Bishop ChrisCHRIS BISHOP (National—Hutt South): Thank you Mr Speaker. Now I have a lot of respect for Kiritapu Allan the speaker who just resumed her seat but she is quite wrong with her claim that Parliament is wrong—or the Epidemic Response Committee is wrong—to summons the Director-General of Health the Solicitor-General and the Commissioner of Police to investigate the powers that the Government has used through the response to COVID. I want to quote at the start of my contribution the words of the President of the Court of Appeal Stephen Kós at paragraph 28 of the judgment of A v Ardern there are unresolved questions about the lawfulness of the notices issued under section 70 of the Health Act." and His Honour notes the letter from the Regulations Review Committee about that and the contribution by our respected legal academics Andrew Geddis and Claudia Geiringer. So the first point I want to make is that the Crown can waive legal privilege and in fact it does so as a matter of course all the time. I refer the House to the practice adopted with success by successive Attorneys-General since 2000 when it comes to legal opinions issued by the Ministry of Justice and the Crown Law Office as to the consistency of pieces of legislation before the Parliament and their consistency with the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act. That legal advice is made public on a near monthly basis. The Crown waived legal privilege in relation to a matter I was involved in two years ago which was the legal issues to do with the appointment of the Deputy Police Commissioner Wally Haumaha. The Prime Minister received legal advice from the Crown Law Office as to whether or not Mr Haumaha could be dismissed and on what grounds he could be dismissed. We asked for that legal advice to be provided. We said it was a matter of public interest for it to be provided and indeed the Crown waived legal privilege and made that freely available. So there is precedent for that to happen and I just make this point to the House: there are significant rule of law concerns around the powers that the Government has exercised during the COVID response and there can be no more basic duty of the House of Representatives—the elected Parliament—to interrogate the powers that the Government has arrogated to itself through legislation and to work out and invigilate whether or not those powers have been exercised pursuant to the law of the land. There is no more important role for Parliament and that is what the Opposition through the Epidemic Response Committee has done. It's a shame it became a divided vote. As I say I have a lot of respect for Kiritapu Allan. It's a shame that this fundamental issue of the rule of law has become politicised and we look forward to getting to the bottom of it.That is the start of my speech. I want to make a second point about saying thank you really to our truckies. I have the privilege of being the National Party Opposition transport spokesperson and I just want to say—as many other members have—a big thankyou to our truckies out there and our freight movers because during the particularly tough times of level 4 lockdown it was the truckies that were on a daily basis driving through the night and supplying our supermarkets and our dairies and our essential services and actually I believe they haven't got quite enough credit. They've been doing a fantastic job driving through the night and all during the day and doing a fantastic job on behalf of us. So thank you to our truckies out there for all the things you're doing.It's been an interesting new time. We've got a new lexicon: Zooming; getting into bubbles. I learnt a new phrase the other day which is what it means to stan someone. I had no idea what it even meant but that's become particularly notable in relation to the Director-General of Health—all the people who stan Ashley Bloomfield. We've got new ways of doing business. I rang an 85-year-old the other day to check in on her and I was told that I had to get off the phone to her as she was in the middle of a Zoom meeting at four o'clock in the afternoon which I thought was pretty cool. New ways of doing business but also the same old things as before. From the Greens we heard this week that it's time to spend $10 billion on high-speed rail up and down the country. From New Zealand First we heard that it's time to go back to the days of self-sufficiency in a speech from a Foreign Minister and that COVID has exacerbated the pitfalls of globalisation at the same time as the Minister of Trade was talking—and the inconsistencies and contradictions in this Government certainly remain apparent still to this day. Thank you."