Wednesday, 1 September 2021

WEDNESDAY, 1 SEPTEMBER 2021

WEDNESDAY, 1 SEPTEMBER 2021

The Speaker took the Chair at 2 p.m.

Karakia/Prayers

Karakia/Prayers

SPEAKER: Almighty God, we give thanks for the blessings which have been bestowed on us. Laying aside all personal interests, we acknowledge the Queen and pray for guidance in our deliberations that we may conduct the affairs of this House with wisdom, justice, mercy, and humility for the welfare and peace of New Zealand. Amen.

Petitions, Papers, Select Committee Reports, and Introduction of Bills

Petitions, Papers, Select Committee Reports, and Introduction of Bills

SPEAKER: No papers or select committee reports have been presented. No bills have been introduced.

A petition has been delivered to the Clerk for presentation.

CLERK: Petition of Christopher Mac Donald requesting that the House of Representatives pass legislation to improve school bus safety.

SPEAKER: That petition stands referred to the Petitions Committee.

Oral Questions

Questions to Ministers

Question No. 1—Prime Minister

1. Hon JUDITH COLLINS (Leader of the Opposition) to the Prime Minister: Does she stand by her statement from yesterday, “Of course, our goal is to vaccinate as many people as possible as quickly as possible”; if so, has her goal changed from April, when she said, “I support the fact that we have been later in the pecking order”?

Rt Hon JACINDA ARDERN (Prime Minister): I stand by my full statements: yes, and, no, my goal hasn’t changed. Our goal has always been for everyone in New Zealand to be vaccinated as soon as possible. That is why the Government established its vaccine strategy task force in May of 2020, and began conversations with Pfizer in July of 2020. This was long before it was even known if a vaccine could work. The outcome has been agreements with four different manufacturers, who have all demonstrated effective vaccines and the decision by our Government to focus on the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine. But we’ve also been aware of the global context we’ve been operating in, and that will have impacted on distribution and supply across the course of this pandemic. Some countries have experienced, tragically, much higher death rates than ours.

Hon Judith Collins: Can she confirm that more than 2 million New Zealanders over the age of 12 are yet to receive a single dose of the COVID vaccine?

Rt Hon JACINDA ARDERN: What I can confirm is that we have 2,290,143 people who have had at least one dose. That represents 54 percent of people aged 12 and over, acknowledging that that eligibility changed only recently. But what I think it also demonstrates—just the pace of this roll-out at this point—is also not only those who have been vaccinated but those who have now booked in to be vaccinated in the near future. We see, for instance, 68 percent of people aged 12-plus are booked or have been vaccinated with at least one dose—68 percent. That’s fantastic, given only today you will have seen that we’ve just opened up eligibility for everyone, and, again, as I say, it demonstrates the pace that we are now at with our roll-out.

Hon Judith Collins: So can she confirm that that leaves more than 2 million New Zealanders over the age of 12 who are yet to receive a single dose of the COVID vaccine?

Rt Hon JACINDA ARDERN: I’ve shared the numbers that I have. I’m not willing to, on the spot, verify the member’s numbers.

Hon Judith Collins: Can she rule out having to delay vaccine appointments that have already been booked due to an anticipated shortage of vaccines?

Rt Hon JACINDA ARDERN: Actually, that is incorrect. It is not that we have had a shortage of vaccines; it’s that we’ve put in additional surge capacity to allow a considerable increase in vaccinations. Through this period that we’re in now and leading into over September, we’d always planned around the supply that we had, which would have enabled us to, on average, deliver about 50,000 doses a day, or 350,000 across the course of the week. When the outbreak started, we saw of course—as you may expect—some demand lift, and we decided to then increase the capacity to provide surge vaccinations. That has led to over 500,000 doses being delivered a week. What we’re now seeking to do is meet that additional demand by seeking additional supply. Our goal, if we are unable to do that is, as much as possible, maintain the bookings that we have but also, in those areas where there is big surges in demand and it is particularly high needs for us to vaccinate, keep that additional surge capacity in Auckland and the upper North Island.

Hon Judith Collins: Can the Prime Minister confirm if the additional vaccines that she’s just referred to—if she has a date for when they will arrive?

Rt Hon JACINDA ARDERN: I can say that we’re working in earnest across a number of different strategies. When we have more detail that I’m willing to share, we will absolutely share it. But, as I say, we’re already thinking in advance, if in the eventuality we’re unable to meet that extra demand, what we would do around the existing supply that we have. Keep in mind we’ve of course always had deliveries coming in of Pfizer on a weekly basis, but they’ve been in the order of 300,000, when we are currently seeing demand of over 500,000—demand that we have helped create by putting in extra surge capacity.

Hon Judith Collins: Was the Director-General of Health correct when he said, “we’re looking at every opportunity there is to see if we can get some additional vaccine in”; if so, is this additional vaccine needed to meet existing vaccine bookings?

Rt Hon JACINDA ARDERN: You will have seen I just set out in quite some detail around what we had around existing planned supply versus the demand that we’re seeing, and I also just set out in my answer to the question to the member that if we are unable to secure that extra supply, our goal is to retain bookings. I believe I’ve tried to comprehensively answer the member’s question, and so therefore, yes, I do agree with Dr Bloomfield’s statement.

Hon Judith Collins: So why did it take an outbreak of COVID for the Government to attempt to speed up the vaccine roll-out?

Rt Hon JACINDA ARDERN: Again, we have been working as quickly as we could against the supply that we had. We’ve always said that it is in the latter part of the year, particularly October, where we’re finally seeing those large drops of vaccine to enable us to then scale up in a significant way. Even then, our projections were roughly 50,000 doses a day. But when we had the outbreak occur, we provided additional opportunities to vaccinate New Zealanders, and then we’ve sought to increase supply. It’s wrong to imply, though, that we don’t have enough vaccines for every New Zealander; we do. They just happen to be arriving in several weeks’ time, and we want to take the opportunity now when demand is now to try and vaccinate as many as we can.

Hon Judith Collins: So can we take it from the Prime Minister’s comments today that we don’t have enough supply actually in New Zealand at this stage to meet all of the existing vaccine bookings?

Rt Hon JACINDA ARDERN: No, the member is incorrect. We currently have 726,000 doses in the country, and we receive them weekly. So, of course, at any given point, we’re always receiving doses in order to meet the demand that we have at any given time. We have a surge because we’ve enabled a surge. People have been in high demand, and we’re providing for it. The one other thing that I’d just point out to the member: there’s been a significant implication in some of her interviews this morning that we wouldn’t be experiencing Delta cases had we had a roll-out that had started before, for instance, clinical trials had finished, which is what has happened in some countries. In some countries, they started vaccinating before clinical trials were even completed. We weren’t one of those countries. Some of those countries are still experiencing outbreaks as significant as what they had before their vaccine roll-outs, and that’s because not enough people have been vaccinated. Our goal has to be to do better than even those who started some months ago, and we have that ability as a country. We all just need to continue to encourage people to take up the chance to be vaccinated.

Hon Judith Collins: Why wasn’t consideration given to having a surge in vaccinations before the country ended up in a level 4 lockdown?

Rt Hon JACINDA ARDERN: Of course a surge is created by those who are willing to be vaccinated at any given time, firstly. Secondly, as I’ve said, in a matter of three to four weeks, that supply issue starts to diminish because we have a considerable increase in the supply that is before us—a considerable increase. So our roll-out has always been one that has scaled up, but we took the opportunity, as soon as this outbreak arrived, as soon as we had people in lockdown where the only things they could do was be tested or vaccinated, to offer those vaccines, and we’ve done that. It’s not too dissimilar to what we’ve seen in other countries. However, we have beaten other countries’ per capita increase in vaccines being offered by almost every single measure. There’s only one country who’s had more at the peak of their vaccination roll-outs. So the demand really has been globally unprecedented here in New Zealand.

Question No. 2—Prime Minister

2. DAVID SEYMOUR (Leader—ACT) to the Prime Minister: Does she stand by her statement regarding an alert level change in Auckland that “We need to be confident we don’t have Delta circulating undetected in the community, and we need to be confident any cases we may have are contained and isolated”; if so, is this the same for the South Island?

Rt Hon JACINDA ARDERN (Prime Minister): Yes, and yes. It is essential that we have confidence that there’s no undetected transmission in our community. This is true for the South Island, as it is for Auckland, as it is for any other part of the country. There is just no margin of error with Delta—a lesson many jurisdictions have, unfortunately, learnt the hard way. I’ve repeatedly said that level 3 is a watch and wait level—it’s a crucial insurance policy. If there’s something we’ve missed despite our high levels of testing and waste-water sampling, we can surround it, quickly contain it, and isolate it, and I would rather be in a level 3 environment to discover that than a level 2 environment, which would be a major setback.

David Seymour: Does the Prime Minister have any idea how devastating that so-called watch and wait level is for businesses and people going about their personal lives, their education, and, in some cases, even seeking healthcare in the South Island?

Rt Hon JACINDA ARDERN: Yes, but I also know that prolonged lockdowns and outbreaks that become uncontrolled are even more devastating.

David Seymour: How many contacts have been identified in the South Island, and are any of them still awaiting a test result?

Rt Hon JACINDA ARDERN: Five hundred and eighteen, and yes.

David Seymour: How many are still awaiting a test result?

Rt Hon JACINDA ARDERN: A small handful are not due their day 12 test, but I would caution the member that those are the contacts we know about. When you have over 400 locations of interest and when you have over 30,000 contacts, you of course do everything you can to ensure that you have all of them, but it may well be the case that we didn’t. Now, we have extra assurances—surveillance testing, waste-water testing—but I would much rather be on the side of caution to discover that we had potentially got something wrong than be in a position of being in a level 2 environment, where, essentially, things go back to a much more normal status, and discover a case, because that would mean potentially yo-yoing back into a level 4, and that would be devastating.

David Seymour: How is it possible that the Government still has not traced and tested only 518 contacts in the entire South Island after 15 days of high-level restrictions, and what does that say for the future of New Zealand’s strategy?

Rt Hon JACINDA ARDERN: The member completely misunderstands the answer. We have, they have been tested, some are not due to return second tests—so the member misunderstands. So the system has worked well, but what the member also misinterprets is the idea that when you have a situation where over the course of a week, from the time of arrival to the time of detection of case A, and over 400 locations of interest, we have absolute confidence that we have every single—single—individual who was at one of those locations of interest. Now, an enormous job has been done, and I pay tribute to those involved—over a thousand contact tracers alone involved in this situation, and people in our call centres—but I would rather be cautious, and there will be some who disagree with that. But if we find a case in the South Island, we have the potential and the ability to contain it at this level. It would be much harder if we were free of restriction.

Question No. 3—COVID-19 Response

3. Dr SHANE RETI (Deputy Leader—National) to the Minister for COVID-19 Response: How did this Government prepare DHBs for a Delta variant outbreak from when Delta was first detected in New Zealand five months ago, and which DHBs, if any, had low PPE inventory eight days before the current Delta outbreak was discovered?

