Stanford EricaERICA STANFORD (National—East Coast Bays): Thank you Madam Speaker. I'm quite pleased to take a call on the COVID-19 Public Health Response Amendment Bill. I keep hearing the words it strikes a fair balance". The bill doesn't strike any balance. This bill is just a framework. It is the idea that we need to be recouping some of the costs of people returning to New Zealand. It is simply a framework a method of receiving those costs—how we do it who we exempt how much we charge how we collect it—and it's all down to regulation. So there's no detail in this bill to strike any kind of balance. The only way we can look to see whether or not it strikes a balance is to figure out which of the different parties' press releases on what they would do would strike a balance and I'll come back to that. But as has been mentioned by my previous speakers there are no details in this bill. We only can go on what the different parties have said.The other issue that we have is that we've known since April. We've had since April people in isolation. That's a relatively long amount of time to understand the issues around costs and recovery of those costs yet here we are in the final couple of days of Parliament sitting here going "Oh crikey this is a problem." The only reason the Government are doing this under urgency in the last throes of this Government is because the National Party have been saying for some time that we need a cost recovery mechanism. We have to be able to recover costs because we can't keep paying for billions of dollars' worth of costs for ever. It pushed this Government into a position where they realise that actually we're right and here we are in the final throes of this Government setting up a regime to do exactly that. But what has happened in their lack of attention to detail over this issue is that there's no real detail in this bill. There is no regulatory impact statement so we have no idea about the impact of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act or any other detail before we start debating this bill. Under normal circumstances we would have a regulatory impact statement that would give us that detail and yet here we are having to rush this through in the last couple of days without that detail and yet we have known since April that this is an issue.Even this week the final week here we are finally starting to understand the actual real costs of that isolation. We've been told up until now that it's $3000 $4000 and we find out this week that actually it's closer to $6000. So it seems that this Government have dropped the ball on this and are finally trying to fix it up because they've been under pressure from us and the rest of New Zealand who are actually sitting up and going "Actually this is a huge problem. We can't keep throwing billions of dollars at this. We need to be able to recoup the costs." I think it was about 70 percent of New Zealanders that actually agree that some of these costs need to be recouped and this Government have finally realised that.As I said the bill just sets up a framework. It doesn't actually give the detail of what's going to happen. The speaker one speech ago was actually quite right in the fact that there are no wins for any political party on the other side of the House. Winston Peters can't win by saying "Yes we're going to charge everyone." which he wants to do. The Greens aren't winning by saying "Well everyone can come back in for free because that's what we believe in love and hugs and it's all fine—it's someone else's money." They can't have a win either. The Government have through this bill basically got no detail. It is simply a regime for us to do something in the future and if we have the privilege of being the Government after 19 September we've made our intentions clear.All we can take from the other side of the House is the few bits and pieces we've picked up from the media about what they would do and they have made it clear that they will only charge people who are here and who are leaving the country for business or for a holiday. I don't know who's going on holiday at the moment—I can't imagine anyone is—but if you decide to go on holiday you have to pay when you come back or if you go for a business trip or if you're coming here for fewer than 90 days. The Prime Minister has said on multiple occasions that if you're coming back to stay for good then you shouldn't have to pay but the only time frame she's talked about is more than 90 days so in her mind—and we have to talk about this at committee stage but coming for 91 days means that you don't have to pay. You can leave again and come back in for another 91 days and not have to pay because in the Prime Minister's mind if you come back for 90 days well that's just coming for good. That's something that we need to explore.My colleague Agnes Loheni made some very good points before and my thinking is much the same when we talk about the price that we pay. We've heard from the other side of the House especially from the Greens that it's very unfair to charge people who are coming back. There isn't any fairness when it comes to COVID and I'd actually like to reflect on Grant Robertson's famous quote at a stand-up—I remember quite vividly when he said "This is not about fairness." when he was talking about which businesses are allowed to stay open and which businesses have to close during lockdown. It's not about fairness—we just have to do what is practical and what is right. So you had businesses who weren't allowed to open who weren't allowed to operate who are now forced to close because of that time that they weren't allowed to operate. Many people have lost their jobs. Many businesses have failed. Nothing is fair when it comes to COVID and charging Kiwis coming back is just part of the unfairness of COVID. Everyone in this country the team of 5 million—and if you take into account the people overseas the team of 6 million—it's going to cost us if you look at it about a billion dollars next year to bring people home if you extrapolate out what we've spent already. We cannot continue to keep doing this. It's just a fact. We can't keep paying to bring people home if it's going to cost us over a billion dollars a year. We've seen what's happened in Australia: we've got 600000 Kiwis there that you know may want to start coming home and we want them to come home but it's only fair that they like everyone else have to pay a price like we all did.Now obviously these details aren't in the bill—that's just a framework as I said—but those are our intentions. The intentions of this Government we will explore further at committee stage but we will be supporting this bill because it's a tool that we will use and for the reasons I've mentioned. But I think that the thought that I will leave on—and I mentioned this at a public meeting that I had in my electorate the other day and people seemed to agree—is that the cost of bringing people home that billion dollars a year when you take that and look at the opportunity cost of what we could be spending that money on is huge. We can't keep spending billions of dollars to bring people home. It's only reasonable that they pay some of those costs with of course exemptions for compassionate reasons. With that I commend the bill to the House."