McKelvie IanIAN McKELVIE (National—Rangitīkei): Oh Mr Chair. Whew! Thank you Mr Chair. It's great to have a neighbour in the chair—obviously it works. I've counted actually. I've done 34 squats and one drop hold and cover this morning to get this call. I don't want to waste the committee's time—I don't want to waste the committee's time. But I want to go back to a point that was raised earlier about discretion. CHAIRPERSON (Adrian Rurawhe): Sorry. Sorry to interrupt the member. Just want to remind the Minister in the chair he's not meant to be interjecting from the chair. [Members groan] Yeah or commenting while I'm giving a ruling—yeah same thing.IAN McKELVIE: Thank you Mr Chair. Great to see discipline. Sorry Mr Chair. I want to go back to a point that was raised by the Minister earlier with respect to discretion and the very good amendment tabled by the member for Taupō in Louise Upston. In any piece of legislation there are winners and losers. In this case and this amendment sums it up beautifully there are losers in this piece of legislation in that our superannuitants have effectively been left out of the legislation. The Minister used the excuse that they were left out on the basis of discretion. He would know from his immigration portfolio that discretion is not widely used by officials particularly when Ministers give directions it's not to be used. So that's the reason for this amendment. Because if in fact this amendment becomes law then it's very easy to interpret it. But if this amendment is left out of the law and left to the discretion of people it creates the issue that Penny Simmonds raised earlier where some people are able to deal with exclusion and are able to question it and get a result and some people are not. It becomes quite unfair.We do have a large number of both superannuitants and veterans who have been effectively locked out of the system completely against their own choice. In other words they have either been overseas at the time of a COVID lockdown or they've made the choice to go overseas quite legitimately as did thousands of other people. The difference between the thousands of other people and the superannuitants is that the superannuitants once their time is up they no longer have access to their entitled income. I think that's a big challenge for us. I think this amendment specifically talks about amendments to the New Zealand Superannuation and Retirement Income Act 2001 and it only talks about people who are excluded from effectively their ability to comply with the law by the Government dictating that the country has locked down and they cannot return to New Zealand.I think the argument for this amendment to be included in this Act as it goes through Parliament is compelling for the reason I just talked about earlier and that if in fact it's left to the discretion of officials those officials are all going to make different decisions because we've got to understand that there's a very large number of people dealing with what is a very large part of our Government operation in the superannuation scheme and the number of superannuitants some 900000 of us that they have to deal with annually. So I think there's a very strong argument to be made in favour of Louise Upston's amendment because I think that if we don't insert something like this in law it leaves all those people at the discretion of officials and they don't have the confidence or necessarily the ability to deal with that discretion as many younger and more—I was going to say more capable but they'll be certainly very capable people but people who are I guess more au fait with modern technology and things like that are.So I want to ask the Minister why in fact the bill specifically excludes these people or doesn't specifically exclude them why it excludes perfectly law abiding senior citizens when if they were included in the bill it would enable them—they'd be effectively protected. I don't for a minute think we're asking for anything other than protection for these superannuitants on the basis of them being excluded from New Zealand for the reason of the COVID lockdown. So I think it would be reasonable for the Minister to answer that question. I know he did address this topic a bit earlier but I don't accept that discretion is the best method to deal with this issue under.