Hon CHRIS HIPKINS (Minister for COVID-19 Response): New Zealand’s overall response to COVID-19 has been designed for all parts of the health system to be constantly prepared to respond to an outbreak at any moment. That, of course, takes into account the latest insights into new variants of the virus that may emerge. This level of preparedness also involves all DHBs having adequate supplies of personal protective equipment (PPE) on an on-going basis. The distribution of PPE to DHBs and to primary care providers is managed centrally by the Ministry of Health, which has sufficient stock and quantity of PPE so that we have the capacity to respond to situations such as an outbreak or hospitalisation scenarios. The process for accessing PPE and other critical supplies from the ministry’s central supply are well understood, and the Ministry of Health engages once a week with procurement, logistics, and supply chain leads from each of the district health boards. I’ve been advised that all DHBs have good stock on hand across all categories of PPE and that no health facility is waiting more than seven days to get a PPE order filled, and the vast majority of them are being filled within three days.

Dr Shane Reti: Can he confirm that no new ICU bed spaces have been added to DHBs since the start of April, when Delta was first detected in managed isolation and quarantine (MIQ), and, if not, how many have been added?

Hon CHRIS HIPKINS: The number of ICU beds has remained around the same, although our ability to surge, in terms of the number of people who require ventilation, for example, has improved significantly. One of the key issues around ICU capacity is workforce, and it isn’t possible, necessarily, to scale up the ICU workforce in a very short space of time, although every effort is made to do so.

Dr Shane Reti: When he says the ICU bed spaces have remained the same since Delta first crossed our shores, is that effectively saying there has been no new ICU bed spaces?

Hon CHRIS HIPKINS: First of all, I think it’s important to note that Delta is still a relatively new variant, but our overall level of preparedness for a COVID-19 outbreak, regardless of Delta or not, has continued to improve. That’s included looking at things like oxygen supplies, dealing with some of the capital investment required to ensure better oxygen supplies in our hospitals, and it’s included things like making sure we’ve got more ventilators available. I think, from memory, about double the number of ventilators are available now compared to when the global pandemic began. Ongoing work has taken place. There is, of course, and we should all acknowledge this—there continues to be a workforce constraint around our ability to respond to COVID-19. We are asking a lot of our health workforce. We have been for the last year and a half, and I think all New Zealanders are very grateful for their contribution.

Dr Shane Reti: How many additional ventilators, then, if any, have been purchased since the start of April, when Delta was first detected in MIQ?

Hon CHRIS HIPKINS: The member is obsessing around Delta. The overall issue is we have been dealing with COVID-19 for a year and a half, the virus has continued to mutate, and we have continued to make preparations to deal with any outbreak of COVID-19, regardless of the variant of COVID-19 that we have been dealing with. So Delta has not changed the game at all in that regard. It has, of course, increased our awareness of the increased speed with which the virus can transmit, it’s had some implications for how we think about MIQ and our border settings and so on, but in terms of our health system preparedness, we have been working to ensure that our health system is prepared to respond to any outbreak of COVID-19.

Dr Shane Reti: Why, according to answers to written questions eight days before the current Delta outbreak began, did Bay of Plenty DHB only have 280 N95 masks in its inventory compared to MidCentral, which had more than 50,000, and how many days would 280 N95 masks last for?

Hon CHRIS HIPKINS: In terms of the DHB by DHB breakdown, as I indicated, DHBs are responsible for ordering from the central store when their stocks start to become low. Those orders are being fulfilled very quickly, and where there is a need to ship urgent PPE in the event that a DHB has a sudden need for it, we have provision in place to be able to do that as well. But the overall responsibility for maintaining their stocks of PPE sits with individual district health boards, so the member would be best to direct his question to that particular DHB.

Dr Shane Reti: Why is Auckland City Hospital now doing urgent infection control building work in the middle of an outbreak, and why wasn’t this work done before we had an outbreak?

Hon CHRIS HIPKINS: Work is happening around the clock throughout the year on infection and prevention control and upgrading hospital capital, and that has been happening since that Government took office. We, of course, acknowledge that we inherited a very, very run down health system.

Question No. 4—Finance

4. Hon MICHAEL WOODHOUSE (National) to the Minister of Finance: Is he satisfied that all initiatives funded from the COVID-19 Response and Recovery Fund are for COVID-19 response and recovery and that, had the COVID-19 outbreak not occurred last year, they would not have been funded?

Hon GRANT ROBERTSON (Minister of Finance): Yes, I am satisfied that they are supporting the response and recovery, bearing in mind that decisions on funding have been made at different times over the past 18 months in light of the circumstances at that time. In answer to the second part of the question, that is entirely hypothetical, as COVID-19 did occur last year.

Hon Michael Woodhouse: Does he think it’s responsible fiscal management to use the cover of the COVID fund to initiate substantial new Government spending over and above the published Budget allowances on non-COVID projects?

Hon GRANT ROBERTSON: I reject various parts of the premises of that question. What I would say to the member is that over the last 18 months New Zealand has experienced the greatest economic shock in a century. Therefore, as a country and as a Government, we have had to respond to that in a variety of ways. That includes both immediate response but also recovery measures to ensure that the New Zealand economy continues to work well, and the good news is that it has, relative to the rest of the world.

Hon Michael Woodhouse: Why did the $710 million for three waters reform need to be funded from the COVID response and recovery fund?

Hon GRANT ROBERTSON: I’m sure the member opposite is aware of the parlous state of water infrastructure right around New Zealand. That decision was made as part of an important part of ensuring confidence and certainty for our construction sector to know that there would be projects there for them. He needs to bear in mind that throughout 2020 there were significant concerns that both the horizontal and vertical construction sectors would struggle to operate in a post-COVID environment. That was an area where the Government was able to kill two birds with one stone: address a longstanding issue and also give certainty to the construction companies that would be involved in the work.

Hon Chris Hipkins: Would the Government have been in as strong a position to respond to the current outbreak if the balance of the COVID-19 Response and Recovery Fund (CRRF) had been spent on tax cuts and roads?

Hon GRANT ROBERTSON: No, we would not, and when the proposal was made in August and September last year to spend billions of dollars on tax cuts and pet transport projects, that was a proposal that that particular group of people wanted to make. That was their priority; we have our priorities.

Hon Michael Woodhouse: How is an art documentary based on Papua New Guinea tattoo practice and revival COVID-related?

Hon GRANT ROBERTSON: Well, it’s interesting that the member opposite would rather that the arts and creative sector in New Zealand withered away in the face of COVID. Providing support to our artists and our creatives to be able to get through COVID, when many of the opportunities they had to generate income were taken away by COVID-19, is an extremely responsible thing to do. It is quite clear the member and his party do not care for the artists and creatives in New Zealand; we do.

Hon Chris Hipkins: Can the finance Minister confirm that a significant proportion of the business financial assistance provided through the COVID-19 relief and recovery fund has gone to fund things that aren’t directly related to the COVID-19 response?

Hon GRANT ROBERTSON: Indeed—what we have done is ensured that businesses in New Zealand have cash flow and they have confidence that they are able to plan, that they are able to develop their businesses. This is a fund that has served New Zealand incredibly well. We have an economy that is operating at pre-COVID levels, which only a handful of other countries can claim, and we have unemployment down at 4 percent. The CRRF has been an important part of making sure that our economy has recovered.

Hon Michael Woodhouse: Well, in light of that, if all of those projects have merit, why weren’t they subject to the normal Budget process, rather than funded from the COVID response fund?

Hon GRANT ROBERTSON: They were subject to Budget processes such as looking at their value for money, such as assessing them against the Living Standards Framework. In some cases—

Hon Michael Woodhouse: That’s not a process.

Hon GRANT ROBERTSON: —it is—there were situations where funding was required urgently in order to be able to address specific needs, but I’m sure the member would understand that that is what is required in a pandemic. Everything has been appropriated properly through the processes of this Parliament.

Question No. 5—COVID-19 Response

5. CHRIS BISHOP (National) to the Minister for COVID-19 Response: Is he satisfied with the speed of the COVID-19 vaccine roll-out and decisions relating to the roll-out made by the Government to this point?

Hon CHRIS HIPKINS (Minister for COVID-19 Response): Yes. I would note that as supplies of vaccine have arrived in New Zealand, they have been administered incredibly efficiently. We have about a 99.5 percent vaccine utilisation rate, one of the highest in the world. Our booking system has operated effectively, and the supply chain and logistics around the vaccine campaign have operated very, very well; 3.5 million doses, overall, have been delivered to date; our overall weekly delivery has scaled up significantly in recent weeks, as supply has allowed; 54 percent of our eligible population aged 12 years and over have now received at least one dose of the vaccine—a significant milestone—and we’re working hard to keep up that momentum.

Chris Bishop: Has the Government approached any other Governments in order to seek COVID-19 vaccines from them for New Zealand, and, if so, what countries and what types of vaccine?

Hon CHRIS HIPKINS: The Prime Minister and I have both indicated publicly that we are exploring a range of different avenues to increase our supply of vaccine through September. Through October, we’re confident that we have enough vaccines due to be shipped from Pfizer to be able to more than meet the demand that we have, but September, we are looking to see if we can increase the overall supplies of that. I certainly don’t believe it’s in the public interest to start naming any countries or any potential partners at this point. However, I would indicate that we remain committed to a Pfizer vaccine roll-out.

Chris Bishop: Is it Government policy to “vaccinate as many people as possible as quickly as possible.”, as the Prime Minister said yesterday, and, if so, is he satisfied with New Zealand having the second-slowest roll-out in the developed world?

Hon CHRIS HIPKINS: Of course I would like to vaccinate more people faster. Supply has been the big constraint up until mid-July, and there’s a potential that supply will be constrained through September, given the huge volume and the huge surge in demand that we are currently seeing, which I welcome. I would note that of those age cohorts that have been eligible for longer, we’re seeing very, very high uptake—up to 85 percent in the 65-plus category. I think that sets a standard for the rest of the age cohorts across New Zealand to try and catch up, and I certainly would encourage them to book in. Would I have liked to have seen more vaccines arrive in the country faster? Yes, of course I would have. Do I regret, though, making the decision to switch to a campaign based around using only the Pfizer vaccine? No, I don’t. I do believe that in the next period of time, that will prove to have been a good decision for New Zealand. It has meant, however, that we weren’t able to vaccinate as many people in the first part of the year as we might have liked.

Chris Bishop: Why are only approximately 80 percent of rest home workers vaccinated, and is the Government considering making it mandatory for rest home workers to be vaccinated to work in a rest home?

Hon CHRIS HIPKINS: Obviously, I would like to see that number higher. Rest home workers have had access to the vaccine longer than most New Zealanders have. It is not compulsory for them, but we certainly have provided a lot of opportunities for them to take up their chance to be vaccinated, and I would like to see a higher proportion of them doing so.

Chris Bishop: Why is the Government not planning on vaccinating students in schools until next year, when there are many weeks left in the school year and 12- to 16-year-olds can now be vaccinated?

