Seymour DavidDAVID SEYMOUR (Leader—ACT): Well thank you Mr Speaker. I join with other members in response to the ministerial statement. I think that there will be people up and down New Zealand who take issue with a couple of points that the Minister made. The Minister said that we are in control of this situation as a country because the response to the resurgence has been so much stronger. Well the question that might come back is: why has the regime of testing contact tracing and isolation not got ahead of the outbreak in the time frames that the Government promised? Well at first last Tuesday—the 11th if I recall—we were told it was necessary to have three days where the Government would evaluate and it was suggested get on top of the outbreak. A couple of days later on the Friday it became clear that the Government had not succeeded in doing this and we were to extend the restrictions—level 3 in Auckland and level 2 for the rest of the country—for another 11 days. And then we thought well surely with everybody dutifully following the restrictions and staying home the Government will be able to trace to the perimeter of this outbreak to the end of the chains of transmission and actually get us to a stage where we are on top of it and can go back to business as usual. Yet yesterday we saw the Prime Minister announce oh no we're still not there and we must remain in this restricted state for a further four days until midnight on Sunday.Now people might reasonably question the Minister's statement that we're in control and the Government has handled this well when they see the costs imposed upon New Zealanders when they see businesses closing and saying they will not be able to open again when they see students anxious about the loss of learning as they approach high-stakes exams and when they see the fiscal cost. You know by one estimate the cost of this lockdown is the equivalent of a whole year's Pharmac budget for taxpayer-funded pharmaceuticals. That is quite an extraordinary cost and it puts in perspective that this is not just lives versus dollars or health versus the economy; it's actually a question of lives versus lives. I would put it that people may well say the Government could be forgiven for its lack of preparedness back in March. I don't think anybody was ready for this then—with perhaps one or two Asian countries as the exception. But where people might question the Minister's statement is in what the Government was doing to mend the roof in the fair weather for the storm that they knew would come. They say they've improved contact tracing. Well a million people scanning a QR code everyday—well that is one-fifth of the team of 5 million. I'm doing it five or six times a day on average so I suspect you've got four percent of New Zealanders doing it five times a day—a million scans. Four percent of people using it if you square it gives you a 0.2 percent chance of actually making a contact. That's the mathematical reality and that's with people finally starting to use the Government's contact tracing app. Imagine if they'd used the 102 days of COVID freedom to invest in proper contact tracing so we could be saved these unsustainable expensive and rolling lockdowns that are so expensive for New Zealanders. They don't like to hear it but that's the truth. They don't like to hear it but that is what people are thinking—what is the strategy when do we stop making it up as we go and how do we get out of this thing in a way that is sustainable? That's what people are thinking when they hear that ministerial statement and that is the conversation our country needs to start having in honest terms. Thank you Mr Speaker.