Watts SimonSIMON WATTS (National—North Shore): I must say it was good to hear the good member Simon Court from Te Atatū West Auckland just giving us a little bit of an overview and a confession of being an Australian. I feel for him this legislation is really not doing anything.Look I'm here to speak in the third reading of the COVID-19 Public Health Response (Validation of Managed Isolation and Quarantine Charges) Amendment Bill. I must say as we've heard National oppose this bill. Why do we oppose this bill? Because this bill is shoddy—it is shoddy. It is shoddy legislation. It has got a shoddy process and it is basically just a disgrace. What I am even more concerned about is that the Minister only today is still trying to estimate to try and work out how many people are impacted by this change how many dollars are involved. He's quoted in the—I mean I added it up on the back of a piece of paper and I got to $3 million. He had to get officials to add it up. He gave me a range of between $1.5 million and $3.5 million. You know these guys have not got a clue. They have had 21 days at least to undertake a whole lot of due diligence a whole lot of background information and a whole lot of assessment around the impact of that but they have not used that opportunity to do that. I think that is disgraceful.Managed isolation and quarantine (MIQ) in this country and the charging process around MIQ which this bill relates to has been an absolute travesty. It has been an honesty box process. How many people go into a hotel stay a couple of weeks and then go Actually oh can you just send me the invoice?" I mean if you did that in real life would you be surprised that a lot of people wouldn't pay? Well we're under no illusion why we've got $7 million outstanding of overdue fees for MIQ that now we're having to call in the debt collectors to follow up with $4 million of that relating to last year. That is an absolute travesty. The other aspect around this shoddy piece of legislation that I want to refer to is the fact around it being retrospective legislation. One of the key aspects within this country of the social contract is that people within this country are able to work and understand that the laws that they're operating within—that's what binds them—and the aspect here around retrospective legislation means that breaches of the law are either validated or the legal actions are done. In effect what we're making here is we're saying that basically an illegal action is now legal right? And that is just—I think the honourable Chris Bishop mentioned it before in terms of the fact—Chris Bishop: It's not "Hon"—it's not time.SIMON WATTS: Not quite but you know it seems to be a bit of a theme today Chris Bishop—a little bit of a theme today. So we'll keep on that if I may. Retrospective legislation should only be used in the most rarest of circumstances—OK? I think what we're seeing here today in this House is another example of a Government that is not over the detail. They're not over the process. They are absolutely back-pedalling here and there trying to push through legislation under urgency—under Budget urgency. This is no more Budget urgency than flying to the moon. This is basically just using the opportunity on a Friday morning to try and push through a piece of legislation that has once again got errors in it. It's not the first time this morning I've spoken on legislation to try and fix errors but that seems to be what we're doing instead of focusing on the key issues and the key aspects that this country needs focus on. Growing jobs supporting business maybe—that might be a nice thing. Helping our farmers up in Northland—that would be a good thing to do. But no—no we're not. We're basically just trying to pass through retrospective legislation and that is absolutely not what this House should be used to do. Look I want to finish off in only the short amount of time I've got just to basically say I guess what can we learn from this process? As a new MP within this House I've only been here seven eight months now but I don't know how many times—and I'm looking at my new colleagues all around me and we're going "How many times have we been in this House to fix mistakes and not to do the thing that we're actually here for?" which is to actually put in place legislation that's going to make this country better. But no let's spend all our time hours after hours fixing mistakes because we're running too fast and haven't got any idea of the detail and what we're trying to do. I think that is a learning that that side of the House needs to take on board this morning and make a change."