Immigration Amendment Bill (No 2)

I move, That the Immigration Amendment Bill (No 2) be now read a second time. I want to take members back to the Department of Labour’s 2002 briefing to incoming Ministers, because it has been commented on in this debate. I want to read the opening statement in it—

💬 Rt Hon Winston Peters: What page?

Page 125. The member might like to refer to it—I know he carries it around with him.

Too often the success of the immigration programme has been primarily equated with quantity rather than with quality of outcome. The 1991 general category was initially perceived as a success, because it attracted high numbers of migrants with high human capital. In practice, outcomes were often poor, because their capacity was not necessarily transferable. This bill, the No. 2 bill, is focused on ensuring that immigration policy is able to address the concerns that we are talking about.

I heard New Zealand First members saying that—

💬 Rt Hon Winston Peters: I raise a point of order, Madam Speaker. The Minister referred us to page 125. I have a full copy of that briefing paper right here and there is no page 125 in it. [Interruption] No, here it is here. The Minister gave it to me.

💬 Madam DEPUTY SPEAKER: That is a debating point, as the member knows.

💬 Rt Hon Winston Peters: No, it’s not.

I raise a point of order, Madam Speaker. Can I please have this matter addressed? It was page 125 of the Department of Labour’s compiled briefings to Ministers.

💬 Rt Hon Winston Peters: I raise a point of order, Madam Speaker. The briefing to the incoming Minister of Immigration by the Department of Labour, Te Tari Mahi—everything has a Māori name these days—is that of August 2002. That is the briefing paper that was given to her, and she gave to me, so where is the page 125 she is talking about?

💬 Hon Dr Michael Cullen: The Minister said she had the compiled ministerial briefings. The member does not have the whole lot; he has only one.

I heard New Zealand First members saying that we were denying people the right to residence, and I want to say in this House that nobody has the “right” to residence in New Zealand. In fact, under the skilled migration policy, it is a privilege. That has been the fundamental problem with the legislation, the policy, since 1991. The year 1991 brought in a right to residence, backed up by a Residence Appeal Authority. Who was the Minister of Immigration in 1991? It was the Hon Bill Birch. Who was in Cabinet in 1991? It was the Rt Hon Winston Peters. He was there in Cabinet when this policy was brought in; he absolutely was. It is a bit rich for anyone from New Zealand First or National to come into this House and criticise this Government for trying to address the problems that their policies created.

This bill does three things. It allows for the global prioritisation of applications. That enables us to take those who have job offers relevant to their qualifications or experience and address their applications first. We are turning the general skills category around so that it works for New Zealand. It is supposed to be the category where skilled migrants come to New Zealand to make a contribution to this country, to be part of this country, and to be part of its economic development and its future. We are making the general skills category work in the way that it was originally intended to work, but unfortunately the National Party—and New Zealand First in conjunction with the National Party—failed to address the fundamental flaw in the immigration system.

This bill lapses certain applications. It lapses all general skills applications made before 20 November last year and not decided by the time this bill comes into effect—except where points have been claimed for a relevant offer of employment in New Zealand, except where they have claimed 28 or more points, or have been issued a job-search visa or permit, or have been invited to apply for one, or have been determined by the Immigration Service to meet the requirements for approval in principle. So people who have already been invited to apply for a job-search visa will continue to have that process. Where they have been issued with a job-search visa, they will continue to have that process. If it has been determined that they meet the requirements for approval in principle, they will still be processed. If they have claimed 28 points or more, they will still be processed. If they have claimed points for a relevant offer of employment in New Zealand, they will still be processed. Not one single person that Pansy Wong mentioned—namely people who claimed after 20 November last year—will be lapsed by this bill. Not one single one of them will be lapsed, because they meet the new criteria as established by the policy.