Hon CHRIS HIPKINS: The feedback that we’ve had overall is that many families are preferring to bring their children with them when they get vaccinated—so take a family-based vaccination approach, rather than having the children and the parents vaccinated at separate dates, at separate times. So that is certainly what we have been working towards. I wouldn’t rule out the potential for school sites to be used in the future, but I would note that in terms of administering as many vaccines as fast as possible, school sites aren’t necessarily the most efficient way to do that, because we’re talking about a relatively small number of people. Even if you include the teachers and the kids, it’s still a relatively small number of people, so you’d be standing up new vaccination sites all of the time only to vaccinate a relatively small number. The focus up to this point where we’re standing up new vaccination sites has been trying to stand up sites that can have as large a throughput as possible, so that we can make the best use of the vaccination workforce.

Chris Bishop: Why has the New Zealand Government still not ordered any booster shots of vaccines when many other countries have ordered hundreds of millions of doses and the US will start doing booster shots this month?

Hon CHRIS HIPKINS: I note that only one country so far has actually started to administer booster shots, and that’s Israel. In terms of whether we have supplies to do booster shots, we already have enough orders of vaccine coming in order to start a booster campaign, and it would be well into next year before we needed to have additional supplies in order to service a third roll-out of vaccine to New Zealanders. So we already have several million vaccines that will be available to start a booster shot campaign, if we decide to do that. But, again, I would note that we’ll follow the science on that, rather than the marketing of the pharmaceutical companies.

Question No. 6—Finance

6. Hon JAMES SHAW (Minister of Climate Change) to the Minister of Finance: Will the Government make further funding available from the COVID-19 Response and Recovery Fund to support people in hardship; if so, in what form?

Hon GRANT ROBERTSON (Minister of Finance): In short, yes, as we assess the extent of the adequacy of current responses and any emerging needs. In a longer form—as long as the Speaker lets me speak for a little bit longer—we are going to continue the work that we’ve done to support those on low incomes. Most notably you would have seen this with the increase to all main benefits that was in the Budget this year, and the ongoing work that we have done with the Ministry of Social Development (MSD), and, most recently, the announcements by Ministers Sepuloni and Henare about additional support around matters of food security.

Hon James Shaw: Does he agree with the Minister for Social Development and Employment regarding additional support that the Government is “watching this space”, and, if so, what is the Government watching for before it decides to make further support available for those who need it?

Hon GRANT ROBERTSON: As I said in my primary answer, what we want to do is ensure that the current forms of support we have are adequate. Where they are not, and where we either need to top up existing funds or create new ones, that is the work that we are doing at the moment. I would encourage anybody who is suffering any form of hardship to get in contact with the Ministry of Social Development. We have provided additional resources just within the last week for MSD around issues of food security in particular, and we will continue to look at other areas of hardship.

Hon James Shaw: In light of that answer, would things like hardship grants and food grants be necessary if more funding had been available in Budget 2021 to increase core benefits by a greater amount?

Hon GRANT ROBERTSON: I believe that the increase in benefits that was in Budget 2021 represented the largest in a generation. It was a significant shift for those people on the lowest incomes in New Zealand and came on top of earlier increases in that space, and also further support through the winter energy payment. As I said earlier on, we will continue to look to provide support to those who are in the greatest need, and we will have more to say on that, I’m sure, in the coming days.

Hon James Shaw: Well, in light of that answer, given the quantum of funding that was made available, why, then, are there still people who are having to approach services for food parcels and hardship grants?

Hon GRANT ROBERTSON: Well, there are New Zealanders in a wide range of need for a wide range of reasons. We do understand that not always is that met through the formal income support system. That is why we strongly encourage those who are experiencing hardship, who need support, to contact the Ministry of Social Development. Funding has been given to MSD and to other social service providers to be able to respond to emergency need.

Hon James Shaw: Will he make funding available for financial support for tertiary students to cover their rent, particularly those who can’t access student allowances and don’t have the usual kinds of casual employment options available to them at the moment?

Hon GRANT ROBERTSON: I would note that the Hardship Fund for Learners was extended this year and does continue to be available for the 2021 calendar year through tertiary institutions. We again are continuing to monitor that and the use of that closely.

Hon Peeni Henare: Can the Minister of Finance confirm that Budget 2020 provided provision for Whānau Ora to continue to support whānau, and in the most recent outbreak they’ve pivoted those resources to do such things?

Hon GRANT ROBERTSON: Yes, I can confirm that. I want to thank again Whānau Ora providers, other iwi providers, and other social service providers for their excellent work. It is a very good question that the member asks, because the funding that was given out both in Budget 2020 and in Budget 2021 doesn’t stop; it carries on. I congratulate the Whānau Ora providers for using that, and pivoting to these new circumstances.

Hon James Shaw: Will he make funding available to help stranded migrant workers in Aotearoa cover living costs like rent, now that emergency benefits have ended, so that they don’t have to rely on food parcels?

Hon GRANT ROBERTSON: The Government’s taken significant steps to support those people who we would put into that category of stranded migrants, and I note that the assistance for foreign nationals impacted by COVID-19 programme has assisted 12,794 temporary visa holders at a total cost of $26.5 million. I’m advised that there is only between 60 and 80 people who were left being supported by that programme. Again, I would encourage them to talk to local social service agencies.

Hon James Shaw: Will he make funding available for people like early childhood relief teachers, many of whom are not eligible for current financial support despite not being able to work right now?

Hon GRANT ROBERTSON: The difficulty we have here is those people who are in those circumstances are not employed by the Government, so the schemes that the Government has in place to support relief teachers through direct means are not available. Those centres that they work for are continuing to be funded, and so the first port of call for those relief teachers should be a conversation with the centre which they work for. Depending on their own employment situation, they may well be eligible in their own right for support through the wage subsidy scheme and resurgence support scheme, and I’d encourage those relief teachers to look at those two schemes as well.

General Debate

General Debate

Hon GRANT ROBERTSON (Minister of Finance): I move, That the House take note of miscellaneous business.

Today, I want to talk about selflessness and selfishness. I want to say to all of the New Zealanders who have backed the Government’s elimination strategy and stayed home to save lives, working from home where that is possible for them, that we thank them for their selflessness. It is heartening to see the vast bulk of New Zealanders doing the right thing by their friends, by their family, and by their communities. And it is this approach of selflessness that has allowed New Zealand to have one of the lowest mortality rates in the world from COVID, one of the lowest hospitalisation rates in the world from COVID, and, at the same time, be one of a handful of countries in the world that has had an economy operating at pre - COVID-19 levels and seen unemployment reduce to 4 percent. It is that strong position that allows the Government to be able to continue to support New Zealanders through this outbreak and for us to bounce back from it.

I also want to thank the good people of Northland and Auckland for their continued heavy lifting and selflessness through this period. We all know the pressure that alert level 4 puts on families and businesses and communities, and we thank the people of Auckland and Northland for their selflessness.

I want to thank particularly, today, our Pacific community, who have been, through this outbreak, victims of racist attacks. They have been involved in this outbreak through no fault of their own but have consistently stepped up to be tested, to support one another, and to ensure that we encircle this outbreak. I want to give particular thanks to Pacific social service agencies such as The Cause Collective and South Seas, and also the churches that have looked after one another.

I want to really acknowledge the selflessness of our essential workforce. This is the group of people who are daily supporting us, leaving their bubbles and the security of that to ensure that the rest of us are able to be kept safe and to be kept fed. I particularly acknowledge our healthcare workers, who have stepped up to do testing, vaccinating, and continue to provide support to New Zealanders when they are unwell. I want to give a special shout-out to those who work in our managed isolation and quarantine facilities, 24/7, making sure that New Zealanders are kept safe. I also think of the stories I have heard from funeral directors, who, in alert level 4, went the extra mile to make sure that families had an opportunity to be a part of the final resting of their relatives. There is no more traumatic time and those people have stepped up. Our supermarket workers, our supermarket deliverers, the Student Volunteer Army who are going out of their way to make sure some of our most isolated New Zealanders have the food they need and the social contact that is there. Our police, our emergency services, our public servants who have done a remarkable job. The Ministry of Social Development, as one example, is processing 14 applications every minute for the last 11 days to ensure that the wage subsidy scheme is being paid out. I want to acknowledge the selflessness of our social service providers across the motu: our iwi providers, our Pasifika community providers, our family violence protection and support providers who have all continued to work throughout alert level 4, making sure that New Zealanders feel safe.

And, finally, much closer to home, in the selflessness category, is the staff of the Parliamentary Service, who have had to leave their bubbles, including during an alert level 4 day, to come into this Parliament to enable it to operate. I want to make sure they know that they have our support, because, sadly, they have had to come here because of the selfishness of the Opposition in this Parliament, because Judith Collins decided to ignore a proposal that was developed, in part by her colleague Chris Bishop, that would have seen a virtual Parliament built off the virtual committees that we have had. But no, the vanity and ego of the Opposition was more important to them than the health and safety of people who work at Parliament. It was more important than setting an example for how businesses could operate virtually, and for what? To throw misleading accusations and take contradictory positions. But that’s no surprise from this Opposition, who’ve had more positions on the COVID-19 response than a Chris Hipkins exercise guide!

We can and should do better by the people of New Zealand to use the technology we have. On this side of the House, we will remain resolutely focused on supporting New Zealanders to get through COVID-19 to make sure they are healthy and that we respond and we rebound as we have before. We are all in this together: he waka eke noa.

Hon JUDITH COLLINS (Leader of the Opposition): Thank you, Mr Speaker. Well, what a smug, contemptuous contribution from the Minister of Finance, Grant Robertson. What a smug contribution, where he talks about the health and safety of parliamentary staffers, forgetting the health and safety of the ministerial staffers, who he’s had working all the way through lockdown level 4 without a thought to them. And as for—

Hon Grant Robertson: Point of order, Mr Speaker. The member has made a completely inaccurate observation about my office. I’ve had no ministerial staff working in my office until today.

SPEAKER: Sorry, I’ll just stop the clock. I think it’s fair to say that that is not actually a point of order. It is a debating point, and it’d be better if the Minister had not interrupted. Yes, I think we’d just better leave it there, but I will now indicate to the Leader of the Opposition that now that she has been informed, she will not repeat any statement which might be misleading.

Hon JUDITH COLLINS: Well, obviously somebody’s a bit tetchy today—a little bit touchy that we’ve just pointed out that ministerial staff have been working in the Beehive, because we’ve seen them on television, and all of a sudden, suddenly, they’re not in his office—that’s what we’ve got from that Minister. Well, he loves to throw the dirt and the accusations, and he does not like any of it coming back to him.

We’ve just seen a Government today talking about vaccine roll-out. We’ve heard the Prime Minister make a noble prediction that we’ll be able to get something like 350,000 immunisations a week in the next few weeks. Well, that is great—and then there is that wee problem that we don’t quite have enough vaccines in the country to cover it, and therefore that’s why we’re trying to get more supply. So let’s get these vaccines in people’s arms, and let’s stop trying the point-scoring that they’re up to.

So, right now, this Government should be focused on vaccines, the vaccine roll-out, the health of New Zealanders, ICU beds, all those sort of things—the workforce that Minister Hipkins has admitted is in stress mode. They should be doing that, shouldn’t they? But instead what we see today, on the Stuff website, is an attack on me, where a Pacific leader in South Auckland said they hadn’t heard from me. Who is this Pacific leader? Oh—the vice president of the Labour Party, Jerome Mika. Oh, also, the Labour Party candidate in 2014 in Papakura, who came second. So that’s the level that they stoop to. When they should be doing their job, they’re after the personal attacks, and they’ll continue to do it.

