Seymour DavidDAVID SEYMOUR (Leader—ACT): Thank you Madam Speaker. I rise on behalf of ACT in support of the first reading of the COVID-19 Response (Vaccinations) Legislation Bill. As a lot of people here will know there's three votes on a piece of legislation and the hope is that if you support it at the first it will be improved and maybe as a party you can carry on supporting it further through the second and third votes. On this piece of legislation we don't have a great deal of hope for a number of reasons that I will cover in this speech. We believe it's important that we at least give some hope and take some sort of constructive approach to a Government that most certainly needs help.This legislation addresses some very serious needs and we have said throughout this pandemic as a party that ACT would be there to make constructive suggestions when possible constructive criticisms where necessary and ask the questions on behalf of New Zealanders that should be asked of this Government and its COVID response. I think that we've played an honourable role in doing that so far and we certainly will continue to do so. When it comes to this piece of legislation it is designed to solve a series of problems that people do actually need solved. The most obvious one is what business and employers up and down this country are facing when it comes to vaccine mandates.I was talking to a hairdresser just yesterday who is looking forward to reopening in Auckland because there's a lot of mops to chop up in that city. I can tell you Madam Speaker they're very excited. But one of the additional challenges that they face as a business is that they have some employees who are unwilling to be vaccinated and others who are unwilling to work in a place where there are unvaccinated. Most of their customers want to be assured that the staff are vaccinated and the legal framework for achieving that is very challenging because under health and safety law they have an obligation almost to ensure vaccination is in place. The Health and Safety at Work Act requires a business or a person conducting a business undertaking—a PCBU to use the jargon—to identify what risks there are identify what mitigations there are to reduce the risk and if there's something they could do to reduce the risk then they have to do it. So they sit there and say Well COVID-19 is a pretty obvious risk around the world right now. Vaccinations have been shown to dramatically reduce the risk." There's a 96 percent reduction in the chance of serious illness by taking the Pfizer vaccine according to recent research in The New England Journal of Medicine. The world's greatest medical journal says that. So you see a strong case that as a PCBU perhaps as a hairdresser you'd really want to make sure that you were introducing a requirement to be vaccinated in that workplace.But of course businesses face other legal hurdles. They also have privacy law. It's not clear if they are able to address the issues with privacy. So that's a real problem. This legislation in fairness does set out the use of vaccination data and any information about vaccination that an employer might have and how they can and can't use it. So that's a big tick. It also offers to have a framework or a tool that businesses can use to work out what their real risk to each employee is of COVID so they can work out if a requirement for that person to be vaccinated is necessary to fulfil their health and safety rules. There's also a conflict between the health and safety rules and employment law because it's possible to say that a new employee must be vaccinated—if that's your business and that's your rules you can do that. It's a very conflicted situation for a business that wants an existing employee to be vaccinated. It's not in their employment contract they don't necessarily have to be vaccinated to continue working. So that puts employers in a very difficult space.This conflict between health and safety law on the one hand and privacy and non-discrimination in employment law on the other is something that ACT has been raising for a long time. On 8 October almost two months ago we stood up and presented our white paper on this. It actually suggested most of the things that are in this bill to resolve those problems. So we've tried to play a constructive role and we think that it's necessary that there's legislation that allows business to solve those kinds of problems. So you might be thinking "Well this bill does a lot of stuff that ACT has been saying is a problem that needs to be done. Why not support it?" Well indeed.There's more. ACT has been saying for the last couple of weeks that vaccination mandates should be vax or test and people thought this was some crazy thing to say that testing should be a substitute for vaccination. Well actually it's Air New Zealand's policy it's Denmark's policy and it's now the policy for the Auckland border of the New Zealand Government. Now in this legislation they're saying that there should be a requirement to be vaccinated or tested. So if you can get a negative test and you show that you're not a threat to people around you then that can be in some circumstances as good as vaccination. So that's another idea that we've put forward that is now here.So why not support it? Well there's a few problems with this legislation. The most obvious problem is the one with what happens with employment. You see if you go to the back of this on the final page it says that if somebody is working for you or if you're working for someone and you decide you don't want to be vaccinated for whatever reason—like perhaps you think you might like four weeks off in December—you get four weeks to think about it and of course that's paid. Paid by the employer. So the employer has to foot the bill of having someone that wants to have that time off.Then there's the question—Tracey McLellan over there she said "Oh the Opposition doesn't understand this they've missed some very fine legal concepts." and then she sat down before she explained what they were. I think that's the life of a Labour backbencher. You're so clever but you're not allowed to tell anyone. That's just the way it goes for them. Now she's impotently heckling over there. She's got nothing else to say. So much for her.You see the thing is that you get four weeks paid by your employer. Well there you go. Then at the end of it you think "Oh well you know what? I think I might get vaccinated anyway." Well then you're allowed to take your job back. Except here's the thing: if the employer says "No. That would be an unreasonable disruption." then actually you're not allowed to come back. So can anyone on the other side—and the Prime Minister couldn't answer the question. Does the person get their job back or not if they decide to take the four weeks and then decide maybe they will get vaccinated having had four weeks paid and then the employer says "No. For you to come back would be an unreasonable disruption."? What does this law actually mean? Who pays? How much time? Do they get their job back or not? We asked the Prime Minister in question time—she can't say. But I'll tell you who will be prepared to say for a tidy fee: it will be the employment lawyers of New Zealand. They will be salivating at this not the business people who have been paying and paying through these lockdowns and restrictions and now get this other law dumped on them.But there's one more reason why we're very hesitant to support this legislation beyond one vote. The reason is this: it is just abominable that a Government which started vaccinating people in this country on 19 February 277 days ago has only today decided to put legislation up to be debated in the House only last night was able to publish it and show the world before we had to vote on it and now is giving 10 days before the traffic light system comes in for employers and businesses to be able to digest what it means start fulfilling all the obligations to keep records for example of who's vaccinated in their organisation to put in place their assessments assuming the regulations are published—all of the things. They get 10 days. This Government had 277. They didn't even get it checked against the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act.The problem was this Government spent so long doing victory laps that they forgot to ask simple questions like: "What if Delta gets through managed isolation and quarantine and there's an outbreak in New Zealand? What on earth would we do then? Maybe we'll have a world where we need people to be vaccinated and interact and people will have a conflict of rights." They weren't doing the basic work and that leads to so much uncertainty that it's very unlikely we can keep supporting this legislation but if they clear a few of these issues up who knows? We might change our mind. Thank you Madam Speaker.ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): Members the time has come for me to leave the chair for the dinner break. The House will resume at 7 o'clock this evening.Sitting suspended from 5.58 p.m. to 7 p.m."