Severin ToniTONI SEVERIN (ACT): Thank you Madam Speaker—and also on behalf of my fellow Regulations Review Committee members who are here and past and present members. It was very interesting sitting on the Regulations Review Committee and being one of the non-lawyers on it. It's opened my eyes to a lot of understanding of what goes on behind the scenes. With the Regulations Review Committee being around secondary legislation which we pass on to our other organisations to write we would expect them to understand what they are supposed to be doing.Now I would like to thank Jason McHerron our barrister but most of all I'd like to thank our staff who were able to help us through all this. But the biggest thing is these policies are being written so that people can follow the rules and regulations that have been set upon them. But if you can't find them if you can't understand them what are you going to do?We're very fortunate that most people did abide by these because they wanted to keep New Zealand safe. But we still created too much pain and as we were saying in respect of the inquiry there was no opportunity to scrutinise amendments made to powers to the secondary legislation and the COVID-19 response vaccination legislation prior to its entrenchment. Now this caused a lot of pain for a lot of people. The thing is we should have been able to be realistic and have an option for people to choose—vaccination or test. But we didn't; we went down that one avenue and we could not have free and frank discussion through the select committee process and hear from other people. That is a sad reality. We understand that when there is urgency we do need to pass it but we've also got to take into mind that we are doing this for the New Zealand people and if the New Zealand people feel they are not being heard then we have upset New Zealand people.Now when all this came through and as the Hon Eugenie Sage said it's around words. Words I have discovered can easily be misconstrued and this is the most important thing. For myself who is dyslexic I can easily misconstrue things can easily mispronounce things and it might seem funny to some people but it's not because if we have the wrong terminology you have major misunderstandings and we found this in the law in terms of what is mandated and what is merely recommended. You know when we use words such as must" for matters of mandating or "may" for matters around permits or "should" or "shall" or "recommendations"—you know these are the factors when it comes to different walks of life and different people's understandings: it has to be clear and it has to be precise. The thing is because we weren't clear and precise this has caused so much pain.We were concerned also as the ACT Party around the "Henry VIII" provisions that we bring forward. But we have come up with 11 recommendations and we hope for the future in the Regulations Review Committee that we do not cause this pain that we have through some of this legislation and these misunderstandings. The biggest thing of all is that most New Zealanders wouldn't even know that they can find these rules and regulations and they wouldn't know how to look them up. But we also stated that we did have a problem around the Ministry of Health and we also understand they were under a lot of pressure. However if you were told once if were told twice if you were told three times or more you should be able to learn from those mistakes because that is what we hope we would teach our children—that you know you get a few chances.We understood the constraints they had but we could have done better like everybody else if we had been able to listen to people through the select committee process that was missed out so that we didn't cause that pain. And as we said we could have had some great ideas and included in that we could have had vaccinations or tests. Thank you Madam Speaker."