Thankfully, Stuff has now removed that story from their website, because they’ve finally worked out that they were sold a pup, as were New Zealanders when the Prime Minister stood up in January and said this would be the year of the vaccine. Oh, no it’s not. It’s the year of the lockdown, that’s what it is, and it’s a lockdown because the Government has failed—failed miserably—until we had a lockdown level 4 to actually get vaccine in people’s arms. And it’s all very well the Prime Minister saying at the podium in April, “Well, we’re going to be a little bit behind. We’ll let other countries go first.”, but surely not 118 other countries—surely not that. And I’m sure that the Minister for COVID-19 Response will want to say, “But no, no, today we’re 117, or maybe we’re 116.”

Hon Louise Upston: Whoopee!

Hon JUDITH COLLINS: Oh, whoopee! We were told in September by that same Minister that we would be front of the queue for vaccines. We’re not front of the queue. We can barely see the queue from the back, it’s that far away. So this sanctimonious, smug attitude about spending money from the COVID fund on the Green School in Taranaki, or on the three waters bribery around the councils to get them to come to the table to talk about it, and the tetchiness every time someone gives him some of his own medicine back—that is actually the sign of a Government that understands it has completely stuffed up the vaccine roll-out until the last couple of weeks.

And why now? Why wait until Delta was here to suddenly get excited about vaccines? They’ve already got Dr Ayesha Verrall, who is able to tell them as a virologist that the vaccinations are the secret to dealing with COVID-19. Keeping it out at the managed isolation and quarantine facilities—where are the purpose-built ones? Oh, that’s right—none are built. Did they take any notice of the Simpson-Roche report? Not a scrap. Did they actually even take any notice of the Auditor-General’s report about this? Not a scrap. They have been so clever, congratulating themselves day in, day out about how clever they were, that they’ve dropped the ball, and New Zealanders are now in level 4 lockdown in Auckland, level 3 everywhere else, and it’s all on the head of this Government over there that has sat by—

SPEAKER: Order! The member’s time has expired.

Hon CHRIS HIPKINS (Minister for COVID-19 Response): It’s certainly clear there is some tetchiness in the debating chamber today. I’m not sure the Minister of Finance is the one that’s most exhibiting that at this point.

I do want to start today by acknowledging all New Zealanders, who, of course, will be disappointed that we have another incursion of COVID-19 into our community. We have enjoyed, over the last year and a half, much more freedom of movement, much more freedom to come together, than many other places around the world. I think New Zealanders are proud of that, but New Zealanders also recognise that they have made sacrifices in order for that to happen and that their fellow countrymen have made sacrifices in order for that to happen. So I want to acknowledge everybody who has done the hard yards to make that possible and who is now doing the hard yards again to help us get back to that point, particularly Auckland. Auckland has borne the brunt of a lot of our COVID-19 response, and I want to thank every Aucklander for the contribution that they are making to driving the virus out of our community, as they have done since we first started grappling with this pandemic early last year.

The Minister of Finance has run through a variety of the different people that we should thank: our essential workers, our front-line health workers. I particularly want to make note of our managed isolation and quarantine (MIQ) workforce, who do outstanding work in making sure they’re doing everything possible to keep the virus out of the country. Let’s consider the number of people who have come back through our MIQ facilities and how few examples we have seen of in-facility transmission or the virus making it out into the community. Bear in mind this is something that we have never had to do before. I think that’s really important to recall. We’ve never done isolation on the scale that we are doing it now, and the team have worked really hard to get that as tight as possible. They’re constantly looking for ways to do it better, and I want to acknowledge their ongoing dedication and their commitment. I have said this before and I’ll say it again: I believe that our MIQ workforce are national heroes. They absolutely deserve our thanks and our acknowledgment.

I do also want to thank our senior public servants. Now, normally, I would thank all of our public servants, but I particularly want to thank some of the most senior public servants who have been the subject of public attacks in recent weeks that are not common in New Zealand’s political scene. Generally, I think we have acknowledged that senior public servants are unable to answer back. It does take a cowardly sort of a person to attack people who are not in a position to answer back for themselves. I want to acknowledge those senior public figures that have been subject to the sort of criticism that they would not normally be subject to and have been unable to respond to that because they are upholding the political neutrality of our Public Service. I thank them for that, and I acknowledge them for that.

I want to acknowledge those who are working from home with young families. I would say it’s not so much working from home as being at home and trying to work. I want to acknowledge that working from home is easier for some New Zealanders than for others, and so for those who have young families at home trying to work, I particularly acknowledge you, and I thank you for your contribution. I simply remind you of the overall maxim that we have adopted over the last year and a half of “be kind, and be kind to yourselves”. Don’t have the same high expectations you might normally have of yourselves. Do be tolerant of the circumstances that you are in and adjust your expectations of what you’ll be able to achieve accordingly.

The last group of people that I want to acknowledge are Kiwis who have been separated by COVID-19. Kiwis are separated internally in New Zealand now with much more restricted movement than we are normally used to, but we’re also a very international community, and for a year and a half we’ve been separated in a way that none of us are used to. I think of my grandmother who made the journey from Scotland to New Zealand and never returned, never saw her extended family again. That’s not the nature of international families nowadays. We are used to being able to reconnect with one another regularly. Kids are used to being able to see their grandparents regularly, even if they’re on the other side of the world. For the last year and a half, that hasn’t been possible. People have missed out on that family connection. They’ve missed out on significant family gatherings and significant family events. There are a lot of significant emotional issues that go with that, and I want to acknowledge that.

We do what we can to provide a safe passage of travel for people in and out of the country, but there is a limited ability to do that and we cannot accommodate everybody who wants to travel. We’ll look to see how we can make the system fairer. There is a constraint there at the moment which means we’re not releasing vouchers, because we are having to accommodate in our MIQ facilities positive COVID-19 cases from our community, and people who are needing to isolate and can’t isolate safely at home. We are doing that so that we can get back to the freedom that makes New Zealand such an attractive place and that means there are so many people who are wanting to travel here. So thanks again to everyone involved in this response.

DAVID SEYMOUR (Leader—ACT): Thank you, Mr Speaker. I fear for our small country in the face of new variants. For a long time, our isolation has been our greatest strength. It has allowed us to maintain a kind of walled garden protected by enormous seas, safe from the ravages of COVID that we’ve watched unfold around the world. But as time goes on, that great strength of isolation begins to look like a weakness, and we do not have, in my view, a clear enough picture, or enough leadership from our Government, about what will happen when New Zealand inevitably reconnects with the world. When we have a release of COVID-19 in New Zealand that cannot be contained, it may not be our choice to lose our isolation and reconnect with the world in that way, particularly if it is a new variant. It may be, as Professor Skegg told the Health Committee last week, that New Zealanders had the easy days, and the harder days are yet to come. That is why it is so vital that our Government’s response is the best in the world. It is unfortunate that the most charitable commentators find themselves unable to say that that is the case.

There are a number of defences that a Government has against a viral outbreak. One of them is tracing. I see Ayesha Verrall joining us in the Chamber. Her excellent report set out a gold standard that the Government should be able to trace 80 percent of cases end to end in 96 hours, with up to 1,000 cases. And yet we heard from the Prime Minister just now that it’s taken 15 days to not trace 518 cases in the South Island—at the other end of the country, from the outbreak, 518 people. They still haven’t managed to return negative tests on 518 people in 15 days. So the South Island must remain in isolation, or a wait-and-see stage, which is truly crippling to people’s commercial and personal business every day, not to mention education, not to mention healthcare.

What does that tell us about our Government’s ability to trace and contact outbreaks without resorting to lockdowns? Of course, digital contact tracing—our NZ COVID Tracer app—has been almost worthless. It hasn’t been invested in or upgraded in any significant or substantial way since December at the latest.

What about testing? We have had a debate of Lilliputian dimensions, an absurdity about whether saliva testing should be allowed. Yesterday, the Prime Minister told the House that saliva testing is PCR testing. Well, at the start of the year, she said we weren’t using saliva testing because we were using PCR testing. She also says, because it’s PCR testing, which she now knows and she also accepted it’s as accurate as nasopharyngeal, that there’s a limited amount of testing ability. We know that the Government has turned down contracts that would have expanded that ability.

What about waste-water testing? Twenty-six sites weekly for a disease that actually manages to replicate in only a couple of days—weekly testing for a disease that replicates in a couple of days. How unprepared was that?

And then we talk about managed isolation and quarantine (MIQ). They have to stop MIQ, because, once again, the Government clearly did not understand that Delta changed the underlying calculus of the epidemic.

Then, you come to the question of vaccination. It’s been done to death, back and forth, across the political aisle. But the facts remain that New Zealand is doing so poorly, yesterday the Prime Minister was reduced to saying that we might not be 120th in the world; we might actually be 119th. How extraordinary is that? If we are going to go into 2022, a world where our isolation cannot protect us for ever, a world where at some point we must safely reconnect with the rest of the world for the certainty people require in their personal and commercial lives, for their healthcare, for their education, for their businesses, then we are going to need a much more sophisticated and prepared response on testing, tracing, and vaccination than this Government has offered to date.

We simply cannot afford to rely on a hard border and lockdowns for ever, because if we do, we will find that, gradually, talent and money will drain out of New Zealand, an outcome that we can ill afford. That’s why we need this Government to do better. Thank you, Mr Speaker.

Hon PEENI HENARE (Minister of Defence): Tēnā koe, Mr Speaker. As I generally do in these forums and in the general debate, I want to take the opportunity kia tangi atu ki ngā mate nui o te wā. Ki te rangatira ki a Tā Michael Cullen, ki te rangatira ki a Des Ratima, ki te rangatira ki a Royce Te Rangitautahi Ponga, koutou katoa o te pō, haere, haere, haere atu rā [to mourn the recent loss of some important people. To the esteemed Sir Michael Cullen, to the respected Des Ratima, to the venerated Royce Te Rangitautahi Ponga, to all of you who have passed, rest in peace].

I generally open my contributions in this House by acknowledging those who have passed on and I want to, in particular, pick a couple of those people, because I think they’ve put this country in good stead and that good work has continued by this Government—of course, Sir Michael Cullen, a former Minister of Finance who did a fantastic job to make sure we had a strong and resilient economy despite the challenges of the time.

I now look at our Minister of Finance and want to congratulate him for the hard work he has done to continue to ensure that our economy remains resilient during this pandemic and during these challenging times. The Minister of Finance has done a fantastic job to make sure that whānau continue to be supported, communities continue to be supported, and, where we can, despite the lockdowns, continue to support our businesses.

I also want to talk about Mr Des Ratima. Des Ratima was a man who was a champion for whānau. He was a man who made sure that even those whānau who had nothing knew they had support from a person like Des Ratima and the services that he ran. I want to acknowledge him because he is a leader and a pou of Whānau Ora and the support that we’ve been able to give to communities across the country. That man will be sadly missed in Ngāti Kahungunu and sadly missed by Māoridom.

