Bishop Chris; Hipkins ChrisCHRIS BISHOP (National): Thank you Mr Speaker. Thank you to the Minister for COVID-19 Response for the statement and the update. It goes without saying that we in the National Party extend our sympathies to New South Wales on the outbreak of Delta in that state—I note another 199 cases today. Also we note that we are supportive in the National Party of the trans-Tasman bubble generally obviously. We supported its opening and we hope that we can return to a situation where there is some quarantine-free travel but we understand the need for the closure in the circumstances.I have a few questions for the Minister about what he's just said. New South Wales is obviously the area of the greatest concern with quarantine-free travel closed since June. Does the Minister have a number of how many New Zealanders are currently stuck for want of a better word in New South Wales and are looking to return?Hon CHRIS HIPKINS (Minister for COVID-19 Response): I do have an idea of the first part of the question but perhaps not so much the second part of the question which is the number of people who have left New Zealand and gone to New South Wales and have not come back to New Zealand. That sits at around 4623. In terms of a breakdown of that about 2900 of those are New Zealand citizens about 320 New Zealand residents about 460 Australian citizens and about 923 are temporary visa holders. So that doesn't necessarily give us an indication of whether they've gone one way and intend to come back but it gives us a bit of an idea of who's there who was here when the bubble first opened.CHRIS BISHOP (National): Just in relation to the registration of interest process for rooms in managed isolation and quarantine (MIQ) does the Minister have a number as to how many people have registered through that process so far and how many the Government expect to register?Hon CHRIS HIPKINS (Minister for COVID-19 Response): The registration of interest process itself I think has closed in the last few minutes; I think it was closing mid-afternoon or early afternoon today. I know that there had been I think from memory just over a thousand registrations of interest. Some of those have already been filtered out as being not eligible. It's important to remember though that registrations of interest can cover more than one person but then one room can cover more than one person as well; so the correlation between rooms available and registrations of interest is an interesting one. So we do what we can to make sure that we're accommodating as many people as possible. We've accommodated more people than we've had rooms available because if you get a family they only require one room for example.CHRIS BISHOP (National): Will the announcement of the extra 500 rooms from the contingency get everyone back in the next few weeks who wants to come home or are there going to be people potentially who can't come back?Hon CHRIS HIPKINS (Minister for COVID-19 Response): I'm optimistic that by the end of August we can get New Zealanders back who meet the criteria to get those urgent allocations. There will be some who want to come back who won't meet that criteria for urgent allocations and so we'll keep providing extra rooms but the first priority at this point is to get those people back who have an urgent need to get back.CHRIS BISHOP (National): Just in relation to the 500 extra contingency rooms what will happen once they have essentially been exhausted on the New South Wales managed return flights? Is the Government intending to put those back into the general stock of managed isolation and quarantine rooms or could they potentially be put to bringing other classes of people back such as—well bringing the split migrant families to New Zealand for example?Hon CHRIS HIPKINS (Minister for COVID-19 Response): We haven't made any final decisions about that. Part of that decision will depend on how long it's likely to be before the trans-Tasman bubble can re-open again; so we've set an initial eight-week period for the suspension. If it looks like we're nearing the point where the trans-Tasman bubble is going to re-open we will want to still keep a contingency for trans-Tasman. If it looks like there's going to be a period where we can free up those rooms and not have to have them in contingency then we would look at what the demand profile for MIQ was at the time. We do know that there's a lot more demand for MIQ now from people who are currently eligible than there are rooms available so that would certainly be one of the things that we would think about.CHRIS BISHOP (National): Just a couple of final questions in relation to the threshold for re-opening the bubble. I note the Minister said Ministers will need to be certain the outbreak in New South Wales and wider Australia is contained and also that remaining cases have to be generally linked. What does that mean in reality? Is the threshold for the reopening of the bubble zero cases across the whole of Australia for example? Or if it's not zero what is a low number of cases? And will the Government approach it on a New Zealand to Australia level—i.e. viewing Australia as a whole entity? Or will it take a state by state approach; reopening for example to Queensland—to take Queensland for example—if they get down to very few cases even while New South Wales may have a few more? Hon CHRIS HIPKINS (Minister for COVID-19 Response): I think in answer to the last part of the question generally we've found state by state arrangements can work quite well. One of the concerns that we have around the situation within New South Wales at the moment is it is clear that that is leaking into other states. So one of the things that we would want to see is that if we were going to re-open on a state by state basis there was a good clear demarcation between states where we weren't concerned that people could travel into those states and thereby travel to New Zealand from those states. So that is something that we would look for.It doesn't necessarily mean absolutely no cases in the community or no new cases but it does mean that we'd be looking to make sure that they don't have unlinked community transmission which is what they're dealing with at the moment. They're getting cases popping up where they don't know how that person got it. Once they get back to a point where it's more predictable which through contact tracing it is possible to get to that point—once you get down to a low number of cases it's possible that new cases pop up but you knew who they were they were in isolation already and therefore the risk is low. We'd certainly be wanting to get to at least that point before we'd consider opening up again.CHRIS BISHOP (National): And just finally when is the Government planning on reviewing the settings with Australia; and how often after that point if the first available opportunity looks like it probably won't be reopened?Hon CHRIS HIPKINS (Minister for COVID-19 Response): We've said with this suspension that we've set it for eight weeks. We'll keep it under review during that time but I think given what we're seeing in Australia—particularly in New South Wales—and given what we know from our own experience about how long it takes to turn that curve back down again I think that eight-week initial benchmark was quite a realistic one. If things aren't under control in Australia—or aren't going to get under control in Australia particularly in New South Wales—before that eight-week period is out I think we would probably see signs of that with a reasonable period of time before the eight weeks marker comes up; so we'd be able to foreshadow that at the time.