Seymour DavidDAVID SEYMOUR (Leader—ACT): Thank you very much Mr Chair. I acknowledge the Attorney-General's comments in relation to what I said earlier about clauses 9 and 10 and the different powers and responsibilities given to the director-general a civil servant who's not elected and the Minister of Health a politician who New Zealanders can actually vote out if they don't like. I acknowledge what I think was the Attorney-General's answer that well if you don't like it you can go to court. I actually think it's an improvement on what we've had but just remember: something happening within 48 hours to get a judicial review—I can't tell you exactly what the going rate is but as a rule of thumb getting a judicial review is 60 grand. Not every New Zealander has a spare 60 grand ready just in case they don't like something the Government does and want to get a judicial review. I think it would be better to adopt the amendments that I have proposed on Supplementary Order Paper 495 and properly circumscribe the power of the director-general than rely on people to take 60 grand off to their lawyer and get a court order because judicial reviews are not a cheap hobby.But I'd like to move on to clause 11 and that is Orders that can be made under this Act". It starts off fine: it basically gives a list of orders that could be made but once you look into that list you see quite how extensive they are. There are some of them that I don't think are that bad—for example it says "stay physically distant from any persons in a specified way". Well that's the sort of law that we could have and perhaps should've had all along that you know you can't come within 2 metres of someone or you can't come within a metre of someone and you have to be able to wipe down surfaces. If that was the way of stopping the spread of a virus that might've been OK because it wouldn't tell any specific person what they could or couldn't do. It would say "Here are the rules; you innovate around them." A lot of businesses that did innovate got shut down by direct orders by these "King Henry VIII" - style powers. It's actually really deadening to innovation to people's sense of ownership and creativity.So some of this stuff is not too bad but there's a lot of it that is far too general. It says for instance "stay in any specified place or refrain from going to any specified place: (i) refrain from associating with specified persons: … (viii) refrain from participating in gatherings of any specified kind … require things to be closed or … open … prohibit things from entering any port or place". These are the kinds of powers that allow what we are seeing that is outraging New Zealanders so much. So it's OK to say you can have a funeral with this many people but a party with this many people. You can worship in a church with 10 people but you're allowed to have a bar open or a gym with 100. It's that kind of specific diktat that New Zealanders can't understand and are angered by. These initial basic rules: don't go within a metre of another person wipe down surfaces—you know that sort of thing—don't go near somebody who has tested positive for COVID-19. Those are basic rules that people might say "OK we understand the need for that. We can operate around it." But when it comes to these rules that impose on a particular person or a particular type of business or type of activity that's when it gets really hard because people get picked and chosen against and that is not consistent with the rule of law—the rule of law being one of the reasons that you might have thought this bill was worth supporting. I certainly did at the beginning of this debate.That takes us to clause 12 which further compounds the problems I've identified with clause 11. You see you go to clause 12(1)(b) and it says these orders can apply "in relation to people generally to all people in New Zealand or to any specified class of people in New Zealand". This is where it gets extremely tricky because instead of making basic rules—we say "This is the rule of law. These are the conditions that everybody must face."—the Government starts to pick and choose between different groups of people. This is where you have a real problem because you can only assume in the context of what's happened with COVID-19 in the last eight weeks that what they might have in mind is that the elderly should have different rules made for them. Well a lot of elderly people out there would be highly offended by that. They might say "It's my life it's my risk and if seeing my grandchildren is more important than some calculated reduction in the odds of contracting COVID-19 I should have that right." A lot of people over 70 highly offended by the way that they have been in their view patronised.But what if it was discovered for instance—and there's a lot of chatter about this out there—that different ethnic groups actually had different susceptibility to the virus? In theory this law would allow a class of people to be a race of people. That is an outrage. That is an absolute outrage and should never be allowed under New Zealand's laws. There could be bases for that that we've actually heard people discussing lately that maybe different cultures have different cultural practices and should be treated differently. Normally if someone told me that members of this Parliament would start saying that different races should be treated differently I'd say you've got to be kidding—that wouldn't happen. Well it's actually started to happen and now we're being asked to put in place a law that actually allows it to happen.Then it goes on to clause 12(1)(c) and says "exempt (with or without conditions) from compliance of the application of provisions … any … class of persons". So not only can a particular group of people be singled out and have an order placed on them but a group of people can be exempt from it. I spoke at the beginning of this debate the first reading speech—I said the critical critical concept here is the rule of law. The rule of law protects the weakest or the most vulnerable and the minorities in our society because everybody can see it written down in black and white and have it applied to them equally without fear or favour no matter who they are. The rule of law and the right to live in a democratic society where we can send representatives to this House and debate and make those laws that protect our rights—well if that's not what it means to be a New Zealander I don't know what is.But this bill—as we get further and further into the detail we discover that actually it allows directives to be made by the Government that apply different standards to different groups of people on who knows what basis that are not properly defined. There's nothing in this bill that says why a different so-called class of people might be treated differently based on the Government's presuppositions about them. That is not the hallmark of a free society where people can point to the law and say "I have my rights and you cannot violate them because it's written in black and white in the statutes of the Parliament I helped elect." A society that believes that is the one I want to live in but the society that this law gives us is one where classes of people can be treated differently by the Government of the day because the Government of the day thinks that it should.Now that is the criticism but how would it be done better? How could this have been done to achieve the Government's public health objectives balancing as I've frequently said in this debate those objectives with the rights and freedoms of New Zealanders? Well if the content of clause 11 notices was limited to making basic public health rules that applied to everybody—don't come within contact of another person don't come within a certain proximity of another person—and didn't single out classes of people or types of businesses or activities such as funerals versus parties then I think we could say that is the right way to make laws. That is what the great economist and philosopher F A Hayek told us we should do that we should have basic laws that people can follow leading to a spontaneous order as people plan their activities around those laws. Unfortunately this bill goes so much further. It cannot be supported. Thank you Mr Chair."