It is the work that he did that’s made Whānau Ora the success it is today. I want to heap praise, like my colleagues on this side of the House have, on those providers, those whānau who continue to do the hard mahi during these times.

I want to add to their list a particular thanks to the New Zealand Defence Force. When I think about how good our New Zealand Defence Force are, I’m filled with pride and joy and humility when I witness all that they are capable of. Let me run through a very short list over the past two weeks. They continue to support our efforts in the managed isolation and quarantine (MIQ) facilities. They are there and they have been for a long time. They support the security of our borders by supporting those who enter into the MIQ facilities. They bring a mana and an integrity to that system that you can’t find elsewhere, and I want to thank them for that.

Can I also thank them for their operations in Afghanistan. Their nimble and capable operability that allowed us to send a deployment to Afghanistan is once again testament to the importance of our New Zealand Defence Force.

Just recently, the floods in Tāmaki-makau-rau, the Defence Force came out again to support those people in West Auckland to make sure, despite COVID, they were supported during a challenging time, which was the flooding in West Auckland. I want to thank them for that. And then, of course, now as we’ve shifted alert levels, I want to thank them for the support that they offer to the border support that’s taking place right now to the south of Tāmaki-makau-rau.

To our whānau in Tāmaki-makau-rau, yes, this has been a hard time. We want to thank you for the work that you do to support people in the community of Tāmaki-makau-rau and to continue to keep yourselves safe during such trying times.

The one message that I continue to promote amongst the Māori communities is the vaccine. I have done this since March and I will continue to do it today. Over the past two weeks, we have seen an exponential increase in the uptake of the vaccine by the Māori community. We need this to continue. Minister Hipkins has already spoken about the approach that we’ve taken towards the vaccine roll-out, and that is the whānau approach. We’ve done that from the start, and I want to continue to express to our whānau that we need you to come forward to make yourself available for the vaccine. Today, 1 September, the eligibility opens up to all of our whānau who are aged 12 and older. Please, whānau, wherever you are in the country, make yourself available for the vaccine. We’re working hard with Māori health providers and general health providers to make sure that the accessibility is in our community and, in particular, in our rural and remote parts of Aotearoa New Zealand, and we want to continue to support that so that wherever our whānau are, they have access to the vaccine.

There have been a number of quite witty puns and use of language to explain the vaccine to my people in particular, to the Māori people. Some of them I want to repeat here today. One such as: be a doer; don’t be a hua. I think that message is important. Another one is “Be a doer! Karawhuia!” And if there’s one thing I can say to our Māori whānau who are out there listening: make yourself available for the vaccine. Kia ora tātou.

Hon MICHAEL WOODHOUSE (National): Thank you, Mr Speaker. I want to join with the Deputy Prime Minister and the Minister for COVID-19 Response in applauding our essential workers. I think that’s only appropriate.

But I think what we’ve found out over the last couple of weeks is that some essential workers are more essential than others, and, frankly, I’ve also learnt quite a bit about the Delta variant of this COVID virus. Apparently it’s a very discerning virus, that it knows not to transmit from one person to another amongst 15 to 20 people in the Beehive theatrette but is so smart that it can transmit across this vast Chamber when there are only 10 people in it—a remarkable feat of epidemiology, I might suggest. And, according to certain commentators, the fact that the Prime Minister and the Deputy Prime Minister travelled out of Auckland before the lockdown but when the virus was spreading is less dangerous than the Leader of the Opposition hunkering down for 13 days in a row and then coming here to hold this Government to account. Well, that seems to be a bit inconsistent to me—and the Greens are nodding. Apparently, in their hyperbolic nonsense, yesterday we were being reckless and putting lives at risk, but today it’s OK. That’s the inconsistency that I find outstanding. I just cannot understand it.

Now, Minister Nash is going to lose a crate of wine at the end of the year because he told everybody that he would bet—and I’ll take that bet—that we were going to be at 90 percent of vaccine rates. Well, I don’t have a Minister’s salary, so my bet is only for one bottle of wine, and here it is: I bet one bottle of wine that this time next week we are going to be in the House debating a second imprest supply bill where the Government is asking for more money. And the reason is quite simple: they have emptied the COVID tin, in large part, on things that aren’t related to COVID.

The Deputy Prime Minister, the Minister of Finance, talks about selflessness and selfishness. Well, I think it’s selfish for the Government to dip its hand deeply into the pockets of the New Zealand taxpayers—Kiwis who themselves are struggling to get by in these times—and taking more money out of those pockets to pay for goodness knows what particular fancy the Government will have. Now, my count is at least $12 billion of COVID-19 Response and Recovery Fund money has been spent on projects that, frankly, I cannot connect with COVID-19.

Let’s go through a few of them. Three waters—so we’re now meant to believe that three waters, according to the answer to my question from Grant Robertson, was a form of stimulus, that they were stimulating the economy by investing $710 million in what some people have called sweeteners for councils, rather than actual infrastructure projects related to that. Flood protection in the Far North—well, it was something that needed to happen. Why was it that it had to come out of the COVID fund? Cameras on fishing boats, we’ve been talking about them for years; $52.5 million for horse racing; public interest journalism; transformative energy projects, whatever that means; climate resilience projects, as if climate change suddenly came along since 26 March last year. The list goes on and on and on—wallaby protection.

The Minister talks about the arts funding, and it is true that areas like arts have been hit through COVID, and it may well be appropriate, but, if that’s the case, put it through the normal Budget process, because Mr Robertson has basically thrown out the window any kind of fiscal discipline or the idea of keeping spending within approved Budget allowances. He made a big thing of the fact that his Ministers had found $926 million in May that they didn’t need to spend out of the COVID fund. One would imagine that then gets left unspent. No, they find plenty more to spend the money on, and too much of it has been on non-COVID.

So my bottle of wine is on us being back here next Wednesday and Thursday finishing the Budget debate and then introducing a second imprest supply bill that will be topping up the COVID fund. As Mr Robertson says, this is the rainy day we have been planning for. Well, if it’s a rainy day, fix the roof, buy the umbrella; don’t go out and purchase a swimming pool.

Hon Dr AYESHA VERRALL (Minister for Food Safety): Today, I am thinking of the 687 people affected by COVID in New Zealand, the 32 in our hospitals, and the eight in intensive care. I am thinking of the seven children under one year who are cases in this outbreak, and their families. If we think about this outbreak, we’ve seen the cases peak at 83 on Thursday of last week, and we hope now that case numbers are coming down—down at 75 today. Further cause for optimism is that, for the last four days, more than half of contacts have been linked to a known case.

I want to talk about the Delta variant briefly, and I did notice Dr Reti’s sleight of hand with the science during question time. Yes, Delta emerged some time ago—in fact, in October last year—and surged in India in May of this year. But our understanding of the parameters of the virus that provide actionable public health intelligence has only come to light recently. Parameters like the incubation period that informs contact tracing systems, only published in June—late June, the last week of June. And you would have seen the impact that had on the series of advice that we had from Professor Skegg’s group. The implication that hospital preparedness should have been changed, when it was only last week that we had information published in the Lancet that the rate of hospitalisations was doubled with the Delta outbreak.

We do know that Delta is twice as infectious, but I want to tell this House today that, in many ways, our response has been 10 times as strong. We went harder and earlier than ever before, moving to alert level 4 on the same day that a case was detected. This has never been done in the pandemic before, not imaginable two years ago. But we knew, because of the intelligence that we had received on Delta, we had to go harder and earlier, and we could because we were prepared. We were prepared as a Government, but New Zealand business was prepared to move their operations online, and shame on the parties so closely proud of their connections to business, who were unable to make the transition in our conduct in Parliament, moving that online as well.

In contact tracing, we have traced over 32,000 contacts. We are tracing the contacts of contacts, so-called second-order contacts, after learnings from New South Wales. At one point, we had over 500 locations of interest; we’re currently down to 344. This is because of the concern about fleeting transmission with the Delta variant, yet another way we have responded to changes in the evidence. We are increasing the use of the app. I’m very pleased to see more New Zealanders taking that up. And we did all of this because we were prepared. We scaled up contact tracing in Auckland. We delegated contact tracing electronically to public health units across the country.

We then moved to the third phase of our response, using centralised contact tracing capacity and deployable public health experts to Auckland. We also trained new contact tracers, as was our plan, so that we could make use of people not working at alert level 4 and also respond to the particular characteristics of the outbreak, which includes bringing on Samoan language - speaking contact tracers.

Our testing has surged. In the first week of the outbreak, we tested 5 percent of the Auckland population, approximately 2 percent of the nationwide population. We had the stocks, the people—though they worked really hard to do that—the IT systems, and the support from Healthline. We reached these heights because we were prepared, and we complemented this with a scale-up in waste-water testing to cover the waste-water supply of 3.9 million New Zealanders. We also surged vaccination, pivoting to safe procedures under alert level 4, being able to use excess capacity in primary care, being able to use drive-through vaccination clinics, because we were prepared.

Outbreak preparedness is not about perfection. I remember doing the Advanced Cardiac Life Support certificate when I was a medical registrar at Wellington Hospital. While that training was incredibly important, I realised that it only prepared me so much for the day I had to run an arrest call, when the hospital sprinklers went off simultaneously, making safe use of the defibrillator impossible. That day was tough, and it’s a reminder that preparedness, while it’s so important, cannot simulate every possible scenario. It is the same with outbreaks—decisions need to be made with imperfect information. But name a service in the health system that can scale up to demand tenfold like our testing system has done, or go from zero to 32,000 like our contact tracing system has done. We had a plan, we were ready, and we’re executing that plan.

Hon JAMES SHAW (Minister of Climate Change): I’d like to take a moment to honour those killed in the terror attack outside Kabul airport last week. It was a horrific development and has worsened what was already a terrible situation. I understand that the attack killed up to 170 Afghanis and 13 US troops, and we add these victims to a toll that stretches to the hundreds of thousands, if not the millions, in the blood-soaked and tragic history of foreign interventions in Afghanistan, for this present conflict, of course, has its roots in the great power rivalries between the British Empire and Tsarist Russia up to 150 years ago.

When the Great Game between the British Empire and Russia was transplanted by the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union from the 1950s onwards, that, of course, culminated in the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan on Christmas Eve 1979, which I note was another Western intelligence failure. The United States spent uncounted billions arming the mujahedin in their war against the Soviets in the 1980s, and that war cost, we think, about one million civilian Afghan lives, as well as something like 90,000 mujahedin fighters and 18,000 Afghan troops.

When the Soviet-backed regime gave way in the early 1990s, eventually, of course, leading to the rise of the Taliban, many of whom were former US-backed mujahedin, that eventually, of course, led to the US invasion and occupation, under which another 47,000-odd Afghan civilians lost their lives, as many as 69,000 police and military in the Afghan services, and something like 90,000 opposition fighter lives during the course of the last 20 years.