I believe it is better to lapse the applications when we know through evidence, through research, and through all of the examples that have been brought to our attention, that those people are highly unlikely to succeed—even when members of New Zealand First raise, time and time again, the issue of highly skilled applicants doing unskilled work. We have been raising that matter since we became the Government, and this is the way we are addressing it. When I became the Minister of Immigration, I said that there were people in this country who had residence and who could not get work, and that there were people in this country who had work but could not get residence. This is the Government that has been prepared to front up to both of those problems, and this is the Government that is making a real difference. We want to address the issue of those who will not succeed in a New Zealand environment—to lapse their applications so that we can get on with the job of bringing in the people we know will succeed.

The third thing this bill does is that it clarifies the distinction between Government immigration policy and Government residence policy, which has been confused by the High Court decision. I want to ask the National Party—and it will be very interesting, because it was its Cabinet that made the original decision to bring in the job-search visa—did it ever intend to include the job-search visa as part of Government residence policy? Of course not! Nobody seems to front up to that in the National Party.

In 1998 the National Party made a fundamental change to the general skills category that recreated the era of 1991. In 1998 it delinked the requirement that the job offer be linked to the skills and the experience that the individual brought. It delinked the qualifications from the job offer, which meant that that party was responsible for saying that if one is a scientist and gets a job offer to work in a laboratory doing original science, one gets five points towards his or her residence. Under its amazing policy in 1998, it also said that if that same scientist gets a job offer as a hamburger bar cook, or a cleaner, then he or she gets five points towards residence. It was the National Party that brought professional migrants to this country and saw their hopes dashed because they were never going to have the opportunity to achieve those ends.

I want finally to comment on the fruits of the case argument. The New Zealand Association for Migration and Investment took the case. It did not take the case with named individuals who were affected by it. I have to say in this House that there are two very distinct groups of immigration consultants in this country, and the New Zealand Association for Migration and Investment represents both sorts. Some want good settlement outcomes, because they actually care what happens to New Zealand. Others do not care about settlement outcomes, because all they want is a fee paid to them when they get a resident stamp in the passport. There are people in this country acting as immigration consultants who do not act in the interests of New Zealanders. The immigration consultants I support are the ones who believe that they have a role to play in actively recruiting the people that New Zealand needs, and that is what this policy is all about.

The Minister who has just resumed her seat tells us that this bill is about better settlement outcomes for migrants to New Zealand. I want to invite members of the House this evening to reflect on precisely what the measure that we have before us would look like if, indeed, the Minister’s assertion were correct. If this bill were being promoted by a Minister who had spent 4 long years in office thinking about how the immigration policies of the previous decade could be improved, is this the bill that the Minister would come to the House with tonight, and would the Minister come along demanding that the House should pass it under urgency?

It is self-evident that this is not a measure being promoted by a Minister with a determination to improve those settlement outcomes. Because the first thing that one would do if one were determined to improve settlement outcomes would be to ask oneself a very basic question about the immigration programme published by the Government that says that 60 percent of the migrants coming to New Zealand in the next 12 months will be in the skills or business category—that is the policy of the Government this year, and it was last year. If we were determined to get people who were going to contribute to our economy and participate in our workforce, would we have a figure as low as 60 percent identified alongside skills and business? If we were unashamedly in the market for providing net benefit to New Zealand as an objective of our immigration policy by having good settlement outcomes, would we have a figure as low as 60 percent?

I am on the record as saying that the figure should be 70 percent or higher. The Minister in the House tonight actually agreed that that might well be right. How is it that the Minister of Immigration, who has spent 4 long years giving careful and earnest consideration to how we might get better settlement outcomes, has not made up her mind whether the figure for business and skills in the Government’s published programme should be 60 percent, 70 percent, or higher? It is absolutely fundamental, if that is the sort of objective one brings to this review, that one would at least know the answer to that question, and the Minister does not know. She concedes I might be right, but she does not know.

One of the other things that a Government and a Minister might do, if they were intent on improving the settlement outcomes for new migrants in New Zealand, is give some passing thought to the fact that there are three different agencies involved in this area. There is the Immigration Service, which hangs over to one side with the Department of Labour; there is the Office of Ethnic Affairs, which is supposed to be involved in settlement programmes; and there is the citizenship function, which sits in the Department of Internal Affairs. I ask the House tonight, how much sense does that make?

