Seymour DavidDAVID SEYMOUR (Leader—ACT): Thank you Madam Chair. Rather seamlessly I'd like to follow on from that and just ask the Minister in the chair the Hon Chris Hipkins about clause 4—Part 1 clause 4—which amends section 5 of the COVID-19 Public Health Response Act. It changes the interpretation. There's quite a number of new terms introduced into the legislation. There's a vaccination authorisation" a "vaccination certificate" a "vaccination exemption". There's "exempt person means a person who has been granted a COVID-19 vaccination exemption" "specified COVID19 vaccination exemption criteria" "vaccinated". These are all the new terms that are introduced.Now what I find interesting what I really want the Minister to address is where do these testing requirements come in? Because as Michael Woodhouse who was speaking just a second ago pointed out the bill very clearly contemplates that some people who are required to do work will be able to meet the criteria by being vaccinated or tested. And this is not only important in the context of the bill which contemplates vax-or-test it's important in the context of the response to COVID-19 globally. Because in quite a number of different theatres the requirement is to be either vaccinated or tested not just vaccinated. And once you think about that you have to start asking well what is the purpose of this piece of legislation?Now some of the Labour members—and I don't know if they were reading the bill notes that they were provided or they're confused or just not sure how to fill in their whole two minutes but a number of them said that the purpose of this legislation was to raise overall vaccination rates. Well the Minister should tell us is that the purpose? Is this legislation there to incentivise the wider public to get vaccinated? Because if that's the case I would suggest there are other ways to achieve that and at the margin we're pretty much as far as we're going to get. We need incentives and persuasion rather than coercion.But I think the Minister should tell us you know the underlying purpose. I mean there's no purpose statement there's no amendment to the purpose statement of the principal Act. The purpose is really helpful to know and once you know that purpose—if it's to increase vaccination rates overall then what we've seen in the interpretation section makes sense: it's all about vaccinate vaccinate vaccinate. But actually there is another purpose that the Minister himself has raised. He stood up and said "Well actually this is about protecting people from harming each other." that a person who is not vaccinated is more likely to have a bigger viral load and pass it on to someone who you know may be either a child who can't be vaccinated or somebody who is vaccinated—but as we know even those of us who are very strong proponents of vaccination against COVID-19 it's not the 100 percent sterilising immunity silver bullet that some of us had hoped for. You know you can harm somebody else.So if the purpose of this legislation is actually to stop some people harming others by carrying COVID-19 and potentially affecting them then you'd have to ask: is the way to address that purpose not to ensure that somebody is actually vaxxed or tested? Because you know if vaccination protection is not 100 percent then there must be some frequency of testing that actually gives an equivalent guarantee that a person you meet is not going to pass on COVID-19. And I wonder why in the interpretation section there's no mention of what it means to be tested. It's all about vaccination even though testing is mentioned elsewhere in the bill.It's also important in the wider context of a response to COVID-19—and Madam Chair this is important so I hope you'll grant me at least a few more minutes on this call. You know you look around the world the vax or test idea is being widely embraced—Denmark for example. I mean they have an app that says if you show that you're either vaccinated or tested to demonstrate that you're unlikely to harm somebody else with COVID-19. Air New Zealand much closer to home: for domestic flights they're not insisting on vaccination only; they're saying it's vax or test. And then there's the New Zealand Government even closer to home: the Minister himself is saying that when people leave Auckland—and I know this is a bit of a sore point so I'll try not to bring it up too much for this Minister—but people will be able to show their credentials for leaving Auckland and that they're either vaccinated—[Time expired]"