I just want to take us back to the special debate that was held in this Parliament when our Government committed us to joining New Zealand forces to the US-led invasion of Afghanistan. My former colleague, Green MP Keith Locke, in his speech then said, “Military action in Afghanistan will almost certainly result in the deaths of more innocent people, and cause more destruction in a country which has already been devastated by civil war and the oppressive policies of the Taliban regime.” He also said that it would be “counterproductive in terms of the battle against terrorism. A military strike is likely to create more anger in the Islamic world towards the Western powers, and the United States in particular. One of the outlets for that anger will almost certainly be new forms of terrorism [aimed] at more innocents.”, and, of course, that is what we saw with the Islamic State attack at Kabul airport last week. Keith also said that we are talking perhaps about a long war against the Taliban. Now, I doubt that even he would have anticipated that it would be fully 20 years, but I doubt that he would have been surprised to learn that it would end in total failure, with the Taliban as fully in control of Afghanistan at the end of the war as they were at the beginning.

Now, there are people in Afghanistan right now whose lives are forfeit because of New Zealand’s participation in the occupation, and the Green Party believes that we should do absolutely everything we can to support those people, even whilst we grapple with the current COVID-19 outbreak and the many other challenges that our country faces. So there are four things that we would like to see. First of all, we would like to see the Government committing to widening the eligibility criteria for resettlement to include family members of Afghan New Zealanders, and to do everything we can to get them out of Afghanistan. Second, we believe that we need to ensure that there is a meaningful number of vulnerable Afghans who are most likely to be targeted by the Taliban because of their race, gender, sexuality, nationality, or political affiliation, and to see that they are evacuated. Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom have all committed to taking Afghan refugees, and New Zealand must do that as well. Finally, we should continue to work with our international colleagues on ensuring that the people who face dire peril are supported in their time of need. Keith also said, “New Zealand is a small nation. But we can do our bit to combat terrorism as a peacemaker and [as] a champion of social justice and adherence to law, not as a war maker.”

BARBARA EDMONDS (Labour—Mana): Fa‘afetai tele lava, Mr Speaker. Talofa, Mr Speaker, or perhaps, after Breakfast this morning, warm Pasifika greetings are more appropriate—or perhaps, because my husband is Māori, kia ora! A warm Pasifika greeting to our ‘aiga, our kaiga, our kopu tangata, our anau and fanau at home. As tama’ita’i Pasifika, I’m incredibly proud of how our Pasifika community has come together, sticking to their bubbles, sticking to the rules, and staying home to save lives. We know for some of you, especially in Auckland, that this is not an easy time. We thank you for staying the course so we can fight this virus together.

As a member of the strong Labour Pasifika caucus, we have been connecting with thousands of our Pasifika community daily: our religious leaders, our community leaders, our regional leaders, our business leaders, our Pasifika health and Whānau Ora providers, our community government agency leads, our rangatahi, our youth. We have been connecting with them through our regular “Zonos”, through our social media bilingual updates, through our Pasifika language radio station interviews, through the various media platforms, even breaking out into our Pasifika language - specific Zonos: a multilayered approach to connect with our Pasifika community in what has been a trying time for us.

The Pasifika community is playing their part to fight this virus. To date, the Pasifika community has the highest testing rate in the country. More than 131,000 Pasifika people have had their first dose of the vaccination. Over 72,000 have had their second dose and are fully vaccinated. We thank our essential Pasifika workforce at the borders, at the supermarkets, at the testing stations, and at the vaccination centres. Fa’afetai, fa’afetai, fa’afetai tele lava.

I conclude with echoing the words of the Minister earlier today, the Hon Peeni Henare. Please, whānau: come forward and be vaccinated. Make yourself available. Seek information from trusted sources. Do this for you. Do this for your family.

Hon LOUISE UPSTON (National—Taupō): Thank you, Mr Speaker, and I want to start by acknowledging that there are many individuals, families, and businesses who are doing it incredibly tough right now, from one end of New Zealand to the other, and the 687 individuals who are currently COVID-positive. I want to also acknowledge every single essential worker that is working in their many fields at the moment. But what they won’t be comforted by is that this is the year—2021—that the Prime Minister loudly proclaimed was the year of the vaccine, but, unfortunately, we have disproportionately higher rates of those most at risk of COVID that are not yet vaccinated.

My parliamentary colleague Barbara Edmonds referred to the many Pasifika who have set records in terms of testing. Unfortunately, we haven’t set records in terms of vaccination. The essential workers, whether they are police officers, corrections officers, St John Ambulance officers, those who work in the supermarket, or those that are working incredibly hard on the ground to deliver food parcels, for example, they haven’t been vaccinated. Too many of them, each and every day, are at risk. It’s easy to say “This year is the year of the vaccine.”, but, clearly, the Government have not delivered on the year of the vaccine.

So, yes, for everyone out there: level 4 lockdown for those still in Auckland and Northland, and level 3 for the rest of the country. National supported the move into level 4, but what we have to recognise and we have to be honest about is the fact that if our vaccination rates were significantly higher, we would not be in the position we are in today. So I do hope that there is a greater level of preparation than we have seen demonstrated so far in every single area.

I want to give you a couple of examples. The Prime Minister earlier today talked about the vaccine strategy task force that was set up in May 2020. Well, the very groups of people—300,000, actually—are reached by Whānau Ora providers, who do extraordinary work and are doing it on the ground right now. Te Puni Kōkiri told Minister Henare that funding was available, and advised to fund commissioning agencies so that they could be part of the overall vaccine strategy, recognising the particular expertise they have in reaching the very 300,000 New Zealanders that potentially needed the vaccine ahead of others, but what happened? No, the Minister ignored the advice, didn’t seek funding, and now expects Whānau Ora providers to provide vaccination support over and above what they are already doing.

We had Minister Henare in front of the committee this morning. He doesn’t accept and he denied the fact that Whānau Ora commissioning agencies, including Pasifika Futures, could have been at the table to prevent the low levels of vaccination that we see today: 19 percent for Māori. That’s simply not good enough. Had the Government planned and worked harder and reached into every one of those communities, we wouldn’t be in this position.

It’s the same with Minister Sepuloni. There are 350,000 New Zealanders that her team work with every week. Has there been any connection with them with regard to vaccination, to support people to get vaccinations, to get information, and perhaps to even get transport to a vaccination centre? Zero.

So this has been far from the year of the vaccine with an all-of-Government approach. The lack of planning and preparation has been appalling. It should have been a singular focus in the year of the vaccine. How do we deliver more vaccines in the arms of every New Zealander faster? Clearly—clearly—the Government have failed on this and, unfortunately, are now scrambling to repair the damage, but it’s New Zealanders who pay.

So instead of the year of the vaccine starting on 1 January, it’s 1 September. May I remind the Prime Minister, it’s now spring.

IBRAHIM OMER (Labour): Thank you, Mr Speaker. I too want to pay my tribute to the great people of Afghanistan, for the unexpected development in the last few weeks shocked us all, and what we have seen in the Kabul airport, which seems to be a thing that we only see in the movies. And so my heart goes out to the great people of Afghanistan, especially our vibrant Afghani community here in Aotearoa.

I’m grateful for an opportunity to speak in this special debate. COVID-19 is wrecking the world, infecting and killing people. As I speak now, in the last 24 hours, more than 600,000 new infections, more than 9,000 new deaths—just in the last 24 hours. A lot of countries in the last few months have made progress, using a combination of public health and the vaccines, and then they dropped the ball. They became so complacent, and now, because of Delta, their health system is struggling and they are a mess. Their economies are also struggling—the economy they always wanted to protect.

So Delta is tricky, and our doctors told us consistently—I love the description of our Prime Minister of Delta, “Delta has changed the rules … [so] we have changed our approach too.” A lot of the countries that I mentioned failed to do that. Simply, they either didn’t know how to do it or they didn’t want to do it, and now they’re paying the price, and that’s not where we wanted to go.

I too also wanted to add my voice to other voices—our essential workers; they are the unsung heroes. Two weeks ago, when we all rushed into our level 4 lockdown, many of them went out, risking their lives, even though they knew that they were likely to get a virus if Delta continued to rage. And they did that by putting their lives in danger, but also the lives of their loved ones as well. Many of them are on low wages, and I have been talking to them in the last few weeks, just to thank them for their contribution, for what they do for us. And many of them also appreciate what this Government has done for them, because, for the first time in many years, I think we have a Government that actually focuses on the low-paid workers. We do have a minimum wage lifted to $20, we’ve got a lot of our contracted workers in the core Government sector on a living wage, and they do appreciate that. And one of them told me that “At least we’ve got a Government that appreciates and that pays us well.” So that goes to show that we’ve got a Government that never leaves anyone behind.

Just as I made my way to Parliament, the taxi driver, who has been working throughout level 4, told me, “Why are you going to Parliament?” Well, I told him, “We have been called.”—the Government. So he said, “Well, we all are staying home, so why are you guys doing this?” And I told him the Opposition refuses to accept for Parliament to reconvene through Zoom or through a virtual, and he said, “That’s just selfish.” I think, as the Deputy Prime Minister said, it’s just selfishness.

I also wanted to talk about my migrant and refugee communities, and I also want to commend their contribution throughout not only this lockdown but since last year. As a part of the team of 5 million, they have played their role. They volunteered, they distributed food to those who are vulnerable, and now they are very grateful for the roll-out of the vaccination. A lot of our community members have their families back home, and they desperately wanted the world to be open, but at the same time they also get the risk of rushing into opening the borders, because then, Minister, we could go back to the zero square.

I am one of those people, and in 2019 I was reconnected to my family after 18 years, and I promised my ageing parents to see them every year after 2019. Now I can’t see them. This is the sacrifice that we all make to keep our team of 5 million people safe. So this Government had a plan to protect the country, and now it has a plan to reconnect New Zealand to the world. Kia ora.

CHRIS BISHOP (National): Today is a good day, because on 1 September, everyone in New Zealand aged 12-plus can go and get vaccinated. And if there’s one thing I want every Kiwi to know, it’s that they can go and get vaccinated. It is safe, it is effective, and every single person who gets vaccinated—every single person—protects themselves and also protects New Zealand. Every single person that gets vaccinated is a next step towards avoiding more lockdowns and connecting New Zealand to the world. So please go and get vaccinated.

Can I start by saying thank you to our essential workers—the people doing the testing, our nurses on the front line, and everyone else out there being part of our COVID-19 response. I want to address two questions in my speech today. Firstly, have we done a good job on vaccination? Because although it’s great that everyone can go and get vaccinated now, our charge in the Opposition is that it has taken too long to get to this point. We supported the lockdown because there was no alternative—there was no alternative. But it is undoubtedly true that with a higher rate of vaccine coverage the lockdown would be shorter and the lockdown would potentially be more regional rather than countrywide. That’s what vaccination does, that’s what the modelling released by Dr Verrall and other expert modellers suggests, and that’s why vaccination is critical.

No one’s saying that if we had got it to 50 or 60, the lockdown wouldn’t have been necessary, but what we are saying is that it would have been potentially shorter and it would be potentially more regional. That’s why it matters that we are the second slowest in the developed world. That matters and that is on the Government. The supply shortages are on the Government. It’s not good enough for the Government to put their hands up and say, “There’s nothing we could do about it.” There are two sides in a contract—there’s the New Zealand Government and there’s Pfizer. And we have agency—the Government of New Zealand has agency in a negotiating process, and the reality is, we signed our contracts late, we ordered late, we didn’t order enough, and now we have a shortage.

