Hipkins ChrisGENERAL DEBATEHon CHRIS HIPKINS (Minister for COVID-19 Response): I move That the House take note of miscellaneous business. I want to begin today with a shout-out to all New Zealanders. The last 18 months have been difficult and tough and uncertain and New Zealanders have overwhelmingly risen to the challenge that has been in front of us. We have stamped out COVID-19 time and again we have made the sacrifices as a country that we need to make that have seen us enjoy some of the lowest levels of restrictions of any country in the world over the last 18 months and that's been the hard work and dedication of all New Zealanders that has achieved that. I want to particularly say thank you to Auckland. Auckland has been at the forefront of our COVID-19 response. They've done it tougher than many other New Zealanders and I say this as a proud Wellingtonian: I take my hat off to Aucklanders and I say thank you on behalf of the rest of the country for the sacrifices that they have made for our COVID-19 response and recovery. I want to thank all of our front-line workers. Whether they're at our border whether they're in our managed isolation and quarantine facilities or whether they are out there day and night vaccinating New Zealanders to keep us safe thank you to everybody that has been involved in all of those efforts. I think New Zealand is well placed. We are well placed as Auckland goes from level 4 to level 3 to continue to stamp out COVID-19. Elimination of the virus is still within our reach and that is what we will continue to drive towards. It is also possible that we could achieve one of the highest vaccination rates in the world in a relatively short space of time if New Zealanders continue to come forward and receive vaccination at the rate that they have been over the last eight weeks and I fully encourage them to do so. In these times politicians have an opportunity to lead or to mislead and I stand firmly on the side of those who are showing leadership through this global pandemic because there's been a lot of information that's been shared lately but it will have left New Zealanders confused and concerned unnecessarily. We saw more examples of that today including the irresponsible claim that was put out there just today that mutations of the virus are becoming less deadly and fewer people are getting severely affected by it. Those claims by the Leader of the Opposition are simply irresponsible. Thousands of people every day around the world continue to die from COVID-19. The last thing responsible leaders in New Zealand should be doing at the moment is saying Don't worry it's not so bad. It's getting better." at a time when we are saying to our most vulnerable communities where our vaccination rates are the lowest "Please come forward and protect yourselves and protect your whānau." from what we know is a deadly virus. The last thing political leaders in New Zealand should be doing is saying "Don't worry it's all going to get better. The virus isn't that bad after all." which is what we are hearing unfortunately from the Leader of the Opposition. Then of course we've got the COVID-19 response spokesperson for the Opposition who can't quite decide whether he's "Nostradamus" or "Captain Hindsight" because in the "Nostradamus" stakes almost every prediction that he has made has proven to be wrong. His prediction that people weren't getting the full dose of vaccine because we were getting too many doses out of the vial—wrong. The prediction that we were going to run out of syringes to do the vaccine—wrong. The prediction that there were vaccines just sitting there in fridges waiting for someone because we were giving them to people in a timely manner—wrong. The prediction that the booking system and the inventory system was going to fail and it was all going to be a debacle—wrong. "Debacle" and "shambles" are words that he uses quite a lot lately. I suspect sitting in the National Party caucus they're words that immediately spring to mind but it is no way to describe the vaccine roll-out which has been incredibly successful. So when his predictions of the future fail he then starts to adopt the "Captain Hindsight" persona where he looks backwards knowing what we know now and tries to point out things that we should have done differently. When we look back in hindsight there are undoubtedly going to be things that we could have done differently. We make the best decisions that we can make at the time with the evidence and the information that's available at the time. Chris Bishop's crystal ball today said that we should have just bought enough Pfizer to vaccinate everybody right from the beginning despite the fact that the Opposition at the time were claiming that we should have put all of our eggs in the AstraZeneca basket. I recall answering questions in the House about why we hadn't and why we were too slow in doing that. That was their ultimate answer. Whether he's being "Nostradamus" or "Captain Hindsight" the Opposition spokesperson has been consistently wrong as have the Opposition."