Craig LizDr LIZ CRAIG (Labour): Thank you Madam Speaker. It's great to be able to start this debate by congratulating you on your new role and also congratulations to all of the new colleagues on both sides of the House. I'm looking forward to working with you over the next three years. It's fitting that as we start to reflect on the Government's priorities for the next three years we look back and for me it's about thinking about the year that was and about some of the things that have informed our Government's priorities moving forward. I'd like to just give you a bit of a southern perspective because for us in the Far South the year had barely begun when we were hit by the Southland floods. As Minister Kiritapu Allan reflected in the House just today it's so wonderful to see the Milford Track reopening because those floods took out a huge amount of the infrastructure in the Routeburn and the Milford Tracks. But it also a few days later hit Mataura and Gore. So it's wonderful to be starting this new year with Parliament declaring a climate emergency but also to have today the announcement that the Milford Track after $13.7 million worth of investment is back open for business. That'll have a huge impact on many involved in the tourism industry down in Fiordland. Next year though we are also seeing work start as part of the shovel-ready project on rebuilding and strengthening Southland's flood infrastructure and so that'll be involving working on some of those stopbanks that were really struggling to hold back the water particularly around Gore and Mataura in the recent floods. It was only a few weeks later though that we entered lockdown and for me entering lockdown our office was incredibly busy as was probably many of yours around the House. So basically I worked right through lockdown but emerging out the other side I made the point of going and visiting as many of our social service agencies and our local businesses as I could. The story they told me pretty much was the same two key things. Firstly they were incredibly grateful for the decisive health response and secondly incredibly grateful for the wage subsidy. On the decisive health response Southland had the highest rate of COVID-19 in the country for most of that early period and so for many of us there was only one degree of separation between somebody in our family and some others who were affected by COVID-19. And indeed we did lose two very beloved community members to COVID. I think reflecting back on this it reminded me of when I was in my early public health training and a couple of my bosses had been involved with the research that found in terms of cot death that if you place your babies on their back rather than their front to sleep we could save over 100 babies a year. I don't ever remember anybody walking up to one of our bosses and saying Thank you. My baby didn't pass away as a result of your work." And I think for us in Southland none of us ever knew what might have happened if we hadn't had that decisive health response. But we were all incredibly grateful both to Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern for the way she led our country through it but also to a number of our public health workforce and particularly some of my former public health colleagues who took that leadership role and were part of that team that crafted that plan that saw us all through. So one of the number one priorities for our Government moving forward is continuing to protect New Zealanders from COVID-19. That not only means strong border controls but also those investments that we've talked about in vaccines which we hope to have rolled out in 2021.Some of the other things though that people talked about were particularly the wage subsidy and the way many businesses said they went into that lockdown not knowing if they'd have a business out the other side and yet the marvelling of the 12-week subsidy not only for the fact it was in their pockets within a few days of them applying but also the fact it was 12 weeks which meant that when business resumed they had a few weeks to gauge what was happening and in many many cases people weren't laid off as a result. So moving forward accelerating our economic recovery both locally and nationally is a key priority for our Government. Certainly what I see locally is that the projected rises in unemployment haven't happened to the extent that we were predicting and instead we've got a building boom some of it because of some of the projects that have been funded. Under way was already the city rebuild for us but also assisted by shovel-ready funding as are the stopbanks. So moving forward though there's another range of other issues that we'll be focusing on over the next three years and I look forward to working with all of you on those. Thank you Madam Speaker."