Brown SimeonSIMEON BROWN (National—Pakuranga): Thank you Mr Chair for the opportunity to take a call on this. I just find this debate fascinating because you've got the Minister there saying Oh I'm not sure about these things. It's not quite something we've given much thought to but we'll get to it." It just raises so many questions from this side of the House as to how this legislation is actually going to work. What we see in this piece of legislation is a Government which is giving itself a huge amount of more powers but hasn't actually done any thinking despite the fact that next Friday we're going to be moving into this red light green light orange light—whatever it's going to be—system a stop-go system which they've already announced yet they haven't actually decided all of these details.There's so many scenarios which we could be putting to the Minister to ask questions. I'd like to just run through a few scenarios or questions around how this law and this section which empowers the Minister to make these orders is actually going to work. I mean we've got this division between the vaccinated and the unvaccinated. How's this going to apply to outdoor gatherings? In my electorate in Howick we're coming up to Christmas. There'll be outdoor events. We don't put big fences around big outdoor gatherings for Christmas carols or whatever it is to check people's vaccination statuses. Is that going to be required under this legislation to check people walking to the local markets because that's potentially considered an outdoor gathering? I've put a Supplementary Order Paper on the table around the issue of funerals. I mean when we get to red light in Auckland are we going to end up in a situation where if you check people's vaccination status Uncle Bob has just died and his brother—you know there's always someone that's not going to be vaccinated in the family—can't come along because you can have 100 people if they're vaccinated but you can only have 10 if one person is not vaccinated. So we've got a scenario now where this piece of legislation is going to mean that Uncle Bob's brother can't go to his funeral because that means 90 other people can't come if he does turn up.These are the decisions and the inflexibility which this piece of legislation empowers the Government to make decisions around how New Zealanders will be living their lives or not under this piece of legislation. We've got situations where as I said outdoor events where community groups—are local councils now going to have to put fences around every single outdoor gathering? I'd like to ask the Minister: is that something that the Minister has considered? Is every outdoor gathering now going to need to require a fence around it to ensure that there's a gate whereby people can have their vaccination statuses checked before they before they walk in for the Christmas carols at the park?What I see in my community is event after event being cancelled—just being cancelled cancelled cancelled—because there's no clarity around how these decisions are actually going to be made. There's no clarity around what's going to be required for indoor gatherings outdoor gatherings—particularly outdoor gatherings. So we're seeing huge amounts of things being cancelled and this is from a Government which said that they were going to be making sure they'd saved summer. Well this is the summer of cancelled activities and the question is well who is it being saved for if everything's going to be cancelled?So I've got a number of Supplementary Order Papers on the table which I think try to address some of these issues and try to actually give the public a little bit more information as to how some of these decisions are being made. One of my tabled amendments requires that after the new section 11AA(1)(c) the Minister must after an order under section 11AB has been made table to the House of Representatives all the advice that was considered in making that decision because currently we haven't even seen the advice behind the so-called traffic light system. We'll get that some time next year. Well now we're going to pass legislation which is going to give the Minister more power without any requirement for that information to actually be tabled in Parliament. The public won't know the rationale behind those decisions. The public are now going to have to somehow wait for an Official Information Act request which gets delayed and delayed and delayed and then redacted and then finally released six months after the decision is made and people will go "Oh OK. That's interesting but it's a bit late because we've had three new orders made since then." So I think this tabled amendment should be supported to require at the time the decision is made the information. The advice behind that decision should be made public because there is going to be so much division so much uncertainty caused by these orders. The public should be informed and should have that information so they understand the rationale and that will also put the pressure on the Government to actually be transparent once and for all over how they deal with COVID."