Reti ShaneDr SHANE RETI (National): Thank you Mr Speaker. As my colleague has advised we will be opposing this bill. The three prime reasons are the scope of the mandate and the life cycle that goes with it; the second point is the managed isolation and quarantine (MIQ) disconnect which I may come back to which my colleague has spoken to here with returning travellers; and the third point is the requisition of privately held equipment—effectively the nationalisation of private possessions and property.I think that another reason we're going to struggle to support this bill is that we haven't been a learning environment during this COVID outbreak. What that means is that what we're doing here is that we're being asked to roll over legislation that may have been approved in some areas but that in others clearly hasn't. I want to point to some areas that I think should have been approved if we were to be a learning environment and doing more than just rolling over default legislation.In particular I've been interested in the part of this bill that commissions the testing procedures both offshore and onshore. If I start with offshore first of all the pre-departure testing it has continued to elude us why rapid antigen testing was an accepted pre-departure test but has not been ubiquitous in New Zealand. How can we rationalise that? How can we say Yes this is a test that you can have legitimately at Heathrow Airport or wherever you wish we'll accept it but here in New Zealand no we don't accept it."? That's really hard to understand I'm afraid. There's a number of reasons why we've got issues with rapid antigen testing; some of which I believe will only come to see sunlight with a royal commission of inquiry and I imagine it will be along the lines of what the Office of the Attorney-General found with saliva testing—that there's been unexplainable hurdles that haven't followed the science and I think rapid antigen testing is going down that same path.I want to talk to the onshore testing as well and whether we really want to roll over the default positions that we have at the moment. I want to talk to the testing in MIQ which has sort of expanded from what was initially pre-departure offshore day zero day one day three day five then day eight was added and day 12. The argument to—and I still don't understand why day three testing is voluntary in MIQ why it's the one voluntary test. It should be mandatory right on day one; I find no plausible explanation for that. But the default response has been through all of testing "Don't worry we do day 12 testing. That exit testing before people leave MIQ saves everything. If we've missed something in day three don't worry we'll pick it up in day 12."Here's the problem I've got with that and it talks to us still not knowing the portal by which Delta entered New Zealand in the first place—here's the problem I've got with day 12 testing and that answer that it is our safety net—"Don't worry we've got day 12 testing." The problem I've got is that from 1 April when Delta arrived through to 3 September 191 people didn't have day 12 testing. How can that be? If it's our safety net if it's "Don't worry we'll do the day 12 testing." why did 191 people not receive their day 12 test?Now if you look at this a bit further it turns out that 34 of them had their test done in hospital. That's fine. We can take that off the list. For 44 of them the test was not required because it had been done before day 12 like within 24 hours or so. That's a reasonable explanation as well. That still leaves 113 people who didn't have a day 12 test. Let's drill into them a bit more. It turns out that 32 of them were aged six months to 17 years; 14 were exempted on clinical grounds four were exempted because they didn't give consent—how can you not give consent to a day 12? And by the way they didn't stay for another 14 days which is what happens if you don't have a day 12 test; you just stay till 28 days. Four didn't give their consent and 63 were aged under six months.Now it's that category that I want to just look into for a moment and put to the Government that instead of just rolling over the current legislation maybe we should be doing a better job here because those under-six-monthers—the 63—it's not that we don't test children under six months; we actually do. It turns out that 17 under-six-month-olds had received a nasopharyngeal test. What we do for six-monthers if you're worried that it's the same sort of thing that we do for adults is we use what's called a high-turbinate swab which is a much gentler swab. It doesn't go quite as far back into the infant's nasopharynx and we get a result from that. My concern here is that—instead of Australia that has said everyone who enters their MIQ be you an infant an adult whatever you are all tested—we still have this pervasive rule that infants under six months don't need to be tested. That's the concern I've got. We know they catch Delta because we had a six-weeker in Northland base hospital but we still have the policy that infants under six months don't have to be swabbed in MIQ. Seventeen clearly said "Oh I'm worried. I'm going to go ahead and do that." That's fine. But that still leaves a large number. My question I'm raising is: is this the mechanism by which Delta entered New Zealand? Did it inadvertently actually come from an infant who wasn't swabbed by exemption and that's how it entered New Zealand?If I look into that a little bit more if we look at the 17 August outbreak and look at a month before that so let's choose our prime period when we're most concerned about Delta coming into New Zealand in this current outbreak. We know it came from New South Wales so we can filter it down a bit more. How many people in that month before our current outbreak came from New South Wales into New Zealand and didn't have a swab? The answer to that is two. There were two people who in that key period just before Delta came here were not swabbed when they came into New Zealand. One was a child aged under six months and the other had their day 12 test completed at a hospital. So we know at least one infant under six months came from New South Wales where our Delta variant we know genomically outbreak started in that month before our outbreak started and exited MIQ without being tested. Is it possible inadvertently that that is actually where our outbreak started? If it is I'd commend to the Government that rather than rolling over pervasively what we accept as the best policies maybe we should look at Australia who've said "No no no everyone even infants need to be swabbed if they enter isolation. The risk is too great." We shouldn't have this arbitrary six-month cut-off; we should be using the high-turbinate swabs for infants and just shut down that other possible mechanism for infection in New Zealand. So this is but one example of the learning that we haven't undertaken that we haven't adopted and taken on board to improve the legislation that we're being asked to approve here this morning and it becomes one of the reasons why we're going to struggle with this bill and why we're saying a no today. There are some good things that have been done—don't get me wrong—but there are also some holes some gaps that are still there. This is the sort of legislation that should be fixing those gaps before we just sign them through the day. So that's why it's a no from me. That's why it's a no from us on this side of the House on behalf of the National Party. We need to be a learning environment and take into account all the findings that we have so that we truly bring the science to this sort of outbreak to the protections that New Zealanders are asking us to put forward and simply we need to be doing a better job. Take on board that this is us offering collaborative suggestions with hard data as to how we can do a better job. That's the mode that you're seeing here. Thank you Mr Speaker."