Walters VanushiVANUSHI WALTERS (Labour—Upper Harbour): One hour for this House to discuss the work of the Regulations Review Committee—my goodness I am delighted. But this is of course a serious issue that we're discussing today. I remember in the early days of the lockdown when one of my sons came up to me and said We're going into lockdown. Is this a good thing or a bad thing?" and I said "Yes." and I think that that is the strange experience that many of us have been through these last few years. It's this collision between what we've achieved as a society—the lives that we've protected and the people who we have saved by the social contract that we upheld—and the legislation that in my view we put in to back up that social contract. But at the same time there were also so many gritty personal experiences: people feeling fear and isolation and other people feeling reconnection with the people around them but a lot of people feeling a real sense of uncertainty. So it is crucial that we look back. We look back not only at what happened to people personally but how the legislation came in around that—to my mind—social contract to ensure that we knew how we were going to pave and navigate the way forward. One of the speeches that I thought best addressed the legal process we went through as we responded to the pandemic was given by the Hon David Parker when he spoke at Victoria University. At the beginning of his address he put up a PowerPoint slide that showed the comparative mortality rates across countries in the OECD. He said "It shows us that we've had the best result amongst OECD countries in terms of low mortality."—indeed also in terms of low hospitalisation rates and that's the truth. That was the truth of what we were going through that was the backdrop to our actions and that slide remains the backdrop to the conversation that we should be having today. It is absolutely clear that this must be a learning exercise but let's not lose that backdrop image: that slide that Minister Parker put in front of us. In my mind there is one word that describes what we were doing at the time in addressing the pandemic and there's one word that describes what the Regulations Review Committee were doing as we assessed compliance with primary legislation and appropriateness and it is "balance". We were attempting to strike a balance a balance essentially between what Minister Parker called the collective rights versus individual liberties. He did speak to the fact that if taken too far collective rights can actually be used to suppress minorities and individual liberties but conversely extreme use of individual liberties trumping community rights beget unjust outcomes too. It is about balance and it's also about more than the academic balancing of rights. For us it was also about the practicality of assessing the capacity of our health system. So before I go into more detailed reflections on the Regulations Review Committee report I did like my colleague of the committee want to thank Jason McHerron a barrister who did provide his exceptional skills and drafting support to the committee; our sagacious Regulations Review Committee chair Judith Collins our prior chair Chris Penk and members past and present. To say that the COVID orders were a large part of our Regulations Review Committee life that we were steeped in it in 2020 and 2021 would be an understatement. It was almost everything that we did. There are many wonderful qualities about the Regulations Review Committee. One of them is that we are very self-aware. On the early pages of the report you'll find a section titled "What does the Regulations Review Committee do?" We didn't want to assume—we didn't want to assume. We know that a lot of people have interest in our fundamental work but my view is there's a line in the report that sums it up: it "assists Parliament to retain control over the content of laws made under delegated powers." That is it. That's essentially the nub of what we do. So while it is sometimes difficult for our conversations not to bleed into substantive policy that is not our work. We look at whether things are lawful or not—that is absolutely key—and whether the procedural rules were carried out in terms of getting us to lawful secondary legislation. So looking at some of the big questions that we addressed one of the substantive questions was: should we have standing legislation that addresses pandemic scenarios such as COVID or should we have bespoke legislation? Now we weren't the first Regulations Review Committee to consider this; in fact the 51st Parliament Regulations Review Committee considered that issue and considered that a tailored response was needed. And indeed the High Court in Borrowdale echoed that same sentiment. They said that there comes a point when Parliament ought to pass bespoke legislation because of the democratic nature of our constitution. So they thought it was a constitutionally worthy thing to do—that we should be passing bespoke legislation. Now in reality what happened is it was a mix of existing legislation and bespoke legislation that we used in response to COVID and where our committee landed is that that mix that hybrid response is really the ideal. You need to have something in place so you can take immediate actions—which we did—but you also then need to develop a bespoke response. The second question we addressed was the pace or the passage of primary legislation. The Hon Judith Collins has spoken to this as well and I think there was discussion across the committee about when you would put something through urgency. Now it must be the case that there is a time when urgency is appropriate. It's a process that's part of our Standing Orders and the question is: when? Now to my mind if you have a scenario where you have a pandemic where the stakes are high where lives are at risk this is one of those scenarios. Certainly there are comments from the AttorneyGeneral that echoed that as well some of those were given in his speech at Victoria University. Another big area of question for us was: what should sit within primary legislation and what is more appropriate in secondary legislation? This really takes us back to the objectives of the Regulations Review Committee where we are attempting to help Parliament retain control of the content of legislation. Now this is really a balancing act and I think the committee's view was that for the most part the balance was set right. Possibly the traffic lights framework was one that we had more of a discussion about. Some people as I've been speaking to them about this issue have used the analogy of sort of having to build the train as you're going or build the plane as you're going. That's not the analogy that I would use; I would see it as expanding the arena for decision making to allow our decision makers to be more nimble as they face the challenges that they need to on the ground. Another question the committee frequently engaged with is: what are the appropriate guard rails that should be put around legislation like this? For the most part the committee agreed that the guard rails were appropriate. An area of interest for me was the function of the courts which I see as being fundamental in terms of one of the key guard rails. What we of course found as some of the decisions or the orders were challenged was that they can be invalidated by the senior courts if they are either contrary to the empowering provision—so they're what's called ultra vires or outside that power—or if they breach the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act. I'd note here that there's express requirement in the primary legislation for compliance with the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act and so that allows the challenging of secondary legislation. The only way you can have secondary legislation which breaches is if within the primary legislation it allowed for that secondary legislation to breach. The Hon Judith Collins also made the point about accessibility and I certainly think it's an ongoing issue that the committee has raised. I wholeheartedly agree which is a good place for me to end my remarks but also just to say that this is a project that's in the works and which the committee gets fairly regular updates on. So we will be shifting to a space that only when the legislation is public in that space is it lawful and I think that's absolutely as it should be. So thank you once again for the opportunity to take these 10 minutes to speak on the important role of the Regulations Review Committee. I would encourage members of the public to read our report. Thank you."