We’ve got this bizarre situation where the Prime Minister uses almost Orwellian language to describe what is a shortage. So she said the other day—I think it was last week—“It’s not that we have a supply problem; it’s just that we need to have a little less demand.” Well, that’s what happens when you have a supply problem. And to make matters worse, we have not ordered any boosters. I just find this unfathomable, because the United States is rolling out boosters from this month, other countries have ordered hundreds of millions of doses, and New Zealand has not yet ordered a single booster shot of Pfizer vaccine. If we’re going to take a precautionary approach, which the Government says they like to do, we should be doing that—we should be doing that. If we don’t need them, we can give them away. That can be part of our responsibility to the Pacific. But a least-cost approach, a least-regrets approach means let’s order them now.

Secondly, were we ready? Because Delta has been a game-changer, as the Prime Minister says, and our charge in Opposition is that the Government was not ready for an outbreak of Delta. Only now are we doing a review as to the infection control in our managed isolation and quarantine (MIQ) facilities. The Crowne Plaza passed all its audits, with a public walkway next to an exercise area. Today we discover, in the New Zealand Herald, reported by RNZ, that COVID-positive people are walking around in an underground car park. As one expert said, that does not pass the smell test. We’ve had people queuing for hours to get a COVID test. And a year on from the Roche-Simpson report, saliva testing is nowhere to be seen, other than at MIQ, and even that’s taken way too long. We’re not making use of saliva testing out in the community. In fact, rapid antigen tests are banned. It’s impossible to bring in a rapid antigen test, which might help us contact trace and test and trace, and they’re banned by fiat. They are banned by the Government. It just beggars belief.

Of course, with contact tracing, the Dr Ayesha Verrall metrics have been failed. In fact, the Government admits that, but won’t give us any new metrics to assess the Government, themselves, against. And we are still hiring people to contact trace. In fact, it took six days before we seconded people from the Public Service. So were we ready? No, we were not. The vaccination failure is on the Government. The readiness failure is on the Government. We had no alternative to the lockdown.

The debate having concluded, the motion lapsed.

COVID-19 ORDERS

Approval

Hon CHRIS HIPKINS (Minister for COVID-19 Response): I move, That this House approve the following orders made under the COVID-19 Public Health Response Act 2020:

- COVID-19 Public Health Response (Vaccinations) Amendment Order 2021

- COVID-19 Public Health Response (Air Border) Order (No 2) Amendment Order (No 7) 2021

- COVID-19 Public Health Response (Air Border) Order (No 2) Amendment Order (No 8) 2021.

Once again, I’m before the House asking for orders made under the COVID-19 Public Health Response Act to be confirmed. To recap, for those who are unfamiliar with this particular process, the COVID-19 Public Health Response Act authorises me, as the Minister for COVID-19 Response, or the responsible Minister, to use the correct term, to issue orders requiring people to do things or requiring people not to do to things in response to COVID-19. Those orders can have almost immediate effect—this is something that we absolutely require in dealing with a global pandemic—but they do need to be subject to scrutiny. The process that we are involved in now is exactly how this unfolds. When I put an order in place, I then have to bring it to the House within a certain period of time to be confirmed. If it is not confirmed within that period of time, then the order that I’ve made expires. When I put a motion on the Order Paper for an order to be confirmed, it’s referred immediately to the Regulations Review Committee who can then review the order, make sure that it is in compliance with the COVID-19 Public Health Response Act, make sure that it is not using that Act in a way that is inappropriate. They can also make recommendations both back to me as the person who signs the order but also to the House. Their report then comes back to the House, and then I have the ability to move the motion which I’ve just moved to confirm the order.

In terms of what this particular motion confirms, it confirms three—so first of all, I should probably say thank you again to the Regulations Review Committee. I’ve had a very constructive relationship with them. They have asked questions of me and of my officials. They have made suggestions. In some cases, we have subsequently adopted those suggestions because they have been good suggestions in continuing to improve our COVID-19 response framework.

I do want to just acknowledge too, though, that many of these orders are put in place very quickly at short notice. Undoubtedly, there are improvements that can be made, and that’s why we’ll see that some of those orders have already been amended many, many times, both to deal with the emerging situation, but also, in some cases, to tidy up and correct not necessarily errors or mistakes that have been made but inconsistencies, or orders have sometimes lacked the clarity that we would aim for if we had a longer period of time to put them in place. So some of the amendments that we approve in this House fall into all of those different categories.

So the three that we are confirming: one is quite a significant one and the others are relatively small points of clarification. So the COVID-19 Public Health Response (Vaccinations) Amendment Order 2021 extends the vaccination requirement for our border workforce to a broader number of people. We have had in place a requirement that those working in our managed isolation and quarantine facilities have to be vaccinated in order to undertake the work. That’s been in place for some time, and many of our front-line border workers have had to be vaccinated. Again, that has been in place for a period of time. We are now expanding that to a wider range of people, and that is what this order confirms. It is important that we provide the greatest layer of defence using vaccination in our border as possible. We’ve been working to achieve that over the course of 2021, since vaccines became available. This order extends that to a broader number of people.

The COVID-19 Public Health Response (Air Border) Order (No 2) Amendment Order (No 7) 2021 makes some relatively minor clarifications around quarantine-free travel and who’s eligible to participate in quarantine-free travel and the requirements about that. I would foreshadow at this point, that, of course, all of our arrangements around quarantine-free travel are under review during this time, where the bulk of quarantine-free travel is paused. In fact, the only current quarantine-free travel we have at the moment that could still be reactivated is Cook Islands, and at the moment it’s paused at their end for very good reason. So we have a much more limited scale of quarantine-free travel at the moment, so we are using that opportunity to review all of the orders we’ve got in place around that.

Then the final one is the COVID-19 Public Health Response (Air Border) Order (No 2) Amendment Order (No 8) 2021, which makes some clarifications around the treatment of diplomats, consular officials, and certain New Zealand Defence Force members when it comes to the relationship between those people and quarantine-free travel, just so that all of the requirements that are in place for people coming into the country are as clear as they possibly can be.

So, like I said, the first of the orders is a relatively substantive one. In my view, the second two are tidying-up orders, making the arrangements as clear as possible and tidying up any inconsistencies or ambiguity that exists within the orders. I do want to acknowledge the way the House functions when it comes to these orders and the degree of goodwill that is shown across the House to scrutinising them appropriately through the Regulations Review Committee, something that I regard as very, very important. I hope that that process will continue in that spirit.

CHRIS BISHOP (National): Thank you, Mr Speaker. The National Party will be supporting the motion to approve the orders, and I want to echo the remarks of the Minister for COVID-19 Response around the collegial and proper way that these orders are dealt with, and also explain to the House my deep sense of pride and happiness at being a new member of the Regulations Review Committee for this Parliament. I started my life—

Hon Chris Hipkins: Once more with sincerity!

CHRIS BISHOP: Ha, ha! No, no, I mean that very sincerely. I started my parliamentary career as the third Government backbench member on the Regulations Review Committee, and coming from a quasi-legal background into the Parliament—

David Seymour: Pretty legal!

CHRIS BISHOP: Ha, ha! Yeah, that’s right. Some would say pretty legal. Coming from a public law background into the Parliament, it was explained to me—I think I’ve told the Parliament this before, but indulge me, sir—at the time that the Regulations Review Committee was regarded as the dreg committee—the dregs of the parliamentary committee system.

David Seymour: No, it’s the highest of the high!

CHRIS BISHOP: That’s right—the highest of the high, says Mr Seymour. And it was explained to me—I can’t remember who said it to me, but I think it was a long-serving member. It may have been from the Government of the day or it may have actually been from the Opposition, and they explained to me that the Regulations Review Committee was the bottom of the bottom, and the only way you could go was up. And I was also on the Finance and Expenditure Committee at the time, so it was a slightly strange comment.

But regulations review is a critical committee, partly for the reasons that the Minister has outlined, but basically we conduct an interrogation, an investigation, into the legality of subsidiary tertiary instruments passed by entities that Parliament has given, essentially, rule-making authority to. And that sounds incredibly boring, but it’s actually critical to the rule of law. The committee functions a bit like a court in that sense. And, actually, a lot of people sometimes take judicial review actions—and that costs a lot of money and ties up a lot of court time—that could easily actually be dealt with by the Regulations Review Committee. I’m getting the signal to come back to it, so before I continue my soliloquy about the Regulations Review Committee, I will just say that they do do a good job.

In relation to the three orders, I agree with the Minister in relation to the third order, which is the COVID-19 Public Health Response (Air Border) Order (No 2) Amendment Order (No 8) 2021. And just in passing, I note we’ve got to find a better way of getting the nomenclature right around these orders, because we’re now up to No 8—

David Seymour: The Regs Review Committee could do that!

CHRIS BISHOP: Potentially, the Regs Review Committee could do that. We’re up to No 8 for the air border order in 2021, so we probably need to find an easier way, but I agree that that’s a no-brainer.

In relation to the first one, which is the vaccination order, we will support that. We do just note the length of time it took to pass the order in relation to the ports in particular, for example. So the reality is 35 percent or so—and that’s the last data I have, and it’s a couple of weeks old, so it’s probably, say, around 30 to be generous to the Government. So around 30 percent of frontline port workers are unvaccinated. And that is a real concern—it really is. The Prime Minister said in February—or late January, actually, I think it was—that it would take two to three weeks to do our frontline border workers. Well, here we are in August, and 30 percent of port workers are unvaccinated. And I acknowledge there are issues with vaccine hesitancy amongst some, and I acknowledge that they’re a private sector workforce, but I think it’s not unreasonable to make the point that we should have moved faster and sooner in relation to this order. So we support it, but it has taken too long.

I also want to flag now that I think the time is quickly approaching in which the Government and the Parliament will have to turn its mind to vaccine mandates or vaccine orders in early childhood education (ECE), where 87 cases of our current Auckland cluster are children aged under 9. And so I think quickly, or at some point in the future, there is going to be a call for teachers in early childhood to be vaccinated. I don’t think it’ll be too long before we get to that point. Delta is particularly contagious amongst the young, and so I think people will start to think about that for ECE—so I hope the Government is turning its attention or its mind to early childhood education vaccine mandates.

And then the second thing is aged care. As I mentioned to the Minister during my question this afternoon in the House in question time, around 80 percent of aged-care workers are vaccinated, but of course that leaves about one in five, 20 percent, who are not. My understanding from talking to those involved in the sector is that the rates in South Auckland are lower than 80 percent—somewhere around the 50 to 60 percent rate, which is obviously concerning, given the outbreak that we currently have in Auckland and South Auckland more generally. So I think the time is soon going to come in which the Government will have to mandate vaccination for those working at aged care. Vaccine rates amongst residents is really good, and that’s great to see, but there are also workers in these clinics.

