Locke Keith: Law Reform (Epidemic Preparedness) Bill — Second Reading 
Locke Keith: Law Reform (Epidemic Preparedness) Bill — Second Reading 
[Volume:636;Page:6906] 
KEITH LOCKE (Green) 
: 
 The Green Party is supporting this bill. I sat on the Government Administration Committee for most of the critical discussions of the bill. It was a very good committee. I do not think I have ever seen a bill that has had such a substantial change and a change in a very good direction as a result of the discussions at the select committee and as a result of the departmental advice changing week by week and people taking into account the submitters and also the very useful advice by the Law Commission in the person of Sir Geoffrey Palmer which all pushed the bill in a very good direction. 
If we look at the bill and look at the bits that have been struck out and the bits that have been added I think we will hardly find another bill that has passed through this Parliament that has gone through such changes. For example turning to the critical sections of the bill in terms of the orders giving powers and potentially restricting different pieces of legislation and freedom of movement four pages—clauses 4 to 9—have been struck out and 12½ pages have been added. The 12½ pages that have been added have a lot of important qualifications—important for civil liberties and good order being maintained through the period of the pandemic. 
For a start one good change was to restrict the orbit of the bill to quarantinable diseases which covers just four diseases—cholera plague yellow fever and added to that avian flu. The powers granted under this legislation cannot be used more generally and that is an explicit contrast to the approach in some other jurisdictions like the United Kingdom where they use generalised emergency laws. As those laws are so generalised they can be used in a wide range of situations and can be abused whereas here there was a care that when we grant such powers they should be very restrictive in terms of what they are applied to. 
One of the functions particularly as a result of Sir Geoffrey Palmer’s intervention and the theme that ran through the way the bill unfolded was to restrain executive power or put parliamentary controls over executive power including the concept of recalling Parliament within 7 days to be able to judge regulations that were brought in to be able to go through a regulations disallowance process and for any member of the House explicitly to be able to stand up and move a motion to turn back a regulation if he or she saw it to be exceeding the powers necessary. 
All that was added to the bill and it is very good as was the concept of having advance regulations made out so that if bird flu broke out we would already have a whole lot of regulations that had been tested in the regulations review process before anything happened and only limited additional regulations would have to be added at the time of the outbreak of bird flu. Leeway was given to add regulations at that point because it is very hard to judge exactly which laws need to be modified a bit. Bird flu by its very nature affects so much in society particularly freedom of movement both at the border and of course to stop infection from spreading. 
 I think one of the themes that came through from the medical advice was that the population is affected less if people can be kept away from the infection be kept at home and have less interaction with society during the peak of an outbreak. The power of a virus declines over time and if people can be kept away from it a lot of lives can be saved in the meantime. If that level of restriction on freedom of movement is to be imposed and if people are to be encouraged not to go to work and where possible not to mix in large crowds that slows up the whole legal process in society. So a whole lot of regulations will be affected particularly those that have times by which documents are supposed to be submitted etc. That runs through the whole legal system. 
There are very strong qualifications in clause 9 about which regulations would be brought in at the time of an outbreak. It would have to be proven that it was impossible or impractical to comply with the normal course of events—say the deadlines in particular laws—and that the regulations were reasonably necessary in the situation. So that is quite a strong qualification. Also the concept in terms of the advance regulations is that there would be a stepped process. As bird flu arrived and as the outbreak grew—if it did grow—then the regulations could be tightened up in a stepladder manner then as there was a decline in the outbreak the impact of those regulations would be reduced step by step. That phasing in and phasing out of regulations is a good approach. 
There is also a recognition that the fundamental human rights of our society—from the Bill of Rights 1688 through to the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act made in this Parliament in 1990 and the Habeas Corpus Act 2001—cannot be breached. Some petitioners were worried about other Acts being explicitly overridden in the bill. A number of these Acts such as the Holidays Act 2003 the Resource Management Act and tax Acts were specifically chopped out of the bill. That is good because some submissions—from unionists for example—thought that there was a bit of a bias and that their particular legal entitlements were being overridden in this bill. Obviously in an outbreak there would have to be flexibility about when people took holidays and things like that but there should not be at the beginning of things a bias against workers’ entitlements. I think the union movement will be very happy that those particular provisions have been taken out of the bill. 
Often I and other members of the Green Party stand up in this House and criticise a bill as being a breach of human rights but I think that in this case while we are dealing with a situation whereby various restraints have to be put into the way the Government and the law operate the bill has gone through an extremely thorough process. I commend the members of the Government Administration Committee the advisers from the Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Justice the human rights people Sir Geoffrey Palmer the Law Commission and the submitters to the select committee for working so well together to turn this bill upside down and to come out with a very good product.