Turner Judy: Law Reform (Epidemic Preparedness) Bill — In Committee 
Turner Judy: Law Reform (Epidemic Preparedness) Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:636;Page:6988] 
JUDY TURNER (Deputy Leader—United Future) 
: 
 I rise on behalf of United Future to speak to Part 1 of the Law Reform (Epidemic Preparedness) Bill. I thank the Government Administration Committee for graciously including me in its proceedings. I was serving on two committees on the same day for much of the deliberations on this bill and it was a bit of a juggling act but I appreciate being included and having the opportunity to speak to this bill which I have had a bit of an interest in. I also thank the officials for their patience because this was a very tricky consideration. We are talking about rather enormous powers under very very difficult circumstances and at this stage we cannot anticipate the full impact of those circumstances. 
This issue is really interesting. What alerted my interest in it and why I asked for the opportunity to sit without voting rights on the committee was a briefing I was given by the Ministry of Health some time ago. The joke at the time was that bird flu was Y2K with feathers on. We take a risk in underestimating the importance of doing some pre-planning on this matter. Certainly the facts are that a pandemic is different from any other type of flu that we may be familiar with. It is not seasonal; it can come at any time. It may impact on any age group and it is often difficult to predict which group will be the most seriously affected. If we look at the 1918 Spanish flu we find that young men for instance died in larger than expected numbers. Certainly as has been mentioned by a previous speaker Maori were badly hit by that pandemic at the time. 
There is usually a very high rate of attack and a high rate of fatalities and a pandemic often happens in a series of waves rather than as a one-off event. The thing I found most sobering was that when I was briefed by Ministry of Health officials they talked very directly about the fact of not if this happens but when. Statistically there are several pandemics per century and apparently we are overdue. Therefore we must take this matter seriously. 
I join with other members who have thanked Sir Geoffrey Palmer and his team for the work they have done. As we looked at the level of intervention that was possible—and suggested at the beginning of this bill—it was very helpful to get some very steadying advice from people like Sir Geoffrey. He talked about the fact that there will be two main types of regulations one of which is heath. He rightly suggested that health regulations were likely to have the highest priority in terms of the type of work that can be done in advance—between now and whenever a pandemic may be called. These are advance modification orders. 
There are other matters that the bill in its current state addresses as we anticipate some of the consequences of such a crisis within New Zealand. Just this morning I was talking with the Hon Peter Dunne who said that his revenue department was already beginning to realise the serious implications for revenue collecting within this country if a pandemic were to occur—if the numbers of people infected were large and if it occurred over a sustained period of time—and how the department could respond to that. These are the kinds of whole-of-Government implications that cannot be understated. 
The Law Commission did a report some years ago on emergency powers. The basic recommendation was that being specific in our pre-planning around legal matters is very important. We were told that there are something like 11000 principal statutes in New Zealand law. The thought was that rather than trying to amend all of them it would be important to anticipate areas—health is the particularly obvious one—where some action will need to be taken and where powers may need to be increased for the season of the pandemic. This would be the case in other areas such as immigration for instance where we can anticipate the need for border control. 
It is important to remember that there are several things that planning for a pandemic involves. First of all we will try and keep it out of New Zealand and we need laws and powers to do that. Certainly we want to keep the pandemic out as much as we can through border control. Once the pandemic is established we need to stamp it out by whatever means we possibly can. We need to manage it in terms of managing people who are ill. Obviously the way we manage a pandemic is different from the way we manage any other health problem and crisis that we face. Finally we need to recover from it. In the select committee we talked about the powers and the fact that from the moment the Prime Minister and the Minister of Health declare a pandemic we then go through a series of waves of infection during which time those powers will need to be implemented to try to maintain control and contain the pandemic as best we can. 
Another set of powers may need to come in to deal with the consequences and the mop-up that will need to happen. We talked about the need to bring in tighter controls and at the appropriate time to relax them as we start to move out of pandemic mode and into recovery mode. It is one of those things that there is a lot of guesswork about based on other experiences and historical accounts we have of pandemics. We need to understand that what we will be dealing with will be novel. It will not necessarily be like anything we have known to date. We will be dealing with people who are very sick and dying and we are talking about something that will be easily transmitted between humans. Therefore the kinds of social contacts that we enjoy will need to be restricted. 
In my own mind I was thinking about several natural disasters that I have lived through in the area where I live—the Edgecumbe earthquake floods and things like that—where communities have rallied together and provided support for each other. It occurred to me that our natural tendency as human beings when we are in a crisis is to pull together. Yet this crisis would require the very opposite response whereby people would need to remain isolated from each other yet somehow provide support. So a pandemic would require a whole different set of skills and responses that are at times almost counter to what it means to be human and help other people. It would require people to respond in such a way as to avoid civil disobedience and all those kinds of things. 
During the aftermath of the Edgecumbe earthquake I remember being disturbed by the number of people who struggled to obey the most simple little rules that were put in place for public health reasons. For instance we were not allowed to flush toilets until we knew whether our sewerage system had sustained damage we were not allowed to use water excessively and we were encouraged not to shower on a daily basis but to try to stretch that out. I could not believe the number of people who thought they could be the exception to the rule. They thought that it would not hurt if they flushed the toilet only a couple of times during the day or they soaped up and jumped under the shower for only a minute; they thought that that would actually be all right. I was genuinely appalled. 
Having lived through that experience I understand that the types of constraints that need to be brought into place to contain something like a pandemic will not be easily complied with. People believe they are a law unto themselves in those situations so sometimes when we talk about fairly Draconian powers we have to understand how those powers may genuinely need to be implemented in the middle of a crisis.