Seymour DavidDAVID SEYMOUR (Leader—ACT): Well thank you very much Madam Chair. I welcome the speech the Minister's just given which for the most part was a bunch of political attacks on the National Party and what their policies are and what they've proposed and whether they should have proposed it and what that would have meant. The reason I welcome those attacks is that it really casts the net wide for a very wide-ranging debate throughout this committee and I sense that there'll be quite a lot of matters to be canvassed and it could go on for quite some time. So I thank the Minister for taking that and also you Madam Chair for entertaining it. I think for people who are watching this at home probably thinking What on earth is going on here?" that's a reasonable reaction to Parliaments around the world that citizens often have. I think it's important just to take a step back and see how we got this COVID-19 Public Health Response Act that we're now amending with the COVID-19 Public Health Response Amendment Bill (No 2). Cast your mind back to 23 and 25 March 2020. We had an extraordinary thing something that even months earlier nobody would have thought possible outside of a totalitarian State and that was the order for everybody to go home. And shortly after that this Parliament of course was shut and the Epidemic Response Committee was established in its stead. One of the first things the Epidemic Response Committee discovered on behalf of New Zealand effectively acting as a kind of de facto Parliament at that time was that actually all of those instructions for New Zealanders to go home were illegal. They had no legal basis. They had completely forgotten to get the paperwork done—Hon Chris Hipkins: That's not what the courts found at all.DAVID SEYMOUR: —and there was a tremendous difficulty. And of course the Minister's now saying "Oh that's not what the courts found." Well you know if that was true I wonder why David Parker didn't just point the committee to the legal basis. He couldn't for a very long time. They actually had no basis for the first week of the lockdowns. That was the problem and actually you know that showed a real difficulty. That's why this bill at least in its first reading when it was introduced ACT was very keen to support it because at least we would have a system of law passed by Parliament debated democratically where people could actually go and read what my rights were.In the early days of the 2020 lockdown that wasn't true. And as a constituency MP I was frequently approached by people—and I remember some of them very clearly. An elderly couple had walked down to the beach at St Heliers and they had taken some chairs with them because their knees were not very strong and they couldn't walk on the hills. The police came along and said they weren't allowed to take their own chairs to sit on down at St Heliers. Now having the law written down and it wasn't really clear whether they were or not—that's how absurd things were in those days. So having the COVID-19 Public Health Response Act a legal basis for specific orders that set out what people can and can't do is actually really important—that we have the rule of law in place; we didn't initially. So that is why this law in itself is not entirely a bad thing. However there is a real problem with the fact that we seem to have almost no evolution whatsoever from that kind of crisis management that continual approach of issuing public health orders under this Act on what seems like almost a daily basis. Just yesterday in Parliament we had to approve a dozen that the Government had recently posted—a dozen orders. It seems with the first thing that this bill does extending the COVID-19 Public Health Response Act by a further year that what we're really saying is that we don't see a lot of scope for the Government's overall approach evolving. We're saying that well into 2023 we expect to still be in this paradigm of crisis management where we require an Act of Parliament that allows a Government to make orders willy-nilly only to be retrospectively approved by Parliament—that we don't see anything like a return to normalcy. I think that is a real problem in and of itself. Now I've heard what the Minister has said that actually the flexibility that the Act gives means that the Government can slowly wind down its COVID-19 response. I get that. But what it's also saying is that it doesn't really plan to do that any time soon. We will continue to be in a paradigm of crisis management. And I think that's a real problem. You know there's an old joke: when the world ends I want to be in New Zealand because they'll be 20 years behind. It's a long time since anyone's made that joke about New Zealand because we've been a very dynamic leading country for many years now but it's actually starting to feel like that a little bit when you see people with full stadiums going on with life with air travel returning to above pre-COVID levels in North America and so it goes on. We have a whole lot of people that are just moving on. The truth