Parker DavidHon DAVID PARKER (Attorney-General): I'm happy to respond to some of those matters. Can I suggest that the Opposition can't have it both ways. Well they shouldn't have it both ways. They can try but they shouldn't. They can't say on the one hand economic matters need to be taken into account going forward because this is an unusual thing and we need to open up the economy and we can't just do this only on health grounds which is essentially what the director-general's orders do now under the Health Act. To get past that you need this legislation which enables the Government because it's now the Minister that takes those decisions and the Minister can now expressly take into account economic factors as well as having to take into account the director-general's public health advice. That's the effect of this new legislation which is different from the other. The other additional protections here are that for the orders that are now made under this legislation there has to be a confirmation process under this House. There's no such confirmation process under the existing Health Act. So that's an additional protection that is there for New Zealanders that we bring these things back to the House for every order—an additional protection that we've agreed through this process. Similar ideas were brought by both ACT and the National Party which we agreed with. We thought these were improvements to the legislation that rather than this having a two-year sunset we should have to come back every 90 days generally for confirmation that this bill in respect of COVID itself is carried forward.As to the point of Mr Brownlee's that we should trust everyone—actually you know New Zealanders the 99 percent New Zealanders who do the right thing don't want their efforts to be put at risk by the 1 percent who refuse to and deliberately flout rules. And we saw that on the way in at level 3 in New Zealand. We saw it in my hometown of Dunedin where people deliberately—student parties started up on private property that were really deliberately flouting it. Now that might have been ignorance as we went in but we have seen that sort of irresponsible conduct on the part of a very very small minority of New Zealanders. The law does need to be able to say that's not right and to enforce the rules that are necessary to stop the spread of COVID.The final point I will make is that I actually agree that this is a very unusual disease. At the moment it appears that it's not changing and morphing so fast that it will for ever stay ahead of a vaccine because if this virus turns into something that mutates all the time there is a view that you will never get to a vaccine. Currently it looks like it's not mutating that fast. And therefore if we manage to maintain low levels of infection in New Zealand we should be able to do that we hope until a vaccine comes along. If the virus started to mutate regularly and therefore there was no prospect of a vaccine eventually society has to deal with it in a different way. And perhaps at that time it would be appropriate to say Look there's no hope of keeping this out for ever. The interim powers of allowing police officers to go in without a warrant to stop a big party at a private residence should be revisited because there's no sense in doing it because we can't do this for ever." But we're not at that point yet. We have so successfully as a country got this under control that we have a good chance that New Zealand is not going to suffer the appalling consequences that we've see in Italy in Great Britain in the United States where thousands of people are dying and people who have got other health problems that are serious can't get treatment because their hospital systems are overrun by COVID. We have stopped that in New Zealand and we've got the chance of—now I'm going to finally before I take my seat refer to the point that David Seymour raised of that terribly sad case of a woman suffering a miscarriage and her partner not being able to join her in hospital. Why did the health authorities do that? Because they wanted to halve the rate of risk that they were through that admission admitting COVID to their hospital. We've got hospitals around the world—around the world you see it in India you see it in Great Britain—where we have got infection rife."