Members opposite can make as much as they want of the fact that some of these structural deficiencies might have been around for some time. It does not make them right, and it does not make it right that the Minister can come to the House with a so-called visionary piece of policy designed to improve settlement outcomes, and not give even a passing thought to whether we might get better settlement outcomes by having the citizenship function, the ethnic affairs resettlement function, and the immigration function all parked in one place where maybe some people who talk to each other could actually make some decisions about these things.

I would have thought that that was not rocket science. I have been promoting this as a policy initiative for a little while. If the Minister has not thought about it herself, and if her officials were not smart enough to think about it, she has certainly been quick to pounce on one or two other things that I might have said in this area. I want to know why she has not thought about that sort of structural change. It seems obvious to me that if we were to have an unashamed attempt to improve settlement outcomes, then the resettlement machinery of the Government contained in the Office of Ethnic Affairs would be the first place one would look to see how we could improve the structure, the governance, and the service. It does not seem to have crossed the Minister’s mind that that might be the sort of thing that the House might want to include in legislation that purports to look at such a lofty and laudable objective as improved settlement outcomes for New Zealand’s migrants.

I also ask the House to consider this. If the Government and the Minister did have firmly fixed in their minds an objective of improving settlement outcomes, why have we been asked to pass this bill under urgency? Why was this measure not featured in the Prime Minister’s press conference yesterday afternoon? Why was word not carefully leaked out by the spin doctors from the ninth floor so that the media could get a foretaste of the wonderful policy that was about to be unveiled by the Minister this week?

The answer to those questions is that the Government does not take any pride in this measure. The Government does not seriously believe for one minute that this is about improving settlement outcomes. This is not part of some bold, new, visionary policy—the result of a concerted and structured review over the 4 years the Government has had to give its attention to this matter. This is a tawdry piece of legislation to cut some people, who have entitlements under the current law, off the list because the Minister was too lazy and too incompetent to do a job in due time, and because, since she had messed it up with a retrospective component in what she did do, because she waited too long to get around to it, the High Court rolled her, and she knows that the Court of Appeal will roll her as well.

I say to the Minister that if that is the case—if, indeed, she is asking this Parliament to tidy up her mess—then she will have to show better grace than she has shown tonight. She will have to come along and tell the truth to this House about the nature of the High Court decision made by Justice Randerson. She will have to tell us what her officials have told her will happen when she gets along to the Court of Appeal. She was so keen to assert on 17 June that she was off to the court, because that would be the way in which these minor technical difficulties would be overcome. [Interruption] Mr Carter asks what became of that initiative. I say to the Minister tonight that she cannot seriously expect the House to spend its time under urgency giving attention to this matter, when she cannot even tell us what happened to the appeal. What has happened to the appeal?

💬 John Carter: Did they have one?

Well, I ask the Associate Minister, Mr O’Connor, who is in the House tonight, whether he would like to tell us what happened to the appeal that the Government announced on 17 June that it would lodge. The Government was so confident that Justice Randerson had got it wrong in the High Court decision. Does Mr O’Connor have an answer to that question? Does Mr O’Connor know about the High Court decision and about the decision of the Government to appeal?

💬 Rt Hon Winston Peters: No.

Apparently not. I say to the Associate Minister that we will put up some more people to speak on the subject and to keep things moving while he is out the back with the officials and they tell him about the High Court decision—which found that his Minister acted unlawfully—and about the prospects that the Government has if it goes to the Court of Appeal. Then the Associate Minister can come back into the Chamber and do what the Minister did not do—which is, to tell us the truth about this measure. Here tonight we are carving a whole bunch of people off a list, on which they currently have some entitlements, and by which, unless the Court of Appeal decided to do something to uphold the Minister, they would retain some entitlements. But we are cutting them off the list. Whether those people should be considered for residence in New Zealand is not really the point. The point is the way we do business. We tell people what our expectations are, we invite them to put their hands up, and then we deal with them fairly, predictably, and with certainty—except that this Government does not want to do that, because the Minister got some things profoundly and fundamentally wrong. She dressed them up in not a very convincing fashion with some arguments, which do not hold any water, about improving settlement outcomes.

