Kerekere ElizabethDr ELIZABETH KEREKERE (Green): Tēnā koe e te Māngai. The Greens are very big on appropriate decision making that the people most affected by a decision should have a say in it. Generally when I rise for a second reading I refer to what happened in the select committee—the issues raised by submitters who are engaging with our democratic process the advice that the Health Committee received to make its considered and usually unanimous report on how to make the bill better. Even under urgency this has generally been able to happen in some form: a week turn-around of submissions—pretty outrageous at the time—or just advice even from the Minister and key officials. Instead I stand up again to speak on the second reading but of course nothing has changed.So far we have stood by the Government and its strong health response to the pandemic despite some misgivings on how that response has rolled out particularly to Māori. However the Greens will be calling for a select committee review after this bill inevitably passes with refinements based on that review.On the second reading I'll consider how these vaccination requirements will affect Māori and rainbow people. As most people here know not only do Māori have the poorest health in this country based on every measure available as my colleague from Te Paati Māori pointed out earlier Māori are half of the COVID cases. With the nature of our underlying health conditions our shorter life spans we are more likely to get infected we're more likely to be hospitalised and we are more likely to die. We see those numbers are happening right now. I look at some of the family that I have who are refusing to get vaccinated and I wonder what tangi I'll be attending myself.So we have the lowest vaccinated rates in the country particularly in the 20 to 40 age group. According to the latest statistics on the Ministry of Health website nationally we're at about 65 percent second dose and 85 percent first dose. In the Tai Rāwhiti and any place where there are large numbers of Māori though—and a large proportion of Māori—those numbers are much much lower. For us in the Tai Rāwhiti 62 percent second dose and 78 first. While 11 of the 20 DHBs have reached that first dose of 90—the magical 90 percent—none of them have done so for their Māori populations. None of them. This is significant because the framework introduced through orders under this legislation will significantly curtail the freedoms of people who are not vaccinated. So Māori will become even more stigmatised and I would say even less inclined to get vaccinated.As the Government transitions away from the elimination strategy we acknowledge vaccination requirements are the most reliable way to keep our people safe. We suggest that that would include more spot-checking provisions at the Auckland border over the holiday period to reduce the risk of spread to areas outside of Auckland and into the areas where there are high populations of unvaccinated Māori. Of course our position is that the traffic light system should be fully tested before Auckland opens its borders at all.As I noted earlier this bill covers how business and employers keep track of all the personal employee information related to their vaccination status because of the requirements of their position or of that particular workplace. It's not very common that an employer would have all of this personal health information of every single one of its employees. So privacy is a real issue. We have been assured that as with the contact tracing information that information will be kept very secure.The risk for trans intersex and non-binary people takatāpui with diverse genders and sex characteristics is that a lot of these requirements and the things that appear particularly on your vaccine pass is what's in our National Health Index database and that doesn't always match the name they use in the workplace. It might not match the gender marker that they use in their life. So having an employer and presumably some people in the HR department depending on the scale of the operation having access to all of that information (a) not having a pass that reflects who they are—that's bad enough—but that some people in our community will be put at risk and experience additional discrimination because those documents are no longer matching with who they are.So we're concerned some people will still get left behind with this bill because they're on the wrong side of the digital divide. People who will struggle obtaining a vaccine pass include the approximately half a million New Zealanders who do not have regular access to the internet; elderly people; people with learning difficulties or other disabilities; people for whom English is not their first language including recent migrants refugees and asylum seekers; but just people without the suitable ID. So we recognise this has been rushed through but there's a whole lot of infrastructure a whole lot of administration operational things that need to be put in place for this to actually start working even though people are going to need to have those passes probably by next week.Finally we believe that everyone should have free and equal access to these passes and that everything needs to be put in place in hope that it's going to happen. We commend this bill to the House. Kia ora.