Hipkins Chris; Rurawhe AdrianCOVID-19 ORDERSApprovalHon CHRIS HIPKINS (Minister for COVID-19 Response): I move That this House approve the following orders made under the COVID-19 Public Health Response Act 2020:COVID-19 Public Health Response (Air Border and Isolation and Quarantine) Amendment Order (No 2) 2020COVID-19 Public Health Response (Maritime Border) Order (No 2) Amendment Order 2020COVID-19 Public Health Response (Air Border and Isolation and Quarantine) Amendment Order (No 2) 2020 Amendment Order 2020COVID-19 Public Health Response (Air Border) Order (No 2) Amendment Order 2021.The motion that I have just mentioned confirms four orders that I have made under the COVID-19 Public Health Response Act 2020 a brief comment on the process that has led us to this point first and then I'll go through the specific orders. Under the rules set by the House my ability to issue an order under the Act is subject to parliamentary scrutiny through the Regulations Review Committee. That is absolutely appropriate because the COVID-19 Public Health Response Act 2020 gives me as the responsible Minister quite considerable ability to issue orders and there should be parliamentary scrutiny of those. The Act recognises that we need to make decisions quickly and we often need to amend those decisions quickly as we deal with an unprecedented global pandemic. It is still important however that those speedy decisions are the subject of scrutiny by the House and I want to thank the Regulations Review Committee for the work that it has done in fulfilling that function. Three of the orders that we are confirming now have been inspected by the committee and they found no matters that they wished to bring to the attention of the House. Those are the amendments that have been made to the COVID-19 Public Health Response (Air Border and Isolation and Quarantine) Amendment Order 2020—two lots of amendments there—and also to the COVID-19 Public Health Response (Maritime Border) Order (No 2) 2020. Those are relatively technical changes reasonably straightforward and have been well canvassed.The order that the committee did want to raise an issue with and I want to speak to the issues the committee raised is the COVID-19 Public Health Response (Air Border) Order (No 2) 2020. This is the order that I signed off on in January 2021 that provides for the new pre-departure testing requirement. Nobody I think objected to the pre-departure testing requirement. In fact I think that was broadly supported across the House. What the Regulations Review Committee did however question was exactly how that pre-departure testing system was going to operate and in particular who would make decisions about who was covered by it and who was exempt. They've raised I think some quite legitimate issues that the Government will address. So while we're confirming the order as made I do want to accept the criticism made by the Regulations Review Committee and say that we are going to go about fixing that to ensure that the anomalies that they have identified have been addressed. There are two ways that we'll do that but first to what those anomalies are. This amendment order established the requirement for people before travelling to New Zealand to get a negative COVID-19 test within 72 hours prior to departure. I delegated through the order to the director-general the power to gazette the countries to whom the pre-departure testing would apply. Initially we imposed that requirement on travellers coming from the US or the UK with a note in the decision that the reason for doing that was because of the significant outbreaks of COVID-19 that they were experiencing and particular concern around the more highly transmissible variant emerging in the UK. Allowing the director-general to gazette which countries it applied to allowed us to add countries as risk was identified. The reality now is that within a short space of time the presumption there reversed: where we extended that requirement to all the countries unless there was an exemption and then subsequently issued an exemption to that. The reason the Regulations Review Committee raised a concern was that the COVID19 Public Health Response Act 2020 specifically allows the director-general to exempt people from requirements. The Regulations Review Committee was concerned that allowing the director-general to decide who was covered by requirements was an unusual or unexpected use of the delegation ability within the Act. I think that that's a legitimate point; so we will amend the order to make it clear that it applies to everyone unless people are exempted. So we will make that as a further amendment to the order and then that will then be subject to Regulations Review Committee scrutiny again. That will get around the issue that they have raised. However it does raise a wider issue that the Parliament will have an opportunity to consider when we next consider amendments to the Act itself and that is whether or not the director-general should be empowered to be able to include people within the scope of an order rather than just exempt them from the scope of an order. That's particularly I think relevant when we're talking about quite operational decisions. It is an anomaly I think in the Act.The Act itself was passed through Parliament during an emergency situation where we had to put a legal framework in place very quickly and so we now know a little bit more about how that Act can be improved. I intend to bring forward several sets of amendments to the Act. The first which will come through in the next few months will be the easier changes to improve the Act that have been identified. A second later in the year will deal with some of the bigger policy issues that have been raised. Obviously one of the reasons for doing this is I want the Act to be as complete as possible. Also I think it's important that the Act which is likely to be used as a template should we ever have to do this again in the future is as up to date and reflective of practice as possible. So we'll bring further amendments to the Act forward in the future. But ultimately these are all sensible decisions—I think; I made them—being approved by the House that are an integral part of our overall COVID-19 response. They largely relate to movement around the border and making sure that our rules there are as clear as possible. So most of the amendments we're dealing with here are amendments of clarification and then also the most substantive additional amendment we're making is the implementation of pre-departure testing which as I said I think everybody by and large supports but there has been a technical issue about how that was implemented that we are working to resolve.DEPUTY SPEAKER: The question is that the motion be agreed to.