving and changing. New Zealand was at a point where we had managed to, by and large, eliminate COVID-19 from our community, and we were certainly, for the foreseeable future, endeavouring to keep it that way. The COVID-19 Public Health Response Act provided the Government with the relevant tools to be able to continue to pursue elimination, as we did for at least the 18 months following that. So I have to say I have some mixed emotions when it comes to continuing this legislation, which will be now administered by my successor in the role, Dr Ayesha Verrall.

I do want to reflect a little bit on what’s happened over that last 2½-year period that we’ve been grappling with the global pandemic. If we want to talk about results, there is one result that stands out above all others, and that is that New Zealand has, within the OECD, depending on which day of the week you look at it—we’re sitting right alongside Japan—the lowest rate of death related to COVID-19 in the OECD. If we want to talk about results, that is a result that all New Zealanders can be incredibly proud of. There are many stories that will be told of our COVID-19 response in the years to come, and those stories will typically be of people who have been in some way disadvantaged by the response, whether it was the impact that it had on their business or their livelihood, and we absolutely acknowledge that our response to COVID-19 has required a great deal of sacrifice by many people. We will also hear the stories of people who found that their plans to enter or leave New Zealand were disrupted by the border restrictions that we had in place. And, again, I don’t think anybody on this side of the House would discount the significant impact that our border restrictions have had on people.

But there are stories that we won’t hear, because we simply don’t know who these people would be. We won’t hear the stories of people who would not otherwise be alive today were it not for the success of our collective efforts as the team of 5 million—a phrase we don’t use very much these days—in keeping COVID-19 out of our community for such a long period of time. We have, in addition to having one of the lowest rates of COVID-19 - related death in the OECD, if not the lowest, one of the highest vaccination rates in the OECD. In fact, we were more vaccinated as a country than almost any other country when we peaked in terms of the number of cases that we were seeing. I think the lower rate of hospitalisation and mortality that we’ve experienced in New Zealand overall, compared to other countries, really does reflect the fact that we got the vaccination campaign right, and we got the timing right when it came to a transition to a different phase of the response.

I must confess, on election night in 2020, while my colleagues up and down the country were celebrating enormously, I wasn’t quite in such a celebratory mood. While I was enjoying the victory, I was nervous for two reasons. One is that, at about 6.50 p.m., Ashley Bloomfield had rung me and ruined my evening by telling me that there was a COVID-19 case that had been detected in the community. The other—and actually more fundamental—thing was that New Zealanders, I think, and clearly evidenced by the election night result, were very invested in an elimination strategy that was never going to be a strategy for ever. How we got from an elimination strategy to where we are now was always going to be a bit of a bumpy road. I have to confess, on election night in 2020 I could not see how we were going to get from point A to point B without there being quite a significant number of bumps in the road, and that has certainly proven to be the case.

But I want to reflect a little bit on the period of time that I’ve been Minister for COVID-19 Response with a few numbers, which I think are useful: 1,058 ministerial briefings have been signed by me during that period of time—many of them on the same day, and many of them signed on the same day in which the decision was made. I’ve responded to 232 Official Information Act requests, taken 136 papers to Cabinet, answered 41 oral questions in the House—and that’s only the Opposition oral questions, not the ones that were posed by Government members. But it is also worth noting that I have responded to 5,038 written parliamentary questions as the Minister for COVID-19 Response, signed 49 different orders made under this Act, 22 exemptions or amendments to exemptions, and done countless media briefings, most of which were in the Beehive theatrette, only two of which I remain embarrassed by. I did learn a few lessons along the way, one of which is, if you’re going to use metaphors, you should make sure you don’t mix them! Because it turns out that stretching your legs and spreading your wings are two entirely different things, and if you accidentally mix those two things together, the entire country will have a good laugh at your expense! But, contrary to popular opinion at the time, there is no evidence that there has been a spike in the birth rate as a result of that press conference.

