Bishop ChrisCHRIS BISHOP (National): Thank you very much Mr Speaker. The National Party will be opposing the extension of the COVID-19 Public Health Response Act 2020 which as the Minister for COVID-19 Response notes was passed in a time of extraordinary circumstances in New Zealand and around the world and as he notes the pandemic continues. The Act has been changed most recently last week or the week before to give the Government the framework the apparatus to implement the traffic light framework. So the Act has undergone quite some amendments in the last 18 months since the pandemic started and the Act is now a reasonably complicated Act to decipher. You have to go into the orders that passed under the Act to make sense of it as well. In some ways that is of course a consequence of the fact that the Act was passed very quickly but the variety of amendments that have been made to the Act have made it a complicated one to decipher.We will be opposing this for three major reasons. The first is in relation to mandate and vaccine certificates and I want to spend a little bit of time dwelling on this. One thing that has become very clear from the last couple of weeks is that there is real unease in quite some segments of our community around the division created by the vaccinated and the unvaccinated. Now at a level that is always going to be the case. We don't have mandatory vaccination in New Zealand for the general population—we have it in some circumstances for people doing particular jobs—and I've never seen the Government to be fair to them put forward the proposition that we should mandate vaccination. Vaccination's a choice; that would run into extraordinary New Zealand Bill of Rights Act problems let alone the ethics and the morality of doing that although I note that some countries are actually looking at that.So the Government has never put that forward as a serious proposition. But the reality of a population where 90 percent 92 percent—hopefully more—of people choose to be vaccinated does create some real issues in terms of division between those who choose to be vaccinated and those who choose not to be vaccinated and that is made more complicated by the legal regime that the Government has instituted which is the traffic light framework which gives extraordinary freedoms to those vaccinated but has the converse effect of creating quite some restrictions for those who are unvaccinated. There is unease in the community about this. In a funny way—well not a funny way; in a way it is inimical to the traditional notions of freedom of movement freedom of association in New Zealand.So one question that I think is going to become increasingly important to answer in the coming weeks and months as our vaccination rate goes to 90 percent double dose in many regions and countrywide and beyond is at what point do the mandates and the vaccine certificates fall away? We're just a little bit behind the rest of the world in this because even Daniel Andrews in Victoria is now talking about the time at which the need for certificates and the need for mandates will fall away. They're talking around the 90 percent figure; well we are soon going to be at that figure. Vaccine mandates have been used as a blunt mechanism to drive up vaccination rates in New Zealand. But at some level the need for them will fall away. I'm not positing a particular view here I'm not suggesting a threshold—I don't have access to the public health advice that the Government has—but I think we are going to confront that question at some point in the next few weeks and months and we're going to have to have an answer from the Government as to how long that legal regime is going to continue for.Now this motion extends the Act through to 30 June 2022 and I'm telling the House now that between now and 30 June 2020 we are going to have to have a good discussion as a polity and as a Parliament around those certificates and those mandates and how long they're ongoing use is going to be necessary for because there is quite some community unease out there around it. Personally I'm a supporter of vaccination certificates; I'm actually very comfortable if bars and restaurants and hairdressers choose to use them based on the principles of private property free enterprise. If a barber wants to say You can only come here if you're vaccinated." I would support that and frankly I'd probably—I don't go to a barbers—only go to a hairdresser that chose to do that. The hairdresser I'm going to tomorrow because I'm desperate for a haircut—I know my hairdresser would do the same thing because we've had a conversation around it and they would choose to do that. There'll be others who don't. There'll be other hairdressers who will say "Actually you know what? I'm comfortable cutting the hair of someone who is unvaccinated because I'm vaccinated." and maybe they'll have to have a test. So we're going to have to have a conversation around that. So that's the first issue.The second issue is the Act continues the highly restrictive border regime that we have at the moment and it's the National's Party's view that the time has come to dismantle the very complicated regime to do with managed isolation and quarantine (MIQ) that the Act allows. Our view is that MIQ made sense in April-June—most of 2020; in fact most of this year—but increasingly makes little sense. Here are the numbers: 27 people who are border cases are in quarantine right now out of 4000 or so rooms. Just 27—I think it was 38 a couple of weeks ago; it's now down to 27. There are 308 community cases of COVID in quarantine facilities but there are over 2000 people isolating at home with COVID in the community.So we have a situation where fully vaccinated travellers are coming into New Zealand having passed the pre-departure test—so they've got no COVID at least when they get on the plane—they're fully vaccinated they arrive in New Zealand and they are going into MIQ facilities even though they don't have COVID; whereas people with COVID who test positive in the community as part of this outbreak isolate at home.Just yesterday the Parliament considered an urgent debate in relation to the treatment of people with COVID in the community. What we know from the Northern Region Health Coordination Centre's report is that treatment is lamentable at the moment and should be better and the reality is those people many of them would be better treated in quarantine facilities but they can't be there because the quarantine facilities are being taken up by people who are fully vaccinated without COVID—which doesn't make a lot of sense. And that's even before you consider the enormous hardship caused by the MIQ regime generally and everyone in this Parliament will know someone or know a family or a constituent who has been affected by these highly restricted border settings. I call it the lottery of human misery and I call it that for a good reason which is that it is a lottery and it does create enormous human misery.So our view is that we should be dismantling MIQ. I really worry about whether or not it is consistent with the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act. There's a case that I know the Attorney-General will be aware of from grounded Kiwis that's going to be heard in the new year. I think that will consider that particular issue. The legal talk around Wellington is that the Crown is very worried about this case because as Murray Bolton showed in his case which dealt with a particular set of circumstances I know but really exposed the Crown's legal risk when it comes to the consistency of the MIQ regime with the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act which of course gives rights to New Zealand citizens to return to New Zealand. So we oppose the continuation of the Act on those grounds.Then the third thing very briefly the requisition of testing capacity clause which Parliament again recently passed and will now be extended by this motion is abhorrent to the rule of law and private property. It's the Rako Science theft clause. It gives the Government the power to steal their property basically because they don't like the fact that they've been calling out the Government's lamentable response to saliva testing. That is not a sensible position. It is not a morally just provision. We opposed the bill to put that in place in the first place and therefore we oppose the continuation of the Act as well. Therefore we will not be supporting this motion."