Hipkins ChrisCOVID-19 PUBLIC HEALTH RESPONSE AMENDMENT BILL (NO 2)Third ReadingHon CHRIS HIPKINS (Minister for COVID-19 Response): I present a legislative statement on the COVID-19 Public Health Response Amendment Bill (No 2). DEPUTY SPEAKER: That legislative statement is published under the authority of the House and can be found on the Parliament website. Hon CHRIS HIPKINS: I move That the COVID-19 Public Health Response Amendment Bill (No 2) be now read a third time. This bill makes amendments to the COVID-19 Public Health Response Act to better support the Government's continued response to the COVID-19 pandemic in a flexible and agile way as it continues to evolve over the coming months. The bill was developed—and it is important to acknowledge this—during a period in which COVID-19 was contained at New Zealand's air and maritime borders and it was expressly prepared in anticipation of a future shift away from the elimination strategy. I'll summarise the key provisions of the bill but first of all a little bit about the Act that it amends. The COVID-19 Public Health Response Act was passed shortly after the global pandemic. The global pandemic—which still continues I might add—began last year. It allows for the Government to make orders in order to contain to control and to manage the effects of the global pandemic. The bill that we are now amending extends the term of the Act from May 2022 until May 2023. That's not an unconditional extension. It will still need to be endorsed regularly by a majority vote in the House of Representatives or it will expire. Again that is important. I acknowledge as I always have that the COVID-19 Public Health Response Act does provide the Government with an unusual and quite comprehensive set of powers and that is not a piece of legislation that we should have on the statute book any longer than we absolutely need to have it. So regular re-approval by Parliament is absolutely appropriate. I do however consider the legislation is likely to be needed over the next 18 months or so even as we step down our COVID-19 response—which I think everybody in the House is hoping we will be able to do—because we'll still need some transitional measures. For example only through this Act are we able to impose the requirement for people to have a negative pre-departure test before they travel to New Zealand and only through this Act are we able to ensure that those coming into the country who aren't New Zealand citizens have been fully vaccinated. For those reasons to ensure that we still have access to those sorts of provisions we want to continue the legislation that allows us to have those in place. The bill broadens the purpose through which a COVID-19 order can be made and it is for the reasons that I've just mentioned. We're entering into a new phase in the pandemic. Borders are currently limited in scope to only those that limit the risk of an outbreak or the spread of COVID-19. We're expanding this scope so that orders can be made to prevent contain reduce control manage eliminate or limit the risk of outbreaks or the spread of COVID-19 for the purpose of avoiding mitigating or remedying the actual or potential adverse public health effects of the COVID-19 outbreak. This shift means we can move from a focus only on elimination to include a wider focus on minimisation and protection which is the era that we're now going into. It's important to ensure that the Act remains enforceable. As such the maximum penalties associated with breaching the Act or breaching the order are being increased. It's important to note that when this Act was first brought before the House and passed by the House the level of penalties available in the original legislation were very low. It's now clear that given the consequences of deliberate and wilful breaches of the order and the potential consequences that that has for the health and wellbeing of all New Zealanders including for the New Zealand economy it is appropriate that we increase the overall penalties that are provided for in the legislation. The bill makes several improvements to the legal framework for managed isolation and quarantine (MIQ) that helps to improve the transparency and accountability of that system. I do note that that is likely to change significantly in the next few months. The way we use MIQ is likely to change significantly but there is still likely to be some form of MIQ. Even if it is not for everyone arriving in the country—which it is very unlikely to be in the medium to longer term—for those who are going into MIQ either because there's a particular public health risk that we're trying to manage because they are unvaccinated because they have nowhere else to isolate or because of some of those other additional factors we still need to make sure that that system is robust and that is what this bill clarifies and allows us to continue to do. So I want to thank the 15000-odd submitters who engaged in the process and members of the Health Committee for their work in considering the bill. I do want to end where I began and note that the global pandemic is not yet over much as we might all wish that to be the case and I certainly look forward to the day when that is the case and I no longer have to wake up every morning wondering how many cases we're going to deal with or what challenges the virus is going to throw at us on a given day. I'm very much looking forward to the day when COVID-19 is but a memory for all of us. We are not at that point yet and we do still have to be prepared for the fact that there will continue to be public health impacts of the global pandemic that it will continue to be unpredictable and that we will continue to need to adapt and evolve. The changes proposed in this legislation allow for that.