Lubeck MarjaMARJA LUBECK (Labour): Tēnā koe e te Māngai o te Whare. Thank you Mr Speaker and it's a pleasure to take a call in the third reading of the Immigration (COVID19 Response) Amendment Bill. Earlier this week I spoke on the process that this bill went through as chair of the Education and Workforce Committee. It's important to note that most supporters broadly supported the need for the bill and they also recognised the need for these powers to continue—and most people understood that that was all it was about. But as we have heard in the previous speaker's speech there were a couple of overarching themes that I want to touch on.One was the extraordinary powers that Erica Stanford mentioned as well as the fact that she made a mention of the situation now being very different. And so first of all I would like to talk about the parliamentary scrutiny that will continue all through this bill because of course there are continuing checks and safeguards through this bill that were passed in the very first original bill but are continuing in this bill. One of them is the fact and I highlighted it in my first reading—the major safeguard is the fact that the powers delegated to the Minister they cannot be just exercised; they can actually be disallowed by the House. And that means that there is continuing scrutiny by the House. The second one and this is also a really important one is that the exercise of the powers must really clearly be related to COVID-19. So in effect when the member talks about a time limit on this bill whether that be one year or two years or not even any time line that is actually naturally restricted by the fact that the powers have to be related to either the outbreak of COVID-19—and I'll just read the specific measures out: either the outbreak of COVID-19 measures undertaken to contain or mitigate an outbreak or other domestic or international measures to contain or mitigate the outbreak of COVID-19 or its effects." Of course in New Zealand we had a really successful response to COVID-19 and sometimes in a way that is a little bit—it makes it easy perhaps to forget that in the rest of the world COVID-19 is still raging. There is a massive pandemic and it infects and kills many people and in fact—SPEAKER: Order! Order! Come back to the bill please.MARJA LUBECK: Fair enough. Fair enough. So coming back to the bill we had many submitters as the previous speaker mentioned that actually submitted on general immigration themes. And we do acknowledge that there have been difficulties caused by the fact that we had to close the border. But that is out of the scope of this particular bill. The original bill that was passed by Parliament was passed unanimously and at the time it was obvious that the Opposition did see the need for these powers by the Minister to be able to be flexible and nimble and be able to perhaps respond to changing situations. There's still a chance that there may be a variant of the virus coming along so restricting this bill to perhaps only a one-year time line would be unwise because we would find ourselves back here—hopefully not but it could potentially be the case that we would see ourselves here within a few months arguing an extension of the powers yet again. So it is still a very uncertain situation. We had 138 submitters and 43 people actually made the effort to come to Parliament and submitted—gave us oral submissions predominantly during recess—so we thank everybody coming to us in person and submitting in Zoom. I commend this bill to the House. Thank you Mr Speaker."