Seymour DavidDAVID SEYMOUR (Leader—ACT): Thank you Mr Speaker. I fear for our small country in the face of new variants. For a long time our isolation has been our greatest strength. It has allowed us to maintain a kind of walled garden protected by enormous seas safe from the ravages of COVID that we've watched unfold around the world. But as time goes on that great strength of isolation begins to look like a weakness and we do not have in my view a clear enough picture or enough leadership from our Government about what will happen when New Zealand inevitably reconnects with the world. When we have a release of COVID-19 in New Zealand that cannot be contained it may not be our choice to lose our isolation and reconnect with the world in that way particularly if it is a new variant. It may be as Professor Skegg told the Health Committee last week that New Zealanders had the easy days and the harder days are yet to come. That is why it is so vital that our Government's response is the best in the world. It is unfortunate that the most charitable commentators find themselves unable to say that that is the case.There are a number of defences that a Government has against a viral outbreak. One of them is tracing. I see Ayesha Verrall joining us in the Chamber. Her excellent report set out a gold standard that the Government should be able to trace 80 percent of cases end to end in 96 hours with up to 1000 cases. And yet we heard from the Prime Minister just now that it's taken 15 days to not trace 518 cases in the South Island—at the other end of the country from the outbreak 518 people. They still haven't managed to return negative tests on 518 people in 15 days. So the South Island must remain in isolation or a wait-and-see stage which is truly crippling to people's commercial and personal business every day not to mention education not to mention healthcare.What does that tell us about our Government's ability to trace and contact outbreaks without resorting to lockdowns? Of course digital contact tracing—our NZ COVID Tracer app—has been almost worthless. It hasn't been invested in or upgraded in any significant or substantial way since December at the latest.What about testing? We have had a debate of Lilliputian dimensions an absurdity about whether saliva testing should be allowed. Yesterday the Prime Minister told the House that saliva testing is polymerase chain reaction (PCR) testing. Well at the start of the year she said we weren't using saliva testing because we were using PCR testing. She also says because it's PCR testing which she now knows and she also accepted it's as accurate as nasopharyngeal that there's a limited amount of testing ability. We know that the Government has turned down contracts that would have expanded that ability. What about waste-water testing? Twenty-six sites weekly for a disease that actually manages to replicate in only a couple of days—weekly testing for a disease that replicates in a couple of days. How unprepared was that?And then we talk about managed isolation and quarantine (MIQ). They have to stop MIQ because once again the Government clearly did not understand that Delta changed the underlying calculus of the epidemic.Then you come to the question of vaccination. It's been done to death back and forth across the political aisle. But the facts remain that New Zealand is doing so poorly yesterday the Prime Minister was reduced to saying that we might not be 120th in the world; we might actually be 119th. How extraordinary is that? If we are going to go into 2022 a world where our isolation cannot protect us for ever a world where at some point we must safely reconnect with the rest of the world for the certainty people require in their personal and commercial lives for their healthcare for their education for their businesses then we are going to need a much more sophisticated and prepared response on testing tracing and vaccination than this Government has offered to date. We simply cannot afford to rely on a hard border and lockdowns for ever because if we do we will find that gradually talent and money will drain out of New Zealand an outcome that we can ill afford. That's why we need this Government to do better. Thank you Mr Speaker.