Goldsmith PaulHon PAUL GOLDSMITH (National): Well it was very interesting to hear from the Minister around the commencement. This bill is to be enacted after it gets Royal assent and the point we're making of course is that that will be too late because the world has moved on and that's why we're not fundamentally supporting this bill. But he used the excuse that well we would have been crosser if the Government had included these measures back in November when they were ramming it through the light-setting regulations in sort of a seat-of-the-pants response to the situation that we faced as a country. The point that we would make and have made consistently is that we are two years into this pandemic and the Government has had many months and years to prepare for the inevitable outbreak of COVID in this country. I mean if you go back to the strategy of this Government it was to buy time for New Zealanders to be prepared for the arrival of COVID. Nobody ever dreamed that somehow New Zealand would never ever get it. We live in the world and unless we're going to seal ourselves off for ever we would have had to deal with COVID at some point. So the strategy as far as we could work it out—it has never been very clearly articulated by the Government. The strategy I can only assume was to buy time and to buy time to do two things: (1) to get New Zealanders vaccinated when that was available and (2) to prepare the health system to be able to cope with a surge of infections when it came to New Zealand in numbers which it inevitably would do.Now our criticism of this Government of course is that they didn't having bought that time at colossal expense—[Interruption]—yeah it's coming Mr Speaker. Having bought that time at colossal expense with $60 billion borrowed what did they do? Well they mucked around on the vaccines and took six months too long to get us started because the rest of the world apparently needed the vaccines more than us and secondly they didn't prepare the health system. So as a result we found ourselves where we were. So that negligent slowness left the country exposed as it were and in the meantime they did nothing to prepare for basic things like making sure that the court system could work in the context of some kind of lockdown or restrictions regime which would be inevitable when COVID came into the country.It's astonishing to hear from the Minister that they started the policy process of trying to deal with some of the issues raised in this bill only at the start of this year. We heard that—we heard that just now. Given everything that they could predict and the difficulties that they've been facing in the courts this Minister finally got his officials to start looking at the policy issues at the start of this year maybe after they had been camping over Christmas. They'd had a big year they'd gone camping he'd done his Christmas festivities probably in late January—when he says the start of this year" it's probably late January that he got back to work—and they started focusing on the issues in this bill. No wonder it's so late and no wonder the commencement date is so late as to be not very effective.I don't like to extrapolate too far on this but it does seem to me to be a pattern. It does seem to be a pattern that has emerged in this Government that they respond to things very late in the piece and make it up as they go along and then bring in stuff which demonstrates that they are doing something but really doesn't amount to a hill of beans and that's a tragedy. In the meantime as we've said all along if this bill did do something useful in terms of making it easier for technology to operate in the court situation and we had time to look at it properly we would be keen to see the commencement occurring the day after its Royal assent."