Tuiono TeanauTEANAU TUIONO (Green) (remote): Thank you Mr Speaker. I also join with others around the House to thank the Minister for his role in shepherding the country through a very very difficult phase. I mean I wasn't a member at the time but you know we were all deeply impacted by it and the years have taken their toll as well.But I guess for me where I land on all of this is that bit where we have moved away from the team of 5 million and it seems that whenever you go to the news sites the COVID stuff has dropped down to the bottom but actually we've had 16 new deaths reported today as well and there are still people in hospitals. There are 383 people in hospital with COVID-19 including seven patients in intensive care and high-dependency care units. The average age of those hospitalised with the virus is 63.So it's still very much here with us the seven-day rolling average of community cases up around 602. So I guess my concern is the move away from that focus of all of us as a team of 5 million and that sense of solidarity that we had in the beginning of the pandemic and thinking about what we can do to get back to that. Because rules come and go and this piece of legislation was there to help us to move fast and dynamically. I accept that but the focus needs to be on again our immunocompromised whānau on our disabled whānau as well.I think back to the feedback that we got from Māori health providers and our and our Pasifika health providers who were at one stage quite critical about how the roll-out for vaccinations were for example because the response hadn't been taking into account the very specific nature of our demographic. We're a younger people—better looking some people would say as well.So what we have needed to have learnt and continue to learn is that when we place Māori and Pasifika leadership and we use that as the way to sort of connect with those communities and also make sure that we position our immunocompromised and disabled whānau that we are acting as a team of 5 million. I think that's really important.I guess for me as a parent like many parents around the House in the middle of winter with the borders opening up and two years' worth of winter illnesses flying in on the aeroplanes I'm really concerned about the impacts on the schools as well. So we have called for on a number of occasions to support an expert-led school plan as a part of the COVID response. We would like to sit down with the Minister Ayesha Verrall to sort of talk through some of the concerns that we are hearing from school communities from teachers from parents from principals about what we can do to actually get that focus back to that solidarity that we originally had.I hear what people are saying: back to business as usual and so on and so forth. Yeah we need to pay some bills and keep the lights on. That's all good and well. But experts and health professionals have been calling for an expert-led plan to support children's access to education but also to protect children school staff and their families as well. I hear what the workers are saying within the health sector as well. They need to be able to go and do their jobs in the safest way possible. That is also true for teachers and school staff as well.So we support this legislation and the continuation of it. But we need to get back to that focus—a strong focus on indoor air quality ventilation monitoring. We're in the middle of winter. Making sure that that stuff is in place for our schools—free N95 masks for teachers and students all of that kind of stuff but also recognising that we're operating in the context of winter as well. So doing what we can do to protect our families against the flu and all those kinds of things as well and supporting those teachers supporting staff that support and teach our schools as well so that if they need to they can take guaranteed sick leave as well and schools are provisioned to do that.So on that we support the ongoing extension of this Act. But we need to have picked up the many lessons over the last couple of years and put them into place. Thank you Mr Speaker.