I want to take a moment to thank everybody who was involved in New Zealand’s COVID-19 response over the last 2½ years, including those unsung heroes who went to work every day during some of the most difficult periods of the response—our essential workers, who kept the supply chains open, kept us all feed, keep the power on, keep the country moving at a time when we were all staying at home. I want to particularly thank our health workers, who continue to experience the pressure of the global pandemic now, even more so now perhaps than they were over the last two years, and acknowledge their commitment and dedication and thank them for their work. I want to thank our managed isolation and quarantine (MIQ) workers, who went to work and put themselves between the virus and New Zealanders. It is worth noting that, of the nearly 230,000 returnees who returned, we stopped more than 4,600 cases at the border before they made their way into the community. We also supported, through our MIQ, 5,000 cases in the community so that they had somewhere safe to recuperate and recover from COVID-19. I really want to thank those MIQ workers for their commitment and their dedication. It was not an easy task.

So, turning our minds now to the purpose of this motion that extends the COVID-19 Public Health Response Act for a further period through to the end of the year. I started, as Minister, a programme of work that I know Dr Verrall will be continuing, to look at the provisions of the Act that are still in use now, that relate to measures that may well be ongoing as part of our ongoing response to COVID-19. That’s one strand of work. The other strand of work is to look at our future preparedness for both new variants of COVID-19 but also future pandemics. It’s likely that legislation will emerge from both of those pieces of work, and Dr Verrall, I know, will shepherd those through the House in due course.

This legislation is still required at this point, although many of the restrictions that were put in place under it have already been removed. The pandemic isn’t yet over. Our health system will tell you that. Experience around the world will tell you that. I’ve had my first opportunity to travel internationally since the pandemic began, over the last month, and I can say that the world hasn’t completely gone back to normal. Other countries still do have restrictions in place. Other countries are still grappling with having large proportions of their workforce disrupted by COVID-19. New Zealand is not alone in that. We have actually weathered the global pandemic better than most of the countries that we would compare ourselves to, and we continue to do so, but the pandemic is still having an impact, and we still do need to respond to that.

Finally, I want to thank New Zealanders for the feedback that they have provided me over the last 2½ years in this role. Most of it was positive, quite a lot of it was humorous at various points, and some of it constructive, and some of it perhaps less so. But I want to acknowledge that the results that we’ve achieved as a country were only possible because New Zealanders bought into what we were trying to achieve as a collective team, and I hope that we can continue with that—that spirit of solidarity with one another and consideration of one another—as we approach whatever future challenges COVID-19 might throw at us. Thank you.

The question is that the motion be agreed to.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I want to concur with a fair degree of what the Minister has just said, and thank him for the work that he has done in the portfolio. My own experiences have been that certainly when we had the Northland outbreak, he took my phone calls and we were able to collaborate a constructive pathway forward. I think many of those written questions will be with my colleague, Chris Bishop. I was fortunate to have some myself. Mostly they were answered in a fashion and a time that gave me the information I was looking for.

The Minister mentioned election night. You know, this is something that may well come out in what we hope will be a commission of inquiry at some point in the future. I think the Minister expressed in select committee that further examination of all of this is certainly not at all out of the ballpark. Now, when he says he was notified at around about 7 o’clock on election night, we are interested in the early exchanges at 1.06 a.m. on election day, suggesting that there was some indication that there was a positive test in and around and the pathway from then to that notification. But that’s a body of work that currently sits with the Ombudsman and a number of others.

I think, looking back at the Alpha outbreak, there were certainly things that were done well by this Government, and I and we have said as much. I think it got a bit tatty as Delta came along around about August 17, as I recall, and then things became more challenging with Omicron. So I certainly want to give credit where credit’s due, but of course we’re also here to try and take what may well have been a good response and make it a great response. That’s our responsibility as an Opposition.

The order that we have in front of us today, the COVID-19 Public Health Response Act 2020, was last extended six months ago, and it does a number of things. It is the primary legislation for things like managed isolation and quarantine (MIQ), pre-departure testing, the traffic light framework, and vaccination requirements. And under sections 9 and 11 of the COVID-19 Public Health Response Act is the ability to create orders, orders such as the public health response protection framework, which has been reported back from the Regulations Review Committee. Two parts that have interested them relate to exemptions under the COVID-19 Public Health Response (Protection Framework) Amendment Order (No 9) 2022, one which talked about mask wearing and entertainers—I won’t go over that, but the social distancing entertainers would need to have. The other was around exemptions from mask wearing.

The report that the very hard-working Regulations Review Committee has sent back to the House raises the question around the punitive actions for breaching the COVID order, more particularly the infringement offences. The concern here is that the much more serious non-infringement offences seem to be part of the order, which are really only kept for very serious offences, when, in fact, just ordinary infringement offences would suffice. So they write here that they’ve written to the Minister on 1 June seeking clarification of this. So we don’t have the answer to that here today, but I’m sure at some time that will be reported back to the Regulations Review Committee as they’re requesting.

