Bishop ChrisCOVID-19 RESPONSE (VACCINATIONS) LEGISLATION BILLThird ReadingDebate resumed.CHRIS BISHOP (National): Well here we are on Wednesday afternoon and the House is about to pass one of the most far-reaching and significant pieces of legislation that this Parliament will consider and the House has had precisely 24 hours to look at it—24 hours for the first reading the second reading the committee of the whole House stage and now the third reading. As Dr Dean Knight of Victoria University that very fine law school says it is a constitutional disgrace. The Human Rights Commission has criticised it. The Council for Civil Liberties has criticised the speed with which this bill is being passed and it reflects an arrogance of the highest order from this Government that they think they can pass this legislation in just 24 hours without scrutiny. I put it to the Parliament that this is contemptuous of the Parliament. It is contemptuous of the people of New Zealand and it is contemptuous of the rule of law.The Government says in its own press releases that 40 percent of people working will potentially be covered by vaccine mandates as a result of this legislation—40 percent. That is hundreds of thousands of New Zealanders. A bill that significant deserves scrutiny. We deserve to get the details right. This bill gives the Government enormous broad sweeping powers in some ways never seen before to create different categories of New Zealanders. The vaccinated will have different rights and freedoms compared to the unvaccinated. Now there may well be a justification for some of those limits and for some of that differential treatment but those are issues for Parliament to consider properly through a robust select committee process. This bill allows the Government to say that if you are an unvaccinated person in a red area of the country—because it also allows the traffic light framework apparently—who wants to go and get a haircut in Auckland you can't. It says if you're an unvaccinated person who wants to go and buy a beer and meet someone in a bar once the red system kicks in you can't. Now there is an argument as to whether or not that should be allowed but the point is there should be a debate about that. We should have a thorough investigation of those issues. These are not issues that are open and shut where the Government necessarily has it right. But what the Government is asking the Parliament to do is just to assume that the Government does have all the answers and that the framework is correct and that everything they want to do is going to be fine and actually we don't necessarily agree on this side of the House.So I want to lay on the record of the House exactly what has happened. We got this bill on Monday night—Monday night. It's now Wednesday. It was introduced on Tuesday and put through its first and second reading. There was no select committee process. There is no regulatory impact statement on this bill. The departmental disclosure statement is cursory at best. If you read through it there's no detail—absolutely no detail. It's basically the general policy statement in the explanatory note of the bill and that's it. It's very cursory. The section 7 legal advice—there's no section 7 report but the legal advice to the Attorney-General explicitly says at paragraph 2 This advice has been prepared in relation to the latest version … . The advice has been prepared in an extremely short timeframe due to late receipt of the Bill that was not in compliance with Cabinet Office Guidance."—that's the officials themselves saying to the Attorney-General that the bill was done in a rushed way. We know that there was no New Zealand Bill of Rights Act analysis done before the framework was considered by Cabinet and we learnt yesterday that the policy papers the underlying policy rationale the Cabinet papers and the policy advice to the Minister will be made public but not until January 2022. So we are being asked by the Government to take on trust what they are doing and that it's based on good sound public policy advice from the officials. We are being asked to take it on trust. And the thing is the Government had time to get this right. They did—COVID has been in New Zealand since August and we are now in late November and the reality is the Government did not have a back-up plan in place if elimination failed and now we are bearing the consequences. There was plenty of time to put this out for an exposure draft for example—to publish the details so people could get their heads around it. And to make matters worse there will be no post-enactment review of this legislation. I moved during the committee of the whole House stage a very sensible amendment. I said OK it's being passed through and there's not a lot we can do about that because we don't have the numbers but how about the Health Committee conducts a post-enactment review of the legislation? We could do that really quickly. We're a pretty hard-working committee. We've done it before as Michael Woodhouse says. Let's do a post-enactment review. Let's get the officials in let's get the Law Society and the Human Rights Commission in and let's go through it with a fine-tooth comb—just make sure we've got the details right. The Government voted against it. So within 24 hours this bill's been introduced and it's going to be law.Let me deal with a couple of substantive pieces in relation to the bill. The first is in relation to a theme I've already covered which is the power this hands to the Government. I think there is real legal doubt about whether or not the bill actually introduces the power for traffic lights for various regions because if you read the bill there is no mention of traffic lights in the bill. And there's a reason why it's not called the "COVID-19 Response Traffic Light System or Framework Legislation Bill". There is no mention of it and so that is going to be something we're going to have to have a look at. And again if we had a select committee stage we could have gone through and examined that but we can't.On the issue of where and when vaccination certificates will be accepted and in relation to the corollary that applies to people who have to be vaccinated to work in those industries it is not clear to me from reading the legislation that that is authorised by the bill. So I think there is a real to use the legal parlance vires issue here as to whether or not the Government is actually going to have the power that it thinks it's going to have once the bill passes. Now that will no doubt be tested by the court and if I'm right and the Government's wrong we're going to have to come back and legislate again—again—an issue that could have been sorted out. I think there are real issues of legality here. Justice Cooke when we discussion around this during the committee of the whole House made it clear in relation to the mandates that already exist for border workers that the Government has to get the empowering provisions right. The Government cannot just point to broad sweeping powers and say "Oh well Parliament said we can do that therefore we can." Actually Parliament has to authorise the Government to act in accordance with properly constructed provisions of legislation. That's the whole point of Justice Cooke's various comments in that specific case before the High Court. So I really worry that this bill doesn't actually do what the Government thinks it does.The final point I want to make is a very important point and it is that I really worry about the divides that will appear in this country. My inbox is full of people emailing me telling me that vaccines don't work that they don't like the idea of vaccine mandates that they don't like the idea of using vaccine certificates and that they don't like the idea of division to use a vernacular phrase. They don't like division. If there was one thing a Government could do to solidify and entrench those divisions it would be this bill. This is not a bill that has been well-thought-through and well ventilated and where we've had an argument and a discussion about mandates. It's not a bill that makes the case for vaccine certificates and carefully calibrates the intrusion on the right not to have medical treatment and it's not a bill that carefully calibrates the various rights about discrimination. It's not a bill that does that. Those are real legitimate critical issues as the legal advice in the section 7 report makes clear. This bill allows the Government to intrude on all sorts of rights and it's not an argument that those rights are not justified; it's an argument that we have to have a discussion about it. I tell you what happens when you don't have a discussion about it. It entrenches that division. To do something in a secretive way like this in a non-transparent way to ram it through without a select committee process and without any post-enactment scrutiny sends the message to the anti-vaxxers out there and those concerned about mandates and those concerned about certificates that they do have something to fear that there is something to hide—because after all if there wasn't something to hide why wouldn't the Government just do the normal proper process.This bill will backfire on the Government not help the Government and it is wrong in principle. We oppose."