Woodhouse MichaelHon MICHAEL WOODHOUSE (National): Thank you Mr Speaker. I heard it said once that one day in Government was better than three years in Opposition. I must say whoever said that was not a member of the 53rd Parliament of New Zealand because I aspire to be a Minister again but in the meantime I would much rather be over here debating the real issues than the lily-livered cannon fodder for the Government that sits on those backbenches. I cannot believe the intellectual firepower that is the Finance and Expenditure Committee's Labour members being so badly wasted in this bill debate.Dr Webb comes up with one minute and one second in the first reading and one minute 20 in the second to tell us what? Who knows. At least in the second reading he said Well it's going to be next week the way it is today." Well that's not true because we're debating a bill to change it only we don't know what we're changing it to. We don't have any details of what the business support payments are going to be from next Friday. I would have thought that Barbara Edmonds might have knocked on the door of the Minister of Revenue being the good former IRD staff member and tax lawyer that she is and said "Give me something to work with. Give me some sort of message that I can give in the one minute and 20 seconds that I'm going to speak in the first reading."Ingrid Leary transfers from Waiheke Island to represent the good people of Taieri in order to do what? Spend one minute and something saying very little or nothing. And I'm not quite sure what Helen White did in a previous life. I think she's a lawyer as well; I'm sure she was a very good one. I bet she wishes she was back there now rather than standing up and spending one minute and four seconds making no contribution whatsoever to such an important issue. Even the Minister moving the second reading couldn't be bothered getting a new speech. He dusted off the speech read by the Hon David Parker and then couldn't even make the change from "first reading" to "second reading". That's the laziness the ambivalence and the disrespect that we're seeing by the Labour members for this House for democracy and for this Parliament. I'm deeply deeply disappointed.So let's just actually drill into what some of the issues said. I found Greg O'Connor the ultimate strawman arguer to be all over the place on this. We heard seven or eight speeches from Labour members saying how important this was and how it wasn't needed but the good people of Ōhāriu apparently have got the opposite problem because they can't get labour in the construction industry. Well that may be the case and very nice though Ōhāriu might be—I used to live in Johnsonville many many years ago—it isn't a tourism hotspot. It isn't a centre for international education. It isn't a place where there are high levels of staff who are affected by this although many of them live there and work in other places. He's talking to the wrong people because there is pain out there. And the Government says "Well the way to do that is to provide more business resurgence payments." And that essentially is what the Minister in his—I say "second reading" loosely—speech talked about when he said "It's about alleviating financial stress." Well the best way to alleviate financial stress is to stop businesses and their staff from getting in that situation in the first place. Former Prime Minister John Key very often was quoted as saying "Don't judge a Government by how much support they give to people who are poorly off; judge the Government by how many people they put into poverty and how many people they take out of poverty." That's the key to this. That's what we should be debating here.Now I want to talk about Jan Logie's contribution and it's going to be a slightly oblique walk-around to get back to the point which is: we don't know what level of business support is going to be provided through this bill. We did in February when we first passed a similar piece of legislation albeit it wasn't in the bill. The Minister did offer it. Now I don't think Jan Logie and I are too different in our aspirations for all New Zealanders. We actually want every single New Zealander to live their best life—actually I would say independent of unnecessary influence by the State. And when people do fall into hard times it is incumbent on the State to do two things: to support them on that journey and to lift them back out of those hard times. Now how we do that we may differ in our political philosophy but I think in terms of our goal we have very similar aspirations.But I was fascinated by Ms Logie's comments around—I think in response to me or David Seymour in the first reading—what we can do to lift businesses out of the rut that they're in and actually get out of their way and allow them to trade. I think that was pretty much what I said. To which Ms Logie was critiquing on the risks that that poses—the risks that someone might die. And I think that's a tragedy—I agree with Mr Seymour's commentary on that. But here's the point and I think a number of leaders—the Prime Minister the Leader of the Opposition Mr Seymour—have all struggled with media questions about how many lives are we prepared to lose by relaxing restrictions that have been on our country. And I think that's a really important question but I refuse to answer it until all of the cards are on the table—until all of the impacts of the decisions Government have made are in the calculus.Now I used to work in the health sector and I've got qualifications in health service management. When we think about decisions policy decisions we talk about—health policy makers talk about—quality adjusted life years disability adjusted life years; that's a common currency for assessing whether an investment in a certain drug will have an outcome and reduce morbidity or mortality or increase. And so yes having no lockdown would have caused a high level of death and serious illness and we didn't do that. Total lockdown may save all lives—probably not but it saved a hell of a lot of them. But here's what we don't factor in and what we need to talk more about: what about the non-COVID health issues? What about what Dr Chris Jackson called the non-COVID cancer casualties when he came before the Epidemic Response Committee last year? What about the diabetes the heart disease the mental health issues on our business owners on people in financial stress? The poor educational outcomes. The developmental delay of our pre-schoolers. What about our secondary schoolers who are leaving now without a leavers dinner without a graduation ceremony without the school formal or ball in the middle of the year? What about the people who are on IVF treatment at the moment—or who aren't because of the cancelled elective treatments in our DHBs? I've read research that has said that the costs in non-COVID health and societal effects are five times greater than the costs of lockdown.So why do I raise that in the context of this bill? It's because we need to reinforce that the gold standard is to safely—so the rhetorical question is: what's the right level of business resurgence payment? I would say: zero. I would say: get the building blocks in place faster than we have to enable businesses to open sooner than they have and more freely than they have vaccinate quicker than we did use rapid antigen tests where we haven't and get rid of the traffic light system. That's what will alleviate the financial stress Mr Sio and Ms Logie will quite rightly say that will come at a cost—a cost in the morbidity and mortality due to COVID but it'll come at a hell of a benefit to all those non-COVID things that we haven't even bothered to measure according to Treasury. When Cabinet considers lockdowns it hasn't considered the cancer the diabetes the heart disease the mental health the educational outcomes the social outcomes and the social isolation of our elderly. These are real costs and the best way to fix them is to enable people to get back to their normal lives—as much as the new normal will look like—faster than we are.And that's the shame of this Government's response. They did well last year. We've said that repeatedly. But resting on their laurels and thinking their best in class and not dealing with those things and not having an open conversation with the country who are very smart about these things because they live these issues every day has I think been a neglect and that's a terrible shame. We shouldn't be debating this."