Hipkins ChrisHon CHRIS HIPKINS (Minister for COVID-19 Response): Thank you Mr Speaker and my apologies. The House moved just a few moments faster than I had been anticipating there. So I want to thank my colleague the Hon Kris Faafoi for stepping into the breach and making sure that the House continued to flow as it should. By way of explanation the motion that my colleague has just moved on my behalf confirms seven orders that I have made as Minister for COVID-19 Response under the COVID-19 Public Health Response Act. By way of a little bit of background that piece of law gives me as the Minister for COVID-19 Response some quite wide-ranging powers to compel people to do or to not do things that relate to the COVID-19 response. It is quite a significant power and it is one that when Parliament put it in place Parliament decided that it should also be subject to regular scrutiny. So any orders that I issue under that Act have to be scrutinised by the Parliament and then ultimately confirmed by a motion in the House as they are being now. Before they are confirmed they go through a Regulations Review Committee appraisal. The Regulations Review Committee will look at: were they made in accordance with the Act is there any unusual use of those powers have all of the correct processes been followed and so on. So here we are we are confirming seven of them now. To run through those briefly: the COVID-19 Public Health Response (Air Border) Order (No 2) Amendment Order (No 2) of 2021—so this is an order amending an order that amended an order—this particular amendment introduced the prohibition on people travelling from India people who had been in India within the last 14 days. This was the first of the restrictions that we put in place and then it was subsequently succeeded by the second order that we're confirming which is the COVID-19 Public Health Response (Air Border) Order (No 2) Amendment Order (No 3) which introduced the new categories of very high-risk countries made clear what the criteria for determining them would be—those countries presently are Brazil India Pakistan and Papua New Guinea—and it introduced a prohibition on people travelling from those countries within 14 days of being in those countries unless they are a New Zealand citizen. That order continues to be in place now. The third order is the COVID-19 Public Health Response (Air Border and Isolation and Quarantine) Amendment Order 2021. This particular one makes some technical changes to the way we manage our managed isolation and quarantine facilities dealing particularly with group allocations and group bookings. The fourth is a change to the required testing regime that we have in place—that is people who have to be tested regularly as part of our surveillance to make sure that they haven't picked up COVID-19. It extends that to a wider group of people who work at the border and it includes people who handle items removed within 72 hours from a managed isolation facility within a plane or a ship or have contact with other affected workers. It also increases the testing frequency for some groups of workers. It allows the Director-General of Health to authorise different testing methods including saliva testing and it requires a PCBU—person conducting a business or undertaking—to use the border workforce testing register to ensure that we have accurate records of all those who are being regularly tested. The fifth order that we are confirming prohibits point-of-care tests or POC tests. This is to ensure that the testing we are using is robust is reliable and that we are not using off-the-shelf tests that we know to be not as reliable as the tests that we have been using. The sixth the COVID-19 Public Health Response (Air Border Isolation and Quarantine and Required Testing) Amendment Order provides for quarantine-free travel—so the safe travel zone. It is the amendments that we've introduced under this particular order that allow us to have quarantine-free travel between Australia and New Zealand; and New Zealand and the Cook Islands; and ultimately New Zealand and Niue when that finally is introduced.The final order being confirmed here is the COVID-19 Public Health Response (Vaccinations) Order of 2021. This requires people undertaking certain roles at our border most notably in our managed isolation and quarantine facilities to be vaccinated in order to do their work. I want to be very clear here. It's not a compulsory vaccination because people who are doing that work are entitled to say no. It just means that they cannot continue to do that work if they say no to having a vaccination. There are only a very very limited number of people who have been in that category and in a lot of the very limited number of cases it's for a reason that's temporary. For example there are some pregnant women who have said no to having a vaccination until after they've had their babies in which case arrangements can be put in place until such time as they are able to have a vaccination.So the seven orders are absolutely consistent with the purpose of the Act which is to do everything we can to keep COVID-19 out of New Zealand and to ensure that COVID-19 doesn't spread within the New Zealand community and of course vaccinations play a big part of that. But the restrictions that we have at our border the managed isolation facilities and the quarantine facilities that we are using at the moment to allow a safe passage back into the country for those who have been in higher-risk settings are a really integral part of that as well. So ultimately I absolutely respect and endorse the process that we are going through now. I think that these orders should be regularly subject to parliamentary scrutiny and I'm very happy to commend the resolution put by my colleague to the House.