“Director General of Health Ashley Bloomfield needs to let New Zealanders know if he has appointed Hone Harawira and the Tai Tokerau Border Control as Enforcement Officers under the law,” says ACT Leader David Seymour.

“The announcement of joint iwi-police roadblocks raises important questions of who’s proposing what to whom, and in what order.

“The COVID-19 Public Health Response Act says, at Section 22, that an iwi group may be an approved enforcement officer.

“At Section 18, it says that the Director General may approve a specific person or group to be an Enforcement Officer.

“So has Ashley Bloomfield approved Hone Harawira and the Tai Tokerau Border Control (TTBC)?

“Are they being approved because they have threatened to run checkpoints anyway? Or are there genuine public health reasons? If the latter, at what point did Ashley Bloomfield request that there be extra checkpoint capacity, and how did he decide to use the TTBC instead of other options?

“If Ashley Bloomfield has made TTBC an enforcement officer, who will propose the location and times for the checkpoints? Will they have a code of conduct? Will it be standard police operations, or will they change the way they operate to accommodate TTBC? Who will decide that?

“Altogether, these decisions are constitutionally significant. If the TTBC is effectively deciding police operations then we have a transfer of sovereignty from the New Zealand people to new unelected directors in Northland.”

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