The Act itself, National will not be supporting. We will be opposing the Act. It’s not vastly different. In fact, it is much the same from where it was six months ago, and we fundamentally maintain some of the issues we maintained then. The Act is a blunt tool. It’s a blunt tool in an environment that is now, as the Minister has just said, a widely vaccinated environment—quite different to what it was six months ago. If we look at some of the things that have changed—the Act provisions, MIQ. MIQ is no longer required or needed and has been moved away from. Pre-departure testing is gone. The traffic light framework was modified last week to five levels, and the vaccination requirements are quite different. We’re now a relatively highly vaccinated population, as I’ve said, and just last week under the Medicines Amendment Act we authorised the fourth vaccine or the second booster.

So things have changed quite a lot, and yet we’re just repeating and extending the very same Act—we’re extending it. How that reads is that the Act had a life of 90 days unless it was provisioned further. That’s what we’re doing here; we’re provisioning it for a further six months. What we’re not seeing is any work from the Government around provisioning our COVID response into business as usual. That’s the sort of work we’d be looking to see, but it does seem to be missing at this point in time. I guess the question is we could be extending this Act here today, or we could maybe be using legislation that already exists. Maybe legislation around maritime and air borders, for example, might cover the purposes that we’re wanting to achieve tonight.

So, in summary, National will be opposing this motion. We’re opposing it because we see this Act as a blunt tool, not taking at all into account our current environment. We continue to call for the Minister to describe a pathway for mandates, a pathway for when they might complete and what the requirements might be for that to happen. So on that basis, National will be opposing this Act tonight. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I also join with others around the House to thank the Minister for his role in shepherding the country through a very, very difficult phase. I mean, I wasn’t a member at the time, but, you know, we were all deeply impacted by it and the years have taken their toll as well.

But I guess, for me, where I land on all of this is that bit where we have moved away from the team of 5 million, and it seems that whenever you go to the news sites, the COVID stuff has dropped down to the bottom, but, actually, we’ve had 16 new deaths reported today as well, and there are still people in hospitals. There are 383 people in hospital with COVID-19, including seven patients in intensive care and high-dependency care units. The average age of those hospitalised with the virus is 63.

So it’s still very much here with us, the seven-day rolling average of community cases up around 602. So I guess my concern is the move away from that focus of all of us as a team of 5 million and that sense of solidarity that we had in the beginning of the pandemic and thinking about what we can do to get back to that. Because rules come and go, and this piece of legislation was there to help us to move fast and dynamically. I accept that, but the focus needs to be on, again, our immunocompromised whānau, on our disabled whānau as well.

I think back to the feedback that we got from Māori health providers and our and our Pasifika health providers who were, at one stage, quite critical about how the roll-out for vaccinations were, for example, because the response hadn’t been taking into account the very specific nature of our demographic. We’re a younger people—better looking, some people would say, as well.

So what we have needed to have learnt and continue to learn is that when we place Māori and Pasifika leadership and we use that as the way to sort of connect with those communities and also make sure that we position our immunocompromised and disabled whānau that we are acting as a team of 5 million. I think that’s really important.

I guess, for me as a parent, like many parents around the House, in the middle of winter with the borders opening up and two years’ worth of winter illnesses flying in on the aeroplanes, I’m really concerned about the impacts on the schools as well. So we have called for, on a number of occasions, to support an expert-led school plan as a part of the COVID response. We would like to sit down with the Minister, Ayesha Verrall, to sort of talk through some of the concerns that we are hearing from school communities, from teachers, from parents, from principals about what we can do to actually get that focus back to that solidarity that we originally had.

I hear what people are saying: back to business as usual, and so on and so forth. Yeah, we need to pay some bills and keep the lights on. That’s all good and well. But experts and health professionals have been calling for an expert-led plan to support children’s access to education, but also to protect children, school staff, and their families as well. I hear what the workers are saying within the health sector as well. They need to be able to go and do their jobs in the safest way possible. That is also true for teachers and school staff as well.

