Ngarewa-Packer DebbieDEBBIE NGAREWA-PACKER (Co-Leader—Te Paati Māori): E te Pīka thank you. I stand for the second reading of the COVID-19 Public Health Response (Extension of Act and Reduction of Powers) Amendment Bill. Look I do want to acknowledge the Government and the fact that this bill is removing sole powers of the Director-General of Health and it's retaining some of the existing safeguards of the Act. As has been said this is positive. I guess its overreach and the one-stop-shop approach that it created was so damaging as the Waitangi Tribunal Haumaru report stated that to support it with hand on heart would be just too difficult for this party. It compromised trust—and still has—for a large proportion of our population. I want to again highlight that the Government's vaccination rollout disadvantaged Māori by failing to take not only expert advice but it equated the risk of a 45-year-old Māori male with a 70-year-old Pākehā. It was like no one had ever heard of their tangata whenua before and we were completely mis-profiled. Six hundred thousand over-65-year-old non-Māori were vaccinated while we had a whole lot of young Māori who are at risk put and pushed to the very very very long back of the queue. So I guess what we need to sort of remember is that this bill was in place—and we talk about its power and its ability to protect us. Where was that then when we had Māori who were disproportionately being put at risk of being infected by Delta? I respect and it's good to hear the Minister's reflections that the Government is working to implement the recommendations of Haumaru. But yeah let's talk about that. It stated that the Government needed to show agility it needed to have change and it needed to completely change some of its approaches in consultation and its outreach for Māori. It reinforced that different approaches were necessary for different communities as my colleagues have said and the importance of devolving resourcing. In the ministry's view the Māori response has shown that it could be remarkably innovative. Wow! We've all been saying that for 182 years but it was good to see that's finally acknowledged.So what I guess we're trying to gauge from this is that if the ministry considers that it's important to have this bill and it's important to build on the work that was learnt from the COVID-19 response and the health system more broadly where is that? What has been learnt? Where is the evaluation of the response to the pandemic? Again we understand that there are reflections and there hasn't been a lot of time afforded to this because of the amount of years that we've had to endure lockdowns and traffic lights and not traffic lights—and orange and red.But I guess the thing is that the Minister has observed that yes we've never had the time previously to evaluate the response but we've now got examples of real-time quality assurance that is being carried out in the interim. So just bear with me. It included undertaking more than 40 investigations into elements of the response which ranged from an investigation into contact tracing early in the pandemic to more recent ones about laboratories. So the investigations resulted in more than 1000—1000—recommendations which are all tracked centrally to monitor the implementation. Where I'm going with this is that the Minister was told and we've been assured that they were going to set new norms. There were going to be new norms set for public health response new norms for us as Māori and new norms that we can say that we're never ever going to have to experience the displacement the disproportionate effect in the way that we were chucked to the back of the queue—particularly our youth. Again based on the failed experiences from this bill we cannot as Te Paati Māori be seen supporting it. Kia ora rā.