Woodhouse MichaelHon MICHAEL WOODHOUSE (National): Well here we go again. It was less than three hours and 15 minutes ago that the Minister for COVID-19 Response stood in this House wringing his hands saying how much it pained him to bypass the normal select committee process that he wanted things like that to be rare and reasonable and then again we've spent the last three and a half hours debating bills and report-backs that run roughshod over the very thing he claims to want to protect.I've got to say that in his speech moving this motion he made some extraordinary comments to Mr Bishop in respect of what other parties would do because this afternoon a colleague of his described the National Party's COVID plan as risky rushed and reckless." and then asked what we were going to get for Christmas on the first day we'll get COVID. Well actually we don't have to wait for Christmas to get COVID because it is here and spreading in South Auckland and I think we are going to be hearing an awful lot more about that and that actually is very relevant to both this bill and to the time we are going to take to consider it and make amendments to it. I should add that the other irony of that is that Mr Hipkins points out that the very things that the National Party wants to see happen are going to be made possible by the orders that are made in this bill. So on the one hand they say it is rushed risky and reckless but they are doing it as well. He then challenged Mr Bishop to say why he wouldn't support this bill and its rushed passage. Well the answer is very simple: a National Government would not have mucked around for months to get the necessary orders in place to enable the reopening plan to be made effective and actually we wouldn't be getting loved ones for Christmas; we would have probably got them for Labour weekend or maybe Matariki if it had been held this year or even Easter but it sure as heck wouldn't have been at the end of the first quarter of 2022.Now if this bill only extended the term of the COVID-19 Public Health Response Act by one year—and the Minister is claiming that is the substantive part of this bill—objectionable though that may be for some including me that we still need this maybe it could have gone through a shortened process because the scope of that change is relatively narrow. But the Minister actually understates the other things that this bill does and that warrant a very significant consideration much more than the four and a half five weeks that the Health Committee is going to be given to do that.Not the least of which is the infringement regime being strengthened to increase the maximum fines and fees and enabling new regulations to set a sliding scale of infringement offences. If I read that correctly it is an Act to pass a regulation to pass an infringement and where are we going to find out and how much are we going to see of the scale of those fees? Are they going to be done in secondary legislation? Are they going to go before the Regulations Review Committee? I hope so because I know the very good people from the National Party on the Regulations Review Committee would scrutinise that closely.There are two other things that concern me that the Health Committee really needs to drill into. Firstly the empowering of the creation of orders for the purpose of requisitioning testing consumables and requiring labs doing COVID-19 testing to do so for the national public health response—so State intervention over private laboratories' ability to do and not do things or to transact business in a certain way free of interference from the State?Now there are a lot of people who have made a lot of money out of COVID. There is no doubt about that. I don't discourage that. I don't criticise that. That is fine. But for the Government to then give itself the power to interject itself intervene in that transaction even though it is actually the purchaser—so it basically doesn't trust its own ability to create arrangements that would be suitable to both the purchaser and the provider—it is going to legislate to say "We'll just get what we want." I have a bit of a problem with that and I'm sure the people who are affected by it will want to talk to the Health Committee if as I'm sure they will they have concerns about that.Then we are expressly recognising the ability of the CEO of the agency responsible to impose room restrictions on people undertaking isolation or quarantine. So it is no longer the Minister's problem; it is now going to be the chief executive. Arm's length further distance by the Government from the problem and the problem is managed isolation and quarantine.Now in order to be able to scrutinise this bill within five weeks the Health Committee is going to have to set aside other business. Now I'm not sure what business is before the Health Committee at the moment but my colleague Mr Bishop tells me that they've been meeting from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. so there must be a lot of it. Here is what is not before the Health Committee and should be: legislation to reform the New Zealand Public Health and Disability Act which the Government tells us is going to be in force on 1 July next year. That should be what the Health Committee is doing right now. Shortening the select committee process for this bill further bumps the business of the committee and any ability for it to consider what some would call an important piece of legislation. It is certainly a significant piece of legislation for our public health sector—we haven't even seen it yet—but there will be even less time for the Health Committee to be able to do that and its other business as a consequence of this.That is consistent with a pattern that we are seeing because the Finance and Expenditure Committee has even less time than that to consider the omnibus bill that has gone through and it should be focusing on $41 billion of imprest supply that we don't know how it is getting spent the Crown accounts that are about to be released and a plethora of other important issues before the Finance and Expenditure Committee.So two of our most influential standing committees have now got to disrupt their normal business and squeeze through in an impossibly short time frame two COVID-19 response bills because this Government cannot get organised enough to say "What are we going to need off in the horizon? What are the burning bridges from a legislative perspective that we need to make sure we have covered?" And yet this is virtually retrospective—again. The second bill that we've seen tonight that is effectively retrospective legislation where we are going to ask submitters to rush their submissions to have lip-service paid to their oral submissions to get officials to burn the midnight oil as usual—it's not as if they don't work hard enough anyway when getting these bills through—in order so that the Government can just get what it wants.Well I probably did use a bit of hyperbole in my first debate speech on the shortened report-back motion in the previous bill. Actually with the pattern that is emerging the death by a thousand cuts of democracy in this country continues. It is a very very sad day for the manner in which this country sees its laws passed and the disrespect that it pays to its electorate its voters and its submitters. This has got to stop. We strongly oppose the report-back motion. I think it would be appropriate for there to be perhaps an amendment I don't know; there is certainly an opportunity to do that but you know it would certainly need to be longer than the five weeks or so that we've given it. I will leave that for others to consider it. But with that I strongly oppose this motion."