So we support this legislation and the continuation of it. But we need to get back to that focus—a strong focus on indoor air quality, ventilation, monitoring. We’re in the middle of winter. Making sure that that stuff is in place for our schools—free N95 masks for teachers and students, all of that kind of stuff, but also recognising that we’re operating in the context of winter as well. So doing what we can do to protect our families against the flu and all those kinds of things as well, and supporting those teachers, supporting staff that support and teach our schools as well so that if they need to, they can take guaranteed sick leave as well and schools are provisioned to do that.

So on that, we support the ongoing extension of this Act. But we need to have picked up the many lessons over the last couple of years and put them into place. Thank you, Mr Speaker.

Well, thank you very much, Mr Speaker. I rise on behalf of ACT in opposition to this motion. ACT has been opposing the continuation of the COVID-19 Public Health Response Act since November. It’s interesting to look at the report of the Health Committee which says, “Our response: The majority of us”—that being the Health Committee—“agree with the continuation of the COVID-19 Public Health Response Act. The ACT Party”—the only party listed here—“opposes the continuation of COVID-19 Public Health Response Act.” The reason for that is very simple: the rest of the world has moved on and the provisions in this bill are no longer useful, and they are no longer helping us avoid the effects of COVID-19.

In fact, this Government’s response has become so incoherent it is not even clear what the objectives are. I asked the former Minister for COVID-19 Response, Chris Hipkins, a month ago in select committee precisely what the objectives of the Government’s COVID-19 response are now. Is it to reduce cases? Can’t be; we’re leading the world in the wrong way for the number of cases. Is it to flatten the curve or reduce pressure on the hospitals? Well, it can’t be—the main issue right now is flu and hospitals missing staff because of unworkable isolation rules. Is it to reduce deaths? Well, actually, the rate of COVID-19 - related deaths per day is currently one of the highest in the world; can’t be that. This Government does not know what the purpose of its COVID-19 response is anymore, but it remains prepared to impose costs upon New Zealanders with nonsensical, unworkable rules that are making it harder for New Zealanders to get by and live their lives.

Let me give you a few examples. If you are a household contact of somebody who tests positive for COVID-19, you have to isolate for seven days. Practically no other country in the world requires this, but the impact of it is that a person who tests positive can be out of action for 14 days. How is that possible? Well, your partner or someone in your household tests positive, you’re out for seven days; around the end of that period, you also test positive—that’s another seven days for your own case. Now, you might only be infectious for a few days of that, but you’re out of the workforce for 14 days.

I talked to principals, I talked to people in the healthcare sector, and I talked to people in a thing the Labour Party may have heard of called business; they are finding that people being taken out of action for up to 14 days for a few days of infectiousness is totally unworkable and unviable.

There are two ways people respond: they actually obey the rules and they’re taken out of action or they ignore them and they spread COVID-19 more. These rules are nuts. They are perpetuated and allowed under the COVID-19 Public Health Response Act. We should dump it. We would actually be better allowing people to voluntarily isolate than what we have now. Or better still, if we did want to keep an isolation rule, then perhaps—perhaps—we should have something like Singapore where you isolate for 72 hours and you’re out with a negative test. That would be sensible, that would be moving with the times, but this Government can’t do that, so they should not continue to have the power of a COVID-19 Public Health Response Act. They cannot use it responsibly.

This Government imposes unworkable rules, such as allowing people to go to nightclubs with no mask, but if you go to a retail store, you must be masked. Where is the cost-benefit analysis? Where is the sympathy for the retail workers up and down this country who’ve become unwitting enforcers of rules that subject them to abuse when we have enough trouble with social cohesion in this country right now? Now, if masks were making a difference and they were so essential that you couldn’t go to a nightclub without one, you might say it’s worth bearing that cost. But actually, like I say, this Government’s response is so incoherent.

What else does this COVID-19 Public Health Response Act allow? Mandates for medical professionals. Well, we have a crisis in our hospitals, we have a crisis in midwifery, and we have hundreds of nurses and midwives who cannot operate because they are not vaccinated. Now, personally, I think most of them are nuts. There are some who have had a reaction to their earlier doses and didn’t want to get a booster; I sympathise with them. But the facts are, it no longer makes sense to stop people from practising their trade in the middle of a major shortage because they haven’t had their booster. And that’s what we’re doing: contributing to a crisis. That is absolutely crazy, and yet that is what this COVID-19 Public Health Response Act allows. We should just dump it.

