Mitchell MarkHon MARK MITCHELL (National—Rodney): Thank you Madam Speaker. I'd just like to start by saying that I was honoured to have been voted in as the chairman of a COVID-19 task force that was sponsored and put together by the Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi Sheikh Mohammed. It involves 70 countries and it has 12 representatives on the committee that I'm chairing. What's been very good is it's been a way of exchanging information seeing what has worked and what hasn't in different countries around the world.The big advantage that we had as a nation is our geographic location we're isolated we have a relatively small population that is spread out we have a healthy population and we have a very good health system. So we had lots of things going in our favour. The problem that we had—and although the Government continually gets up and tells us that they went hard and fast—is that we were too slow at the border; we didn't close our border quickly enough and we allowed the virus to continue to walk into the country. We were too slow to go to lockdown. Again I go back to my colleague Brett Hudson that highlighted these things. These are on the record. We went into lockdown too slowly. Unfortunately because we did delay on the border—Hon Chris Hipkins: We were one of the fastest in the world.Hon MARK MITCHELL: —because you did delay on the border it put us in a position where actually the Government—we supported you going into lockdown but you were put in a position that really your options were narrowed because we were too late at the border. So you really had no choice but to go into level 4 and we were very clear that we would support you in that. We suspended the Parliament and we've got behind you and we supported you as much as we can—including by the way offering to come back into the House to pass legislation to make sure that our enforcement agencies were actually acting legally. Right now in this Parliament no one can get up and actually say clearly whether or not they were acting legally under level 4 and level 3.The third thing that happened way too slowly was quarantine. We wouldn't quarantine at the border. We heard stories from all over the country and finally the Police Commissioner himself in front of the COVID-19 committee chaired by the Hon Simon Bridges—SPEAKER: Order! I apologise for interrupting the member. The member's been running for over two minutes now; he's going to now start talking about the bill before the House not the history of the pandemic.Hon MARK MITCHELL: Thank you Mr Speaker. This does relate to the bill because it relates to the powers contained—SPEAKER: Well you better get there quick.Hon MARK MITCHELL: —within the bill. One of the powers contained within the bill which is a severe overreach by the State is the fact that police officers are going to have a power to enter a private dwelling without warrant. I can tell you now: I'm proud to have served for 14 years in our New Zealand Police service one of the finest police services in the world that enjoys enormous public confidence. What this Government has done is introduced a bill to the House—and unfortunately most of New Zealand won't find out about this until probably weeks later—whereby they're going to give police officers—the State—the ability to walk into your home without a warrant if some information comes to them or if there are too many cars parked out on the street. If it meets the threshold of reasonable doubt it gives them the ability to walk into your home. I can tell you now from my experience as a police officer that sometimes just a house burglary can be the worst type of offending against someone do you know why? It's because they feel like it's a gross violation of the one place that they should feel safe—the one place that they have the right to be able to say who or who doesn't come into their home. This is what the Minister has done: he's put law-abiding Kiwis that are going about their everyday business in a situation now where they could have the State walk in their front door into their house to check on information that really can't be measured to see whether or not they're being compliant.I can tell you now the other thing that's been driven out of this committee is very clear: Government if you do not retain the confidence and the trust of the people of New Zealand it doesn't matter how many laws you bring to this House they will choose not to be compliant. I can tell you one thing: we've moved into level 2; back home in my own electorate—in fact I did a social media post on this—on the Saturday it was very clear that most Kiwis who had been compliant had done what they had been asked to do had moved themselves into level 2. There were more people out on the streets. There were more people out in recreation areas. They had moved themselves into level 2. The Government in my view had seen that and understood that realised that they'd waited too long realised that they'd pushed it too far realised that they were starting to use up that goodwill that's been given to them throughout this lockdown.By the way we do have a job on this side of the House; it's to hold the Government to account and we do that for the rest of the country. It's not always an easy job; it can be pretty thankless. But we've found ourselves in a situation right now where even our own journalists our own press gallery if they decide to stand up if they want to hold this Government to account all of a sudden there's a massive backlash against them. Well you know what? It's actually time that we started to hold this Government to account a bit on these decisions and not just be told everything and taking it. Like they said We've got enormous goodwill just ignore them we don't have to respond we don't have to put Ministers up." It's an arrogance that's dripping from this Government. Hon Member: Just dismiss.Hon MARK MITCHELL: I'd be very—yeah what was it? "Just dismiss"—just dismiss them. By the way you're eating into goodwill from this side of the House because me personally I wanted to support the Government and I did support the Government. We wanted to do that in a good way to make sure that us as a nation emerged in the strongest possible position with the least harm done; we have not done that. The harm is coming—in fact the harm is here right now.So we can't support this bill. I want to acknowledge the Attorney-General and I want to acknowledge the fact that he has taken a call and he has addressed some of the issues that we've put up. I want to acknowledge and thank him for that because they're important ones. Things like getting the rules right because I can tell you another thing that went wrong in the first two weeks: we had four pieces of official information that were being put out to the public and all they wanted to do was comply—they wanted to make sure that they were sticking to the rules—but there was deep confusion created because they were getting three or four different messages coming from different parts of the Government. We want to have clarity around what the rules are. We don't think that it is humane. We think that people are suffering enough. We think that if someone's lost a loved one that grieving is important for everyone regardless of what culture you come from—that grieving is important for everyone; people coming together.Trust the public. The good thing about level 4 and level 3 I think is that it's at least allowed us to learn those basic concepts around hygiene and social distancing and being more aware as a nation. That's a very good thing. I acknowledge the Government. We've flattened the curve—that is a great result. Moving forward to bring legislation into the House like this that basically tramples over the rights of law-abiding Kiwis in terms of that they will now have the State walking straight in through their front door—and the irony of this situation is quite simply this: when we were in level 3 and level 4 although we questioned the powers because we felt that was important and it is important in a First World country and democracy where civil liberties are held and protected. It's important that the Government is always acting within the law it's important the agencies are.I had many serving police officers come to me saying that they were very concerned and very uncomfortable with what they're doing because they didn't join the police to not have the powers to actually know what they were doing. They felt deep discomfort with it. Then we had the Police Commissioner come in front of the committee and he said "Oh well we'll let those checkpoints run because we want to avoid a protest." Every rule in the book was being broken. If you want to undermine public confidence in a world-class police service that's the quickest way to do it. Now you're going to tell them to go out there and start policing the community that you're relying on for their goodwill. If New Zealanders decide that they're not going to maintain level 2 restrictions because you've run out of goodwill it doesn't matter how much legislation you pass it doesn't matter how many police you recruit it doesn't matter if you put the defence forces out on the street—it is not going to make one iota of difference. You have to maintain public confidence.Anyway thank you very much Mr Speaker for your forbearance and for allowing me to take the call. Thank you."