Hipkins ChrisHon CHRIS HIPKINS (Minister for COVID-19 Response): What a fanciful effort to rewrite recent history that the committee just heard. Let's turn our minds back to when this bill was introduced to the House on 21 September. Back at that time the very member who just resumed his seat Chris Bishop was demanding to know how COVID19 could possibly have made it out of an managed isolation and quarantine (MIQ) facility and why the Government hadn't done more to make MIQ facilities more robust and make the systems more robust—those very things that he is now arguing we shouldn't be doing. And yet when the bill was introduced he was arguing that we needed to be doing more.He then tried to argue that now we should be closing MIQ facilities right about the time that the purpose-built facilities he was arguing a year ago we should have started to construct might actually even if they were fast-tracked be starting to come on stream. They weren't quarantine facilities—I'm happy to remind Chris Bishop of his own public statements that they were MIQ facilities purpose built to allow more people in from overseas. Those were his own words his own media statements his own claims that were suggesting that we should do that. We would have built hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of white elephants had we followed the National Party's approach at that particular time. They were wrong then and of course they're wrong now.I would just remind the member of why we have border controls in place at the moment and it is still to contain the outbreaks of COVID—the potential outbreaks of COVID-19—within the community because if we follow the member's train of thought which is that we allow this Act to disappear we say we don't need it any more then we would have no controls at the border around COVID-19 at all no ability to stop someone who wasn't vaccinated coming in at the border which is still the National Party's policy. And yet they're proposing to do away with the legislation that would allow them to enact their own policy. They're proposing to now do away with it. So we would be saying the border is open—anyone can come in vaccinated/unvaccinated tested/not tested. There'd be no legislative framework whatsoever to allow any of that to happen which means hundreds of cases of COVID could arrive at the border every day and there would be nothing we could do about it because the law that allows for a vaccination requirement the law that allows for a pre-departure test requirement would be gone. And those requirements would no longer be in place because by the member's own statements he believes that the law that allows those requirements to be put in place should no longer be there that the Parliament should not extend it for the next year and a half. In other words it should remove those requirements. Because once this law is no longer in place none of the requirements that have been put in place under it including the border restrictions that the member's party's policy requires would no longer be possible. And that's what he's just argued in the Chamber.Does it mean by extending this Act that every order that is currently unmade under this Act will continue for that entire duration of time? No it won't. That's the beauty of this Act. It's the reason it was designed as it was to allow orders to be issued and removed at relatively short notice. So when we've needed to escalate alert levels we've been able to do that at short notice and we've been able to bring them down just as fast. It means for things like MIQ at such time as we want to dial that back and as we're ready to dial that back we will be able to do that but we'll be able to step our way through that. And it might be that additional protective measures are required instead of MIQ such as home isolation which is one of the things that we think will be part of the transition to a more open border. By removing this legislation in its entirety none of that would be possible. And yet that seems to be what the National Party are now arguing for and yet none of the things in their own policy suggest that that's what they want. So they want to remove the law that would allow them to enact their own policies. It's bizarre.