There’s one more justification the Government gives for its response: they say something like, “Well, look, there might be another variant. That’s why we need to give people a couple of test kits so they can test themselves on arrival and if they’re positive maybe they’ll go off, we can gene sequence it, we can find out if another variant has come about.”

Well, actually, if you think about it, we’re now at a stage where we’ve got a highly transmissible and, thankfully, much less virulent strain of COVID-19; it is unlikely—very unlikely—that a more virulent and more transmissible version will out-compete Omicron. And actually, if we’re worried about that risk, then what we should do is actually be on guard all the time in case there’s a new virus. In reality, the real probability is that a new variant—like all of the others—will evolve somewhere else in the world and we’ll have months’ head start, as we did throughout this pandemic, in order to respond and consider our response. Once again, the COVID-19 Public Health Response Act is not necessary if you’re going to have months, as we have for every other variant. So why do we have this law in place?

I thought it was telling to listen to the outgoing COVID-19 response Minister, Chris Hipkins—actually, it was really telling to listen to him on the weekend, when he said he thinks, “Probably we could have stepped down some restrictions a bit faster.” Has this guy been to Auckland? Does he know what Aucklanders went through? Does he understand the loss of business, the mental health suffering? And he says, “Actually, we probably didn’t need to do all of that.” Really? This guy is now either trying to clear his own conscience now that he’s not the Minister and not responsible for Government policy and not responsible to the Prime Minister, or the Labour Party is trying to eat their cake and have it too by saying, “Look, if you don’t like the way we responded, look at Chris Hipkins, and if you do like the way we responded, look at Ayesha Verrall, because we’re going to keep on restricting people anyway.”

This Government, at some point, needs to accept that it has made enormous mistakes throughout its COVID-19 response. They say, “Oh, but fewer people died.” Well, you know what? Anyone can quarantine an island. The question was always going to be: could we reconnect? The question was: would New Zealand only take steps that stacked up and made sense and actually saved lives? We now know, thanks to advice from Ashley Bloomfield to the Minister, that they continued with managed isolation and quarantine (MIQ) for four months after they were told it was making no difference. They kept people like Charlotte Bellis out of the country, having to seek sanctuary with the Taliban, because they continued with MIQ for four months after it made sense.

We know that they kept spending $2.7 million a month advertising boosters when almost nobody is getting them, to the point that it’s costing them $67 of advertising for every person that takes it up. I would wager most of those people didn’t even see the advertising.

We now have a Government that is totally incoherent, that doesn’t know what its objectives are, that none the less continues to impose costs on New Zealanders, and has a history of imposing costs that weren’t well calculated, getting it wrong, and leaving New Zealanders worse off for little to no gain. The only reason that it carries on—the only reason we still have this COVID-19 Public Health Response Act—is because it is embarrassed to admit it’s done wrong. We saw it today in question time: could the Acting Prime Minister say sorry to Aucklanders? No, he could not. He couldn’t admit what Chris Hipkins admitted on TV.

Well, it’s about time that this Government owned its mistakes, fessed up to the impacts that it’s put on New Zealanders, and dumped this COVID-19 Public Health Response Act that is well past its use-by date. Thank you, Mr Speaker.

Kia ora, tēnā koe e te Pīka, otirā tēnā tātou e te Whare. Tangihia ō tātou mate. Ki te tumuaki o te Kīngitanga, a Anaru Tamihana e takoto mai rā ki te poho o tōna whare ki runga o Rukumoana, whoatu rā e hoa. Hoki mai rā ki a tātou i tēnei ahiahi, tēnā tātou e hika mā. Ka tū awahau, ka kōrero awahau mō te Pāti Māori ki te kōrero ki te whakakorengia i tēnei mōtini [Hello, greetings, Mr Speaker, as well as to the whole House. To lament our dead. To the head of the King Movement, to Anaru Tamihana, who lies now in the embrace of his meeting house on Rukumoana marae, rest in peace, my friend. Returning to us all this afternoon, greetings everyone. I stand to speak on behalf of the Māori Party to speak to the negation of this motion], the continuation of the COVID-19 Public Health Response Act 2020.

Now, the COVID-19 virus spread like colonisation across the world. It was clear from the outset that in Aotearoa it would mostly affect tangata whenua and shut down businesses, forcing people into lockdown in their own whare. The COVID-19 pandemic amplified pre-existing racial disparities, having devastating impacts on the physical, economic, spiritual, cultural, and educational wellbeing of Māori communities, lacking the infrastructure to protect their whānau, remotely educate their tamariki, and remain in mahi during a public health crisis that shattered illusions of Te Tiriti progress.

