Kerekere ElizabethDr ELIZABETH KEREKERE (Green): Kia ora. E te Māngai tēnā koe. On behalf of the Greens I rise in support of this motion. This does provide the framework we need for vaccine mandates and certificates but I very much look forward to the day when we do not need any of those things. This is the world we're in right now and for the foreseeable future. I know from the experts that we're talking to that this is years and not months.We have stood by the Government consistently in this strong health response. We're proud of our record compared to the rest of the world in terms of fewer case numbers hospitalisations and deaths. We particularly acknowledge how hard our health workforce have been working and we're really really proud of our iwi and Pasifika community and health providers and disability workers on the ground. We would not be where we are without them. But we have raised our concerns with the detail of some of these strategies particularly the lack of a Te Tiriti o Waitangi focus or an equity approach which would have seen much quicker vaccinations for Māori and we wouldn't be in the situation we are now with counting down every day to see where our numbers are at. Next week the Auckland border will be flung open and we echo the voices of iwi leaders that say Please do not holiday in places with low vaccination rates even if that might mean not being able to go home and see your whānau. Please think of the health of that whānau and the health of those communities before you head over there." because we're in the honeymoon period right now. We're seeing case numbers coming down but we know that it won't be long before we see the spike happen again. That happens every time that there's a relaxation either of the alert levels or in this case it'll be the Auckland border.Moving forward we hope to see a really tight suppression strategy outside of Auckland so that where cases occur they're stamped out and people are very much looked after because we do not accept that COVID should just be allowed to spread in the rest of the country and we'll see what happens. People are at home and we let that continue just enough until the health system is not overwhelmed. But I want to focus mostly on home isolation. We had our special debate yesterday about the deaths that happened in Auckland—largely preventable deaths—and we do not want to see that happening any more and we know that the health system has done a lot of work in addressing those and some of the issues that were raised in the report had already been in place by the time the report was released. However for those of us who live in the regions those of us who live in rural areas we know that we don't have access to the same health support as some of the cities. As we've seen already the capacity that's required to get our people tested to get our people vaccinated—we're going to need even more needed for people who have positive cases and are in their homes. Who's looking after their whānau? How on earth do they self-isolate in areas where there's a massive housing crisis and for example in the Tai Rāwhiti where many of the motels are already used up as emergency housing. Where are these people going—and a shout-out to those people who are coming up with really innovative solutions and particularly marae who are opening their doors for whānau who are not positive so it allows their positive person to stay home and then they can be somewhere else that's safe and they can eat and get on with the rest of their lives. We're going to need much more resource going into looking after those people because that's the goal. People might get sick; they get looked after. They have proper health professionals doing the assessments of them. They have GPs who are resourced to actually go and visit them to check on them. If they're given something like an oximeter to use they're properly trained in it and the technology that's required to run all of the system to monitor all the people who are staying at home—those systems are all in place they're well tested and all the technology is working.I just wanted to finish to talk about the border. I think of it as a type of insurance that if we need to clamp down because for example Omicron is coming but there'll be other variants. This virus is not going anywhere. It's very dynamic and clever and so we totally support people having shorter stays. We agree with our colleagues who say "Well why on earth are we taking up beds of low-risk fully vaccinated people in MIQ when there's many many more of our whānau who need to come home?" We absolutely support our people coming back to this country. We definitely support more health workers being brought into the country to supplement our workforce. However we do not agree with the dismantling of that infrastructure. We think we're going to need it for quite a while longer and if there's room left over after all our people have come home then we absolutely need a backup space to put our positive cases who have nowhere else to go.I hope that we don't have many more times that this bill continues to come back into the House but in the meantime we support this. Kia ora."