Seymour DavidDAVID SEYMOUR (Leader—ACT): Well thank you very much Mr Speaker. I rise on behalf of ACT to join in this debate. I want to start by saying that the opening of quarantine-free travel into New Zealand from Australia is a great event for so many people in this country. It is a great event for our tourism industry which in many cases has been decimated by the lack of tourists. The Minister of Tourism is right when he says that New Zealanders have done a pretty good job of getting out and supporting the tourism industry but we know it is not enough. That is why you've got hotels closing at Fox and Franz Josef that's why you've got people going out of business. Because as any tourism industry operator will tell you quietly they love Kiwis but Aussies leave more dollars in the till. So it is a good day for them.It is a tremendous day for so many of us in New Zealand who have friends and relatives cousins and connections in Australia who will be able to see them for the first time—in some cases—in several years. I've just found out that one of my best friends who's recently had a baby in Sydney is coming for Anzac Day. There are going to be many stories like that. So it is a great day for many of the family and social connections.And it is a great day for many of those businesses that you might not think were connected with travel all of those businesses that are importers or exporters or work on projects collaboratively across the Ditch who will be able to renew relationships and meet face to face because we all love Zoom but we know that it is no substitute for meeting people in person. And those relationships in business need to be renewed.So for all those reasons it is a great day and we should acknowledge that. But we also need to acknowledge that this has come at least six months too late. We need some honesty and some transparency about what this so-called bubble means. It is not a bubble; it is a bubble illusion. The Ardern bubble takes you straight back to October. It is actually a time-travel bubble. It takes us to where New South Wales was in October 2020. And you listen to the Prime Minister yesterday she said We're now going to treat Australia as if it's a region of New Zealand. If there's a hot spot we won't let people travel out of there to here." Really? She said that there is going to be a traffic light system that we're either going to continue suspend or stop travel from Australia—green orange or red. And then she said that there are going to be different planes at the airport. We're going to separate out different travellers depending on where they've come from. She said all this as though she was hoping for a Nobel Prize. New South Wales did all those things in October. And when I asked her in the House yesterday "How is it that they did it then and we can't do it now?" she said "Oh but they're not a country." Well actually New South Wales has been dealing with all of the other Australian states as if they were other countries just as we will be dealing with the Australian states on a case by case basis and as the Minister for COVID-19 Response said yesterday managing our border unilaterally. So that is the first thing we need to be clear about: we are doing nothing different from what New South Wales achieved six months ago. And the next thing we say is that if all of those benefits for our tourism industry for our personal relationships for our business connections with our cousins across the Ditch are truly great benefits on 19 April they would have been greater benefits back on 16 October when New South Wales opened to New Zealand. They would have been even better benefits when the Prime Minister said on 16 April last year that we would have the world's smartest borders. It has taken a year of messing around to get this far. And it doesn't just matter because of all of that lost opportunity that has occurred while this Government has been spinning its wheels and spinning the public on travel from Australia; it matters because it tells us something about this Government's ability to deal with complex tasks in response to COVID-19. It matters because the tasks that the Government will have to undertake in responding to COVID-19 are going to become more complex. And the reason for that was set out in ACT's excellent report—I have to say—COVID Response Plan 2.0 which says that we are moving into a different and more complex paradigm. And there are four megatrends that underline that. One of them is vaccination the second is the variants which may undermine vaccinations and finally new technologies and fatigue with our existing responses. Now I put it to you that if it takes six months to catch up with what the New South Welsh people of the world were able to do last October how are we placed to face that world? Well I think this is a time that we need to be honest with each other and our Government must be transparent with us and accept that it hasn't done a good job it hasn't gone hard and early; it has actually been incredibly late at doing incredibly simple things. We introduced a few principles that might be helpful for doing better at these kinds of things in the future. We said that in response to those megatrends of vaccination and variants of new technologies and fatigue actually we need better principles that will allow us to do things like we've just done better and faster. We need more transparency. The Government should be open about what really happened. It had the opportunity to open up to Australia just as Australian states were opening up to each other and us last October.It should be faster at adopting new technology. We heard today that there is going to be some use of thermometers to check people's temperature as they come in. That's the kind of thing the Taiwanese were doing last March. We are just too slow in our tech uptake and when we do get technology it is stuff that other countries were doing a year ago.We've got to become more proportionate to risk. We made Australians stay in managed isolation and quarantine next to people from hot spots for six months when there was no risk. This goes back to transparency. There have been three cases of COVID19 arriving from Australia in the last six months. Will the Ministry of Health tell us where they came from when they came or whether they were even Australians or people transiting from Australia? No they won't. That is the level of transparency we get from this Government. But actually what that shows us is that had we had a New South Wales - style hot spot system—opening our border and closing it when there were risks. I suspect all of those cases would have been stopped from coming to New Zealand because they would have come from places that were identified as a hot spot at the time. But we are not managing risk in the way that we should.We need a culture of admitting failure. This Government needs to be honest about the fact that it has not done well with this policy of a bubble that actually it needs to do better and it will need to do much better in a COVID 2.0 world than it has done so far.And finally we're going to need a culture of focusing on the wellbeing of all New Zealanders. There has been far too much harm done by failing to properly balance what the Government describes as the health risks of travel from Australia with all of the other costs that we've suffered over the last six months of being needlessly closed to them. That is the kind of intelligent approach that we should be taking to our COVID-19 response. It is the kind of response that is going to be needed as vaccines and variants and new technologies and fatigue with simply locking down and closing the border make the old ways unsustainable. As the rest of the world gets vaccinated and gets moving again we are going to have to be ready to participate in that new paradigm. And if patting itself on the back and seeking gratitude and congratulations the way this Government has in the last 24 hours reflect the strength and sophistication of our response to COVID-19 New Zealand will be getting left behind in this new paradigm and the people will finally see that this Government has not been adept; it has not gone hard and early; it has been lucky to govern a country that is very isolated with a population that is very cooperative.It's a great day for New Zealanders; it is a terrible day for this Government that must do better. Thank you Mr Speaker."