Bishop ChrisCHRIS BISHOP (National): Thank you very much Madam Chair. I want to deal with some of the issues to do with—I'm just trying to find the exact right section—new section 32N(2A) inserted by clause 22 which deals with the issue of the Minister deciding eligibility criteria for offline allocations through managed isolation and quarantine (MIQ). What we've done as a select committee is recommended inserting new section 32N(2A) which requires the Minister to consider the right of every citizen to enter New Zealand under section 18(2) of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act. My question to the Minister and the Government is: what policy advice has been sought previously in relation to the compliance of the MIQ regime with the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act? The reason why this is a very important question is that in my view and I think the view of many others the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act provisions in relation to the free movement of New Zealand citizens have been overlooked in the development of the MIQ regime. Section 18 of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act is very clear. Now the bill of rights is declarative so everything's subject to reasonable limitation I'll come back to that. But section 18 Freedom of movement" is very clear: "Everyone lawfully in New Zealand has the right to freedom of movement and residence in New Zealand."—that's subsection (1). Subsection (2) states: "Every New Zealand citizen has the right to enter New Zealand." That's very clear—every New Zealand citizen has the right to enter New Zealand. Now the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act 1990 binds Parliament it binds the Government and it binds the judiciary—that's section 3 of the Act—and "Every New Zealand citizen has the right to enter New Zealand." Now there's a limiting provision in the bill of rights. As described in the Bolton decision of the High Court His Honour makes reference to the fact that it's a bill of reasonable rights. I haven't often heard it described like that but that's a reasonable description—it's a bill of reasonable rights. So every right is expressed in a declarative way but section 5 says that there can be limits on rights as long as they are justified in a free and democratic society. Here's the issue: is MIQ a reasonable limit on the right of New Zealand citizens to come to New Zealand?Now 18 months ago when the pandemic started and COVID was raging around the world and New Zealand kind of by accident kind of by design more by accident adopted an elimination strategy that we would keep COVID out of New Zealand MIQ made a lot of sense. In fact the National Party called for it and I think we were actually ahead of the Government in saying "You need to you know lock off the borders."—because just as an aside the World Health Organization at the time—and David Clark I see is in the Chamber and he'll remember this from his time as health Minister—was specifically telling countries: "Don't erect border barriers because there's no evidence that that helps in the prevention of spread of a pandemic." So that was slightly strange advice from the World Health Organization; perhaps counterintuitive and certainly not in keeping with what subsequently happened. But anyway the New Zealand Government did the right thing which is that they put in place a very hard border in New Zealand and said "Basically it's going to be impossible to come to New Zealand—or very very difficult—and we've established the MIQ regime." and we traversed some of the circumstances around that last night. We've had this MIQ regime in the hotels. I don't want to get into the specifics of how all that works but it's worked pretty well—for the most part it's worked pretty well.But the situation is markedly different now. Now my personal view is that MIQ was a very reasonable limit on the right 18 months ago; it probably even was at the start of this year. But now we find ourselves in a situation where we're in November 2021 and 96 97 percent of the people coming through MIQ are fully vaccinated and they pass pre-departure tests because the Government put in place that requirement in I think December last year January this year so that minimises the number of people with COVID coming in. So the situation has markedly changed now from what it was when MIQ started. The judgment of His Honour Justice Venning in the case of Bolton v The Chief Executive of Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment and the director-general as a second respondent is a very very interesting one—[Time expired]"