Allan KiritapuKIRITAPU ALLAN (Labour): Madam Speaker thank you for the opportunity to make some brief remarks on this bill this evening. I want to acknowledge some of the remarks that have come through both from this side of the House and from the Opposition. This bill is being passed under urgency. We are foregoing the typical process by which we all agree good law should be made by and we are doing so because of the particular circumstances we find ourselves in both nationally and globally.There are three particular grounds of irony I think I want to speak to briefly in the contributions that I've heard from friends across the House. My good friend the member for Ilam he addressed this House about the legal grounds for which this bill is (a) being passed now and he addressed the grounds by which the lockdown has been in place over the last six or seven weeks. He says that we shouldn't be passing this bill because New Zealanders should be trusted yet at the same time decries this Government's position because there was absolutely no legal authority on any standing grounds by which we've been under the lockdown for the past six weeks. It's an absolutely ironic position to put to this House.What the Opposition—and indeed what this side of the House—have sought is absolute certainty and clarity at all stages. Now as we transition from level 4 through to level 3 by which we've had very clear grounds—well we say we've had very clear grounds the Solicitor-General say's that we've had very clear grounds and indeed many academics have said we've had very clear grounds by which this lockdown has operated. When we turn to level 2 we accept that there is going to be a much more liberal environment by which we will be operating in. For the certainty of all of us it is important that we're all very clear of what those rules will be during this very odd time.Now we come to the issues around transparency. We hear the Opposition decry time and time and time again throughout this afternoon: there's been a lack of transparency. Indeed my good friend Mr Macindoe just said right then in this House We have not been reached out too. We have been locked out." Well he will know and we will know that they indeed were provided in good faith in order to ensure that this House could hopefully come to a consensus position on this bill—they received a draft. They have been provided the opportunity to feed back that information. That same draft has also been provided to many legal academics of which we're very grateful that they have fed back into this piece of legislation. We can expect that there will be Supplementary Order Papers tabled this afternoon to help ensure that this very bespoke fit for purpose legal framework is right.I now want to come to the use of urgency which the Opposition again have decried and decried in this House this afternoon. Isn't that again an irony? In 2011 it was the Rt Hon David Carter I think who made the observation that that Government had spent a quarter of that year sitting under urgency—that side of the House. They passed bills like the national standards—DEPUTY SPEAKER: Sorry in the minutes left come to the bill.KIRITAPU ALLAN: It's very important Madam Speaker. This sets the context by which the Opposition—DEPUTY SPEAKER: Come to the bill.KIRITAPU ALLAN: —have made significant contributions about our use of urgency.DEPUTY SPEAKER: Come to the bill.KIRITAPU ALLAN: That side of the House used urgency to introduce 90-day trials—DEPUTY SPEAKER: Come to the bill.KIRITAPU ALLAN: —Auckland super-city increasing tobacco tax and the "Hobbit" legislation. This side of the House is using urgency for a very significant bill.DEPUTY SPEAKER: I'm sorry but I have said to the member: come to the bill. You don't ignore the Speaker. You have half a minute left. You come to the bill.KIRITAPU ALLAN: This side of the House is using urgency in this House in an absolutely unprecedented time—in a time when those forebears of the Westminster system envisaged that we would indeed use such a use of power in a time when urgent legislation is needed to be introduced because we are living through a global pandemic that nobody could have anticipated. So I commend this bill and the Attorney-General for his work and his team's work on this incredible piece of legislation done in such a short period of time."