SpeechMATT KING (National—Northland): Thank you Madam Chair. Look I've been getting quite a few messages from up north asking me what the hell's going on in Parliament this morning and last night and so I thought I'd explain it in layman's terms. I said Basically what we've got here is we've been managing a crisis"—and I'll give credit in part to the Government in some of the way they've handled it—"but they didn't have the legal framework to actually do some of the things that they've been doing." I'll give you an example: the checkpoints up north. There's no legal authority to block the road and direct people to receive brochures or be turned around—there's no legal authority to do that. So effectively for the whole time that this lockdown's been going the police have been bluffing.I don't blame the police—I've got a lot of time. I've had a lot of contacts from a lot of the police and they have been really really unhappy with the situation that they've been put in. So they've been put in a situation where they've got to try and bluff. They had no legal framework. So effectively up until now several aspects of the lockdown have been illegal. So I understand that they're bringing this legal framework in—I get that.I sort of wonder to myself: would the Greens have supported this legislation if National had proposed it? Honestly would they have supported this legislation if National had put this forward? I'd say it would be a big no but they're swallowing a dead rat.So the reason why they won't release the legal opinion is because it's been illegal. But what gets me about this legislation is that the politburo the Minister can make a ruling under section 11 and it can be 10 people allowed to go to a funeral and yet 100 people in a bar and that makes no sense. There's no logic. It's not fair. We have a woman that was locked down in quarantine in a hotel in Auckland and she couldn't get to see her dying mother and she was beside herself. They wouldn't test her—she hadn't been tested. She'd been there for about seven days and she just wanted to go and see her mother and go straight to her house lock down there and spend the last two or three days with her mother. I found out from speaking to her that she might not last the four days she had left before she got out. It took the court to overturn a stupid ruling by this Government that they had to lock them down for two weeks and there are no exceptions—it took a court ruling.I've got this situation in Kaikohe in Northland where there were five dairies open with people going in and out at random buying their product and yet the butcher and the greengrocer at each end of town couldn't open. One of the greengrocers—he'd spent 20 grand on product because he's stocking up thinking that he was going to have a run on his product and he lost the lot. He couldn't trade. For me that was like "Where's the common sense in that?"So I look down here and I see the rulings that can be made by the Minister or the director-general. I think it's the Minister now; it's not the director-general but the Minister. They can impose conditions on you that they might be able to justify but as for what's happened previously it cannot be justified. So we've got an authorised person that can come and enforce these regulations and the stipulation of what an authorised person is is to me a clipboard warrior—a Government employee. I mean it could be anyone in a high-vis vest who's going to turn up at my business and shut me down based on some rules made by the Minister and the current Minister is the one that bikes to the beach and goes and moves house and all that sort of thing—so no credibility there.So I have real serious concerns about this. The warrantless search of a person's property because they might have 11 people at a wake or a tangi—I can't believe that we are allowing that and that we're going to put a law through that allows even the police or an authorised person to actually go into someone's house over some regulation that the Government have put forward as dumb as 10 people at a funeral. I mean it just gets me.But what gets me more about this whole thing is that they gave it to us a day or so ago—no select committee no scrutiny. We're doing it under urgency—no regulatory impact statement nothing. I'm struggling with how this Government's operating. In my view this Government should be hanging their head in shame collective shame over this bit of legislation. The quote says "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men or women to do nothing." and that's what I think is happening here."