Kedgley Sue: Law Reform (Epidemic Preparedness) Bill — First Reading 
Kedgley Sue: Law Reform (Epidemic Preparedness) Bill — First Reading 
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SUE KEDGLEY (Green) 
: 
 The Green Party will be supporting this legislation going to a select committee but we do have some serious concerns that I will raise here and that I will seek to address at the select committee. Frankly the predictions about what might happen in New Zealand if there is a pandemic are almost Kafkaesque. We have had predictions of hundreds of thousands of New Zealanders becoming ill and not being able to bury the dead and so on. We do agree with Tony Ryall in this regard—the key issue will be for people to manage in their own homes so we need to have medical care that can reach people in their homes. We think that this is—along with the lack of surveillance—a key hole in the pandemic preparedness plan. 
We are pleased that we have also had a role in prodding the Government into taking greater action on this issue. At the beginning of last year the Government did not have any supplies of personal protective equipment or anything else available. Now partly through its own initiatives and partly because of the prodding and questions of members in this House I believe that the Government has a much greater level of preparedness but there are still some significant gaps. Although there has been much talk about improving our surveillance I see no evidence whatsoever of improved surveillance so that is the greatest gap. Secondly how will we treat people in their own homes? This fundamental question has not been answered. 
But I will focus today on the issues of police powers. We certainly acknowledge that we need police powers in an emergency to be able to enforce quarantines and suchlike. We have no problem with this and we recognise that it is essential. The problem is that the police powers in this bill are completely unrestricted; we can see no restrictions on them whatsoever. What this could mean is that for example people could be forced to be vaccinated against their will. I think people should have an option there. They could choose to stay home rather than to be vaccinated. 
Secondly under the powers of this bill health professionals could be forced to go to work even if they should be protected under the Health and Safety in Employment Act. This Act states that if health professionals feel that their safety and health are at risk they do not have to turn up to work. This bill appears to override those provisions and it seems to me that nurses doctors and ambulance officers etc. could be forced to work under the provisions of this legislation by force—by police—even if they feel that their health is at risk and even if they feel that they are not properly protected. This appears to us to override all of the provisions in the Health and Safety in Employment Act. We think this is a real concern and that health professionals ought to be made aware of the unrestrained and unrestricted nature of these powers. 
We will be seeking to amend those police powers—which we agree are necessary—to make them focused on the implementation of quarantine such as quarantining aircraft and communities in order to protect against specific risks. We have no problem with those police powers at all. The problem is that this completely erodes civil liberties to the point where we would have no democracy but would have a totalitarian State. 
We think that what has happened is that the officials in drafting this legislation thought about every eventuality and every situation where they might need some powers but the consequences are that they have ended up with completely unrestricted powers which actually offer no protection or civil liberties to individuals or indeed to health professionals. I have spoken to many health professionals and all of them said that because of their duties they of course would wish to go to work but that they would have concerns if they were expected to go to work unprotected be exposed to a virus then take that virus home and expose their families. That could cause their families to suffer from a disease. We do not know how serious bird flu might be but it could put their lives at risk. That is why we have the provisions of the Health and Safety in Employment Act and we are concerned that those provisions are overridden in this bill. 
Many people have referred to the 1918 influenza epidemic but in a way we are probably far less equipped or prepared in 2006 than we were in 1918. In 1918 people knew their neighbours they had communities—communities were not decimated as so many of our communities are today—and most people grew their own food. And they knew how to survive on their own. We have a tradition in our history—both Pakeha and Maori—of people actually surviving in conditions where they are on their own. But today most of us could not survive for much more than about 24 hours and I think most people would indeed panic and be completely ill-equipped to cope if there was a pandemic. 
What we need to do is to focus on encouraging people to be more self-sufficient and to be able to cope on their own and for New Zealand as a whole as a nation to be more self-sufficient. We learnt that during the SARS epidemic when the Government tried to order supplies of personal protective equipment and discovered that it could not get any because there was an international panic. So the SARS epidemic progressed and had it come to New Zealand we would not even have had personal protective equipment. We were completely reliant on imports for that; we simply did not have stockpiles. 
So the Green Party members think that we need to be much better prepared as a nation and more self-reliant in respect of medicines equipment and indeed of basic fundamentals like food as well as drugs. We still have huge holes in that regard. We are glad the Government has begun to develop some sort of provisions—for example contingency supplies of antibiotics. We have a very limited supply of Tamiflu. It is not nearly enough even to protect our health workforce and from answers to written questions we do not think we have nearly enough personal protective equipment to equip our health workforce. That being the case it is all the more essential that if our health workforce are not able to be properly protected in the event of an epidemic in terms of personal protective equipment Tamiflu and so forth then they should have the option—as they are given presently under the Health and Safety in Employment Act—of not turning up for work. Unfortunately under this bill all of those provisions are overridden and the police powers are completely and totally unrestricted. We will certainly seek to specify those police powers. 
Debate interrupted.