Over the last two years, we have seen whānau, hapū, iwi, and Māori organisations demonstrate exemplary leadership and step up to provide the Māori response, as the Crown had nothing in place and simply could not reach the places we could. It becomes clearer every day, especially given there is still no public Māori response plan for the Crown, that this will remain the case; that we cannot rely on the system in place at a national level.

Māori have made huge sacrifices to ensure the team of 5 million are protected. We changed our tangihanga protocols, changed tikanga, closed marae, set up iwi checkpoints and border control in some areas to ensure our vulnerable communities were protected. Despite all of this, the Government has continued to exclude Māori from pandemic decision-making and coordination. Not releasing Māori data at a crucial time of the vaccination roll-out was outright cruel. Starting the vaccination at those who were 65-plus and those who had pre-existing health issues meant that Māori mortality rates were not considered, as Māori die seven to 10 years earlier than non-Māori. This also meant we missed the opportunity to develop a truly whānau-centred approach. The Government’s COVID response plan meant we left over half of Māori behind, because 70 percent of our people are 40 years and younger.

As a result, we have a response that is entirely out of touch with the needs of our people. A response that singles out marae—the cultural, economic, spiritual, and political centre of Māori life—by allowing warrantless entry by an officer of the State. This is something that could have easily been fixed, but instead provides further reasons for us not to support this motion. We will not support the continuation of an Act that gives the Crown extraordinary powers to enter private properties without warrant, including our marae, our papakāinga, our homes. There are no good reasons to justify the invasion of tangata whenua and constantly ignore our rights to be undisturbed, as promised in article 2 of the Treaty of Waitangi.

This Government said they had removed it but hadn’t. Section 20: “Powers of entry: (1) An enforcement officer may enter, without a warrant, any land, building, craft, vehicle, place, or thing if they have reasonable grounds to believe that a person is failing to comply with any aspect of a [section 11] order. (2) However, subsection (1) does not apply to a private dwellinghouse [or marae]. (3) A constable may enter a private dwellinghouse [or marae] without warrant only if they have reasonable grounds to believe that people have gathered there in contravention of a [section 11] order and entry is necessary for the purpose of giving a direction under section 21.” And then, subsection (4) states: “A constable exercising a power of entry under this section may use reasonable force in order to effect entry into or onto the land, building, craft, vehicle, place, or thing if, following a request, a person present refuses entry or does not allow entry within a reasonable time.”

This Act represents a failure of inclusive leadership and a missed opportunity. It is a failure of inclusive leadership because it fails to provide a pandemic response that works for all peoples, of all cultures and socio-economic circumstances. It entrenches rather than eliminates inequities and disparities.

We are dealing with a once-in-a-generation crisis, and we need to use all the tools at our disposal to keep each other accountable to the people we are here to represent. Tangata whenua know what happens when pandemics are not managed properly. It is our people who bear the brunt of the virus. Throughout this pandemic, our people have been leading their own responses. We exercised our mana motuhake to lead our own solutions, to protect our whakapapa for the generations to come. We oppose this bill as we have done in the past. Kia ora tātou katoa.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I rise to take a very brief call this evening in support of this, as chair of the Health Committee, which considered issues related to the extension of this legislation. This was the third time in the life of the Act that the notice of motion had been considered by the Health Committee. I want to acknowledge the former responsible Minister, the Hon Chris Hipkins—and that’s something, I think, that, regardless of the contributions that have been made this evening, was reflected in the committee in terms of the tiresome effort that the Minister had put into workload around this.

Can I acknowledge the incoming Minister. I know the Health Committee looks forward to working alongside her.

The position of the Health Committee is to, effectively, recommend by majority that the Act be continued and that the period be extended through to 31 December. The reason for that is because the framework and the legislative basis up to this point has served the country well. There was much confidence from the committee’s perspective in the responses that Minister Hipkins had given to questions that were posed from members from all around the House. One point in particular—and it’s reflected in the report—is that he indicated that many of the orders that had been made under this piece of legislation had progressively been dismantled, but it was not a situation where the orders could just be carte blanche all dismantled at once. A very brief contribution from me, but just one that is in support of this bill.