is that we know that the world is going to move on.Hon Chris Hipkins: Let's see how the northern winter goes—let's see how the northern winter goes.DAVID SEYMOUR: We know that COVID is going to become endemic in the world and we know that sooner or later we end up living with it. We're all going to the same place. The question is how much we're going to borrow and spend and how many other costs on people's psychology and the development of children we're going to pile on to people in the meantime and how prepared we are to reduce the worst risks that COVID puts on people.What we have from this Government in this piece of legislation is just a holding pattern. We're going to carry on for the next year and a half and we don't really see any change in approach. In fact actually things may be exactly the same. Now the Minister here has just said something very interesting. He's heckling—he wants this debate to go on a while I can see. He said "Look let's see how the Northern Hemisphere winter goes." You know he thinks that the Northern Hemisphere is going to be in big trouble because they have endemic COVID. Well that's interesting because New Zealand's going to have a winter next year if the seasons are still the same—hopefully the Minister agrees with that.Hon Chris Hipkins: Oh what a profound statement!DAVID SEYMOUR: Yeah no no—the Minister agrees with that. At least he's got some science on him. And we by that stage by the Minister's own admission are going to have endemic COVID because what he said to us is COVID is going to spread around the North Island and presumably then the South. So if that's the case then we turn to a whole lot of other questions such as: how is the Government going at absorbing new technologies? How is it going at—and wasn't it interesting at select committee today: there was the rapid review of the COVID-19 testing in Aotearoa New Zealand. I thought it was cool how the testing technical advisory group kind of trolled the Minister by putting "rapid" in the title. I actually thought that was quite good.Chris Bishop: Ha ha! It's like a rapid review of rapid tests.DAVID SEYMOUR: Yeah yeah. Well I tell you what it's not very rapid when you get in there is it? But you know this is one of the questions: how are we going to get better at integrating technology? How are we going to get better at working with the private sector? How are we going to get better at partnering with business? This Government's not interested in having any of those conversations; they're just saying "Oh you know what we're doing? We got a bill to extend it another year and a few other things that we'll get into."But I think the other thing that's kind of interesting is that this bill has been passed relatively rapidly but now there's going to be another bill next week passed even more rapidly. And the thing is that the Government's response is just so flat-footed. You know like you know what it's like catching the ball at second-five and you're flat-footed it's not a nice experience; well they're actually going backwards catching the ball. That's how bad this Government is because they were so unprepared for Delta; they really thought that they were going to hit a perfect home run that there was going to be enough vaccination—I remember Ayesha Verrall saying it in the last briefing that the Minister invited me to and actually the Prime Minister invited me to another briefing yesterday in question time so we're looking forward; we hope that the Minister will host us for another one now.Chris Bishop: Can I come too?DAVID SEYMOUR: Well we will invite Chris Bishop of course. He invited me to the one he went to so it seems only fair. And she said because she's too honest to be in politics "Well look we've got vaccination; it's all going to be fine." You know that's the thing. They thought they were going to hit a home run. They didn't count on Delta breaking through managed isolation and quarantine. They didn't count on it being very difficult to get population immunity and now they're just scrambling.So we've got this rushed law which just says "Oh I don't know extend it for another year you know see where we go." And then next week they're going to rush through another law to introduce the traffic-light system which they obviously hadn't thought of either. That's the problem with this Government's response. Once the great fortune of isolation and low-population density dissolved they really aren't sure what to do.The way I'd sum it up is: once New Zealand was hit by Delta this Government's COVID response was helter-skelter. Unfortunately while that may be amusing for some people here it's terribly disconcerting for people trying to plan their lives and their businesses. We'll have a lot more to say as the debate goes on. Thank you Madam Chair.CHAIRPERSON (Hon Jenny Salesa): Members the time has come for me to leave the Chair. The committee is suspended and I will resume the Chair at 9 a.m. for extended sitting tomorrow. Thank you. Debate interrupted.Sitting suspended from 9.58 p.m. to 9 a.m. (Thursday)"