Page:New Zealand Parliament Hansard 2021-03-09.pdf/31

9 Mar 2021 COVID-19 Public Health Response Act. And, I guess, the safety valve that the Government put in place—and I think it was a good one—was to be able to continue to debate the orders that were put in place, because we gave some pretty extraordinary powers to the Minister and the Chief Executive of the Ministry of Health that would restrict New Zealanders' freedoms. We felt that Parliament, being an elected House of Representatives, should have the ultimate oversight over that, and it has. As ACT, we believe that these orders certainly haven't threatened New Zealanders' basic liberties in any particularly pernicious way, and we’d actually encourage the Government to start using them more surgically, for want of a better term, so that it can combat COVID-19 without putting such damaging blanket restrictions on New Zealanders' freedoms such as, for example, spending most of the last three weeks under some level of restriction.

As Aucklanders, that is having a devastating effect on kids' education, on people's non-COVID healthcare, on businesses going broke. I've got businesses—the Minister said the events space is going well; he should ask the people at the ASB Events Centre, an iconic venue in huge trouble. You ask, "Well what does that mean?" and "Why is that relevant here?" Well, we have orders and restrictions under the alert level regime, at least, which mean that you can go to a shopping mall with thousands of other people—Westfield Newmarket every Saturday, every Sunday; there's more people in that mall than a lot of towns in this country—and yet ASB Showgrounds can't have an event with the same number of people, even though they're prepared to put much more stringent controls into the access that people have. We'd make the case, on behalf of the ASB Showgrounds and other people trying to hold events, that actually the Government should use these powers it has to make orders that are a lot more surgical in the way that they keep people safe from COVID and allow people to go about their business. You can go to Westfield Newmarket with a couple of thousand other people at a time, constantly going in and out—very dangerous. Having a controlled, restricted entry in and out, with special planning of where people can stand at any given time within the ASB Showgrounds—people who are experts at tracing who comes and goes from their exhibitions for other reasons, by the way—they can't do it. And I think that's an example where it could be more surgical.

Another example, you know, we've got air border orders that we are confirming here. The border is now facing quite a range of different people. We haven't had a case from Australia, if I understand it, for months, but we’re still getting cases almost every day from other parts of the world. There are countries that are very close friends of New Zealand, particularly our friends in the Pacific—you know, your Samoa, your Cook Islands—where they have no cases of COVID and haven't had for a long time, in Samoa's case ever. They are at greater risk of catching COVID-19 when they get put in managed isolation at the Pullman in New Zealand than they are in Samoa or once they get out to the rest of New Zealand. The question is, why do we endanger them like that? Again, the Government could use the orders, the powers this Parliament's given it, to be more surgical, to actually start treating different risks differently.

So, far from saying that we need to restrain the Government or stop it from using these orders, I'd actually encourage them to make use of the powers that Parliament's given the Government to put in place orders that allow people to maximise their freedom and prosperity without having to be further endangered by COVID. There's lots of opportunities to do it; I've given two. What do I know? I'm just an Opposition member of Parliament who's identified two pretty obvious opportunities that the Government hasn't used. I think, if the Government was to bring the extraordinary resources that it has, $100 billion a year budget, I suspect it could actually think up quite a few more ways to use more surgical orders.