Bishop ChrisCHRIS BISHOP (National): Thank you very much Mr Speaker. I want to thank the Associate Minister of Health for her excellent introduction for these various orders that we're approving and I just want to echo what she said in relation to the excellent job that the Regulations Review Committee does. We have the chair of the committee here in the House: Mr Penk. When he took on this venerable task at the start of this Parliament I suspect he didn't quite know just how many orders would be presented. David Seymour: How venerable it might be.CHRIS BISHOP: David Seymour's mocking the venerable nature of the committee but it is a very hard-working committee.David Seymour: I'm mocking the member's diction.CHRIS BISHOP: Oh he's mocking the member's diction. Oh OK righty-o. Anyway the committee does a good job and it's very well chaired. It's got some excellent members on it as I've commented previously.I want to make a couple of points in relation to the orders that are being sought for approval and we'll be voting for the orders on this side of the House. The first is in relation to the COVID-19 Public Health Response Vaccinations Amendment Order No. 4 2022 SL2022 1-31 which is the most recent report of the committee. I just want to signal that we're supportive of what this order does but we are concerned by how long it took to make this order. So basically what this does is creates an authorisation for a person who's not been vaccinated or not received their booster dose to undertake work that would otherwise require a vaccination or a booster dose and it's basically for people who have tested positive and therefore can't get vaccinated but they are still caught by the various vaccine mandates. I have had a bit of correspondence in relation to this. Other members around the Parliament may have as well—so people who work in mandated workforces who are essentially required to go and get boosted and have been unable to do so because they've tested positive for COVID. So sensible change; concerned by how long it took.The second thing I want to talk about is the COVID-19 Public Health Response Protection Framework Amendment Order No. 6 which is SL2022 1-07. This moved the whole country from red to orange. I want to signal now that on this side of the House certainly for the National Party—and I think I'm right in saying Mr Seymour agrees with me on this—the utility of the traffic light framework I think has really been called into question. David Seymour: It's a roundabout.CHRIS BISHOP: It was irrelevant." says Mr Seymour. David Seymour: It's a roundabout.CHRIS BISHOP: Oh it's a roundabout. OK I thought you said it was irrelevant which would definitely—definitely—be true. I think the key point is that the traffic light framework was of its time. It reflected a scenario in which we had vaccination rates that were increasing and it reflected it and it was devised in a time in which Delta was the dominant strain certainly in New Zealand if not worldwide. And of course now we have Omicron and our vaccination rates have now increased to the point where we have widespread coverage in many parts of the country. I was looking at the numbers the other day the number of—I think I'm right in saying—people who are aged 65 and above who have had a booster is over 90 percent in every DHB. That's fantastic because those people are the most vulnerable to COVID and they benefit the most from having the booster so I've kept a track of how we're going on the booster numbers and I think I'm right in saying that almost in every DHB we're over 90 percent and most DHBs are approaching 95 percent. So it's a great credit to the vaccination teams out there who've done such a fantastic job getting around the country. And once we got the mechanisms right and once we gave a bit of power to the people so to speak—involved community organisations and Māori and Pasifika health organisations and empowered them a bit more than maybe the officials wanted to at the start—fantastic job. But all of that is to say that things have changed. Delta is no longer the dominant variant. We have Omicron—it's milder—and we have very high levels of vaccination coverage. So I think it's time—and we've said this for a while now but I'm just flagging it up and in this context—to transition away from the traffic light framework. It's not to say that we don't need rules around what happens when you get COVID and what happens if your whānau gets COVID and it's not to say we don't need rules around mask-wearing but my personal view and the view of the National Party as well is that we're better to have some simple rules in place that everybody can get behind rather than the confusing nomenclature of the traffic light framework where we're at orange and we've been signalled that we'll be at orange for quite some time to come. So I think that would be very sensible. Of course we've largely now done away with vaccine passes as well. I haven't seen a cafe or bar in the recent past that is actually utilising them. As a strong believer in private property rights I'm completely comfortable with restaurants or hospitality venues that want to choose to use them—go for gold. But I have yet to come across one that actually is and that in and of itself I think is quite interesting. I think I've seen some stuff on Twitter that some cafes are but I don't tend to pay too much attention to that.The final point I want to make is in relation to vaccine mandates more generally. I want to say to the Government that the time is soon going to arrive when the time line for the phasing out of vaccine mandates across the various professions that are covered by mandates will arrive. We do need some clarity and some certainty from the Government as to when that will be. There are big swathes of our workforce that are covered by the requirement to be vaccinated and there is considerable unease in various parts of those sectors and from a considerable number of people at the imposition on rights that those mandates provide. And we accepted on this side of the House vaccine mandates for the bulk of 2021 because there was a clear nexus between vaccination and the prevention of transmission of COVID-19 and the severity of Delta and the severity of the disease when people did get COVID and we supported them as time-limited measures that would help get our vaccination rates up and that would have an impact on the flow through of COVID into the New Zealand community. But Omicron has changed the circumstances that we're dealing with. We already have a very high level of vaccination and Omicron is a different type of COVID to Delta and the wild strain of COVID. And we know as I've commented previously in the House Omicron busts through vaccination double vaccination even triple vaccination and so the impact on transmission is far less effective and because of that we have to bear in mind the impact it's having on rights and the ability for people to opt out of medical treatment. What we are saying to people is that if you choose to work in a particular profession—be it Corrections or be it at an allied health workforce for example—you have to be vaccinated. That is a pretty big thing for the Government to do. It's a pretty big thing for the State to say to somebody. Now it's not to say that that can never be justified but it's to say that the Government has to go through a rigorous rights analysis to figure out when the intrusion on rights is justified and whether or not the efficaciousness or the efficacy of what the Government is doing justifies the intrusion on the right. I would put it to the House that we have approached that point when it comes to vaccine mandates more generally. So we do need a time line from the Government as to when these mandates will be phased out altogether. We've already seen that in relation to vaccine pass settings—for example cafes bars things like that—but there is a vast part of the New Zealand workforce that are still covered by our vaccine mandates more generally and we do need to see from the Government a time line for the phasing out. That in and of itself even the Government publicising exactly how that will work would actually provide comfort for a lot of people. So we look forward to that. Of course we do look forward to considering more orders as they come before the House. Just a final comment in passing I think this has been a really good mechanism for parliamentary scrutiny. Clearly in this back and forth in the House we're essentially pro-forma going through the motions a little bit when it comes to the actual scrutiny—the scrutiny that happens in the committee process. But that in and of itself is a really important process and it's something I think the Standing Orders Committee would like to consider for future issues that we may confront in this House. Thank you sir."