Reti ShaneDr SHANE RETI (National—Whangarei): Thank you Madam Chair. It's a pleasure to speak to this debate and reflect back on the Estimates from 24 June when we had David Clark and the Director-General of Health in front of us. We spent a lot of time discussing the pandemic response—I'm looking at the transcript here. We spent a lot of time talking about testing—testing at the border asymptomatic testing. I have four or five points across that range which I'd like to raise with the Minister and seek his advice on—and my colleague could be in and out as is the format for this discussion.What I want to start with first of all is data collection for Māori health under the coronavirus. We talked about data in the Estimates how dependent we were to know that we were making progress. When we look back at around the time of the Epidemic Response Committee we had an issue early on with testing for Māori; we couldn't tell what level of testing was happening out in the regions. It either wasn't being collected or more specifically it was needing to be a tie up between National Health Index (NHI) number and then the actual testing database and that was complex. I'd like to acknowledge several academics who threw their weight to this discussion and got it moving along. Well and good. So we learnt from that that it is really important that we gather data particularly around ethnicity during coronavirus.The very brief extension that I want to go to then is that there was a story that was reported three weeks ago about an overloaded Air New Zealand flight out of Auckland where 11 people were offloaded and the comment was made: My kids pointed this out to me … 'all of us in here are Māori apart from one lady' ". My concerns with that is that maybe Māori were disproportionately offloaded from that flight. Here's where I come to the ethnicity testing part because I needed to know if that was correct or not. So I posed questions to the Minister and asked him how many of the 11 people placed in quarantine—so they got off the flight and got put into quarantine on Saturday 4 July—were Māori. The reply was that it's not a requirement that individuals arriving at managed isolation disclose information about their ethnicity. Now that's a bit of a challenge. I couldn't understand that because I'm pretty sure that everyone going into isolation as we learnt through the Estimates has to have an NHI number. If you have an NHI number you need to report ethnicity. So I thought I'd just double-check that and sure enough on the Ministry of Health site it says that ethnicity data must be collected during the first interaction with the health agency must be collected at any time in a certain number of years and it must be collected if the ethnicity already held is either not stated or not elsewhere classified. So in all those instances I might have reasonably expected that ethnicity data of these 11 people as they moved into managed isolation was recorded. The first point that we needed to know was did they have NHI numbers and the Minister kindly replied that yes they did. So we know that happened. So my question becomes: why was ethnicity not recorded on these people and is it routinely recorded for Māori who go into isolation? That then leads to another set of questions but if the Minister could talk to that or help us with that that would be useful."