Here’s another one: we have an NZ COVID Tracer app. Now, I’d be willing to support the Government saying, actually, not only is it mandatory for businesses to display a QR code it’s mandatory for visitors to those businesses to use them. Let me just tell you how it works; it’s pretty simple. Person A, Matt Doocey, comes in. Now, if there’s 50 percent usage, then there’s a 50 percent chance that we get him. Now, of course, I know Matt Doocey uses it all the time; he’s a good citizen, very good representative of the people of Rangiora.
Hon Scott Simpson: Hard-working MP!
DAVID SEYMOUR: Yep, hard-working MP. Fifty percent chance that Person A uses it. Then the next person that comes in, Scott Simpson, hard-working MP for Coromandel, 50 percent chance that he uses it. The chance that both of them scanned in at the same place is only 25 percent, and that’s if 50 percent of people are scanning in. The chances of actually connecting two people who are there is only 25 percent. Now, in reality, we’re lucky if 10 percent of people are using it, and 10 percent times 10 percent is a 1 percent chance of it working. So all the good people like Scott Simpson and Matt Doocey, hardworking representatives of provincial New Zealand who scan in wherever they go—and there’s Stuart Smith, he’s looking for a bit of attention in the back there—
Stuart Smith: Absolutely!
DAVID SEYMOUR: He’s from Kaikōura and he scans in. All the hard-working people like Scotty and Matt and Stuart—I should say Simpson, Doocey, and Smith, Mr Speaker, because I want to follow the Standing Orders—they’re all working hard along with a whole lot of New Zealanders who go and follow the rules, turn their Bluetooth on, and scan, but the reality is that so few other people are doing it that the Government’s not tracing anyone.
We heard that; the silence was deafening. During this Valentine’s Day outbreak, we did not hear anything from the Government. If they’d used the NZ COVID Tracer app to actually connect any cases in that cluster, they would have been shouting from the rooftops. They would have been saying the Tracer app is working; I guarantee it, because this Government’s good at nothing if not publicity. The fact that we didn’t hear from them tells me they didn’t trace a single contact using the NZ COVID Tracer app. Well, I’d be supportive, and ACT would be supportive, of the Government using the powers it has under the COVID-19 Public Health Response Act to actually put in place some mandatory requirements. It’s already mandatory for a business to display a QR code; why not make it mandatory to sign in?
There’s another way they could use these powers, and if that means that we can trace a cluster faster and not have to have a whole city under lockdown at varying yo-yoing levels of restriction for three weeks, I think that’s worth it. And I say that as someone who is nothing if not a civil libertarian. I’d put my reputation as a civil libertarian up against anyone in this House, and I think actually it is worth balancing the requirements that people have in facing an epidemic in order that we maximise our overall freedom. There is no freedom for people losing their businesses, no freedom for kids missing out on their extra-curricular activities and their school. There’s no freedom for people missing out on their mammograms who actually don’t know they have breast cancer as a result. Those are the kinds of things that we need to be thinking about, and so I commend these orders, I encourage the Minister to actually get to work in making more of them.
Because here’s the thing: one of the key roles of Government in the case of an epidemic, an emergency like this—but, actually, in general—is to be an effective and efficient regulator; to set clear rules of the game that people can find and read and understand so they know what the rules are and they understand what the consequences might be of breaking them. As we’ve seen in the last few weeks, when the Government doesn’t do its job of making the rules clear, confusion ensues and people get locked down.