Finally, just on this order, I think we need a good public discussion at some point around the concept of vaccine mandates for private sector workers as well. As the rates of vaccination coverage go up, and that’s a wonderful thing—as I said in the general debate, the best thing people can do for the future of this country is go out and get vaccinated—but at what point or is the Parliament and the House comfortable with private sector employers saying, for example, that their workers have to be vaccinated? Or to take a slightly more extreme example, what about a private sector business saying that “only people who have been doubly vaccinated are allowed on my premises.”? Now, it’s illegal to go out and say, “People under or over a certain age can come on to my property.” if I’m selling goods or services—that’s illegal; it’s illegal under the Human Rights Act. It’s illegal to say, “Only men are allowed in my shop.” That’s illegal as well.

Is it the current legal position that shop owners can say, “I’m only allowing you on my premise or into my bar or club or my concert”—for example—“if you’ve been doubly vaccinated.”? And these conversations have happened overseas already, because they’ve got such a high level of courage. We are going to get to that point, thankfully, by the end of the year, and so the conversation, I think, is quickly going to turn around the legality of that. I’m not expressing a view either way, I hasten to add—I’m not expressing a fixed view either way. I’m just saying we have to have a conversation as a Parliament and as a country around that, because it’s a tricky one in which the health and safety obligations of employers intersect with the human rights of citizens, but also intersect with the broader rights of the collective in New Zealand to be kept safe as well. So those are tricky legal issues, and my colleague Scott Simpson attempted to ask the Minister for Workplace Relations and Safety about it in the select committee last week. They had quite an interesting conversation, but I think it would be fair to say the Minister was not particularly interested in having the conversation, and I think it’s quickly going to be time in which we’re going to have to start talking about that stuff.

I agree with the Minister that the second order we are amending is pretty straightforward, although it’s really good to hear—and I note in the report from the Regulations Review Committee, the report notes that the officials are taking the opportunity to review the principal order to identify how it can be simplified and improved, and that’s a good thing. And I hope that they are beavering away and considering how we can make it slightly more easier, and I’m sure that they are doing that. So with those remarks, I just say thank you to the Minister for presenting these to the House expeditiously. I’m sure they are but three of many still to come this year. Thank you, sir.

JAN LOGIE (Green): Thank you, Mr Speaker. While I’m loathe to be here instead of on a Zoom meeting of our Parliament, I rise to take a call, reluctantly, on behalf of the Green Party in support of the motion to approve these latest COVID orders. The reluctance has nothing to do with the orders, just with having to be here undermining our effort of providing—[Interruption]

SPEAKER: Order! Put your mask on!

JAN LOGIE: —strong clear leadership, as that was another example of, to the country about taking this virus seriously, and if we’ve got the ability to work at home, then we should be doing that, because this is a serious issue for us as a country. As much as I enjoyed listening to the history of Chris Bishop’s participation in the Regulations Review Committee, it does not seem to me a priority for the business of this House.

So to speak quite briefly to these orders, we are supporting them. The first one, as outlined by the Minister, is to extend the groups of people and the workplaces where people may be required to have a vaccination. Where previously it was managed isolation and quarantine (MIQ) facilities and front-line borders, it has now been extended, and this order does that, including ports. It also provides exemptions for affected people who do not interact with air crew, crew of affected ships, or international transiting or arriving passengers, so it’s not a blanket covering in every workplace. It refines, also, the clause of the principal order regarding who may grant exceptions and under what circumstances. I note in here there’s a clause for the Minister on providing better guidance on when they might grant an exemption, and that is partly to do with supply chain issues, which also links in part to our ports.

While that was brought up by the previous National Party member, the low rates of vaccination in ports, I would like to do a call-out at this point to Lyttelton Port. That has a very high rate of vaccination, which I understand is because the management of that port has been working incredibly constructively with all of the unions on site, and because the delegates, being the staff members themselves, have been able to provide that leadership for everybody else in the workplace, giving them that confidence and undermining any hesitancy and misinformation. That really is the model that the Green Party would like to see in the future. There is talk about compulsory vaccination and penalties for people who may not be vaccinated, but we want to start from a conversation about where are our social networks that we can lean into to support people to get vaccinated as we know they need to be—and I will come back to the core point, Mr Speaker.

So the second order is around the public health response air border, expressly providing that only quarantine-free travel persons may arrive in New Zealand on an aircraft undertaking a quarantine-free travel flight—seems pretty straightforward. I think we’re all on the same page on that.

And the last point, the order applies to diplomats, consular officials, and certain New Zealand Defence Force members. Just on this point, and their exemption around the requirement for quarantine—just for clarification, the consular and defence personnel covered by this order were already exempt from the general obligations of a negative COVID test in isolation or quarantine infringement liability in the principal order, as it was made last year. So this order just extends that exemption to ensure they aren’t captured by the other quarantine-free travel obligations that sit in separate clauses. The reason for that exclusion is around international norms around diplomatic relationships, and it does not mean—I want to give people an assurance, and we’ve asked the questions—that they are coming into New Zealand and putting us at risk. There have been conversations and there are protections in place for them to follow, but it just is not covered in the same way through our law as for other populations. So the Greens are happy to support this.

DAVID SEYMOUR (Leader—ACT): Thank you very much, Mr Speaker. I rise on behalf of ACT in support of ratifying these orders that have been reported back from the mighty Regulations Review Committee. I want to offer my congratulations to Chris Bishop for his second term, or tour of duty, as he might call it, on the Regulations Review Committee. People joke about it being the highest of the high. I actually believe that we don’t spend enough time on regulatory responsibility in New Zealand politics. It’s an extremely important committee, and I know that our member on that committee, Toni Severin, has found it to be extremely engaging and important work.

How brave are the Green Party? Yesterday, being here was life-threatening; today, Jan Logie just spent the first minute of her speech talking about how dangerous it is to speak here. I will return very shortly to the topic, but you have to say, the difference between Logie and logic may only be one letter, but isn’t it a vast gulf when it comes to the quality of speeches?

The ACT Party’s very happy to support these three orders. The second two are the most perfunctory, I think; really technical matters of what exactly is a quarantine-free travel (QFT) person, ensuring that they’re properly defined and giving exemptions for certain people to be able to be exempt from quarantine or from managed isolation and quarantine (MIQ), those people being in the case of consular corps, diplomats, and some military people so that New Zealand can maintain its external links. I think those are all good and well.

Similarly, the requirement for vaccinations for certain essential workers, we support that because it is just so critical. We understand there’s a range of issues around personal choice, some people are sceptical about vaccination and hesitant to get them, but we also know that from the point of view of New Zealand—as I said earlier, I fear for our small country—we need to be able to maintain relative safety. We don’t want people to die from this virus. For people that say it’s not dangerous, you only have to look at Scotland: 8,000 more deaths than usual in the last 18 months. So don’t worry about whether we’re properly diagnosing them; 8,000 more people than expected died in Scotland, whose population, similar to New Zealand, is 5.4 million.

We also need to stop the hospitals from being overwhelmed. New Zealand’s hospitals are already overwhelmed. They cannot support many more patients from COVID. That’s why we support this idea that people who are right at the front line, where COVID may come into New Zealand, should be vaccinated, because we know that it is the most significant protection we have at the moment from people getting badly infected, passing it on, and, ultimately, people being hospitalised or dying.

So that’s all well and good, but I think if this House is going to be asked to ratify these kinds of powers, then we should also be asking the Government what it’s doing to follow through. You know, I was astonished to read, I think it was 9 August, not so long ago, about three or four weeks ago, that after this order was put in place on 30 April—so May, June, July, 9 August—about 14 weeks passed and still 60 percent of border workers in the Bay of Plenty, at the Port of Tauranga, not vaccinated, 1,500 border workers in total still not vaccinated. It’s one thing to pass these orders and make these laws, but we need a Government that can actually deliver, and the fact of the matter is the Prime Minister said, “Look, it’s going to be mandatory—you know, no ifs, no buts.” in April and then, months later, still nothing had happened. We actually need, if we’re going to pass orders like this, an executive Government that is prepared to implement them. Otherwise, there’s not a lot of point in passing such laws or orders. I just say to the Government, we know that you’ve had trouble with supply, but you’ve got to do better at vaccine delivery. If you can’t vaccinate the vectors, the people at the front line, on the border, then it’s not clear what the purpose of some of these rules are.

I want to echo a point that Chris Bishop raised that I think is extremely important. I don’t believe in vaccine mandates in the sense of forcing a person to be vaccinated unconditionally, but it is also true that a lot of people in our society are going to find conflicts of rights over vaccination, and I think in future orders we are going to have to consider what sorts of rights people have to stipulate vaccination, not that another person must be vaccinated unconditionally but that they will only transact with a person if that person is vaccinated. This is very important. It’s not a question of being mandatory; it’s a question of being able to lay claim to the right to only interact with vaccinated people in certain contexts.

I’ll give you an example as a local MP that, Mr Speaker, I’m sure will be familiar to you. During the measles outbreak last year, I had a principal get in touch and say, “Look, you’re my local MP, I need your help. I’ve got students at my school who refuse to be vaccinated for measles. I’ve got other students who, for medical reasons, cannot be vaccinated for measles. Under the Health and Safety at Work Act, I’m a person conducting a business or undertaking (PCBU). If I let those people who won’t come to school and potentially infect those who can’t, what is my liability, and should I have the right to insist that if students want to come on to the premise that I as a PCBU am responsible for, they be vaccinated?” We’ve already had a rehearsal of that, and there are no doubt going to be many further clashes of rights as it goes on.

I just want to go through a recent article in The New York Times—this is becoming very real—“Goldman Sachs: … requiring employees to be fully vaccinated to enter its U.S. offices starting … Sept. 7. JPMorgan … encouraging … Bank of America: … only allowing vaccinated employees to return to the office. … Wells Fargo: … encouraging but … not announced a mandate. … Google said in July … it would require employees who returned to the company’s offices to be vaccinated against the coronavirus. … Apple: … encouraging. Amazon: The retail giant told its corporate employees … they did not need to return to their offices … pushing back [the] deadline … Microsoft … would require proof of vaccination … Airbnb said … it would not ask employees to return to the office … [in order] to provide greater clarity”.

We could go down all of these blue chip American companies, that’ll be familiar to just about every New Zealander, that are grappling with this issue, and no doubt firms in New Zealand, from your fish and chip shop up to your large corporate on the Auckland waterfront, are going to have to grapple with those same issues. So I believe that that is a debate that needs to happen in an open and respectful way. This order is, in a way, a prelude to it, but the future debate is going to be far more sophisticated than the Government simply saying all people in a certain place must be, for public health reasons. It will be about managing conflicts of rights.

So we certainly support these orders. I think they’re the right thing to do, for the reasons I’ve outlined, but I also believe that it is very important that in future, or, actually, in the very near future, because preparedness has been a theme recently—I say while the Minister for COVID-19 Response is sitting here—this Government is actually preparing to think about these issues that are emerging overseas and need to be dealt with here. Thank you, Mr Speaker.

Motion agreed to.

Orders approved.

SPEAKER: In accordance with a determination of the Business Committee, the House stands adjourned until 2 p.m. tomorrow.

The House adjourned at 4.04 p.m.