It is a pleasure to get up and support my colleague Lianne Dalziel, and congratulate her on her management of this legislation, which is not driven, as Mr McCully would claim, by any High Court ruling. It is driven by something that he may lack—his party certainly does—and that is vision. This is legislation to drive—

💬 Ron Mark: Where was your vision during the election?

—vision in this country where skills and industry are matched, where immigration and industry are matched, and where immigration and community are matched, so that we achieve some positive outcomes for this country from immigration, and where we match the aspirations of those coming into this country with the opportunities and needs of industry in New Zealand. It is as simple as that, and this Government is prepared to make the calls that are necessary and to bring into this House legislation that achieves those visionary goals. I know that it is hard—if not impossible—for any of the parties on the other side of the House to understand that we can guide some vision for this country, and put in place some legislation that helps achieve that, and in the end produce a better country than when we started—because we took over from a miserable National Government, supported by New Zealand First at one stage, and then by ACT as well, that had created policies that misled many immigrants to this country. They were brought into the country in the belief that they would walk right into jobs because they had skills. We are aligning their skills with job opportunities. I am happy to be part of a Government that has developed sound legislation, and I look forward to its passage through the House.

The Minister has just said he is happy to be part of a Government that introduces sound legislation. There could be no more unsound legislation than the bill before the House. I assume the Government hopes that through its actual effect it will be sound and that the immigration consultants who have wide resources do not inspect it very closely and discover there are loopholes in it. That would be very embarrassing for the Government and would completely destroy the Minister’s statement. But I expect people will be looking at this bill very closely overnight, and informing various people as to how sound it is. They may even allow the bill to go through the House so they can then approve it or take some action subsequently.

But to say that, generally speaking, this type of legislation could be sound is drawing a very long bow. This is retrospective legislation of the worst possible kind, and no Parliament that properly supports the rule of law, the Westminster system, and all those things that we refer to from time to time, should really be supporting this legislation. Governments sometimes have to admit they have made a mistake and did not carry out Government policy properly, and that those people who have lodged applications are entitled to have their applications heard, and if they do not succeed, well, the applications do not succeed. We are not suggesting—and no one would suggest—that all the applications that are before the Government would necessarily succeed. But all the Government is doing here is a wiping away of applications that it thinks will help it to reduce about 2 years of a backlog.

It is the sort of thing one does when the health system has a very long waiting list. One way to end the waiting list is to cut it short or redesign it in some form or another. Or the same thing can be done to the State-house waiting list or suchlike—come up with some scheme whereby it is cut short. Any self-respecting Government would have accepted the High Court decision or would have brought in legislation that, as from today, would have brought the matter to an end and allowed those people who have lodged their applications to proceed with the applications and see whether they were successful.

However, this minority Labour Government, supported by United Future, does not want to take that view. All the other parties in this House that have voted tonight have opposed that view. Retrospective legislation is contrary to all our principles. I heard from Dr Cullen—and I did not touch on this—his accusation of judicial activism against Justice Randerson. He was making his speech at 9 o’clock at night, and he thought he would take up some sort of line he had perhaps heard on the Supreme Court Bill, where a criticism of judicial activism was made. To accuse the judge of judicial activism was quite—

💬 Hon Richard Prebble: It’s just statutory interpretation, that’s all.

It was very simple statutory interpretation—interpretation probably of an administrative law type of case, where Justice Randerson just had to look to see, on the facts, whether the requirements of administrative law had been carried out. There was no statute to interpret, really, just the facts, to see whether the policy had been carried out. To say that this was judicial activism and then to carry on in the way in which he did about the High Court Justice, I thought came very close to a breach of parliamentary privilege, in his attack on a member of the High Court of New Zealand.

That goes to show how hard the deputy leader of the Labour Party, the Leader of the House, was trying to draw attention away from the actual bill and to throw attention on to the personality of the judge concerned. If he says that no judge of the High Court is ever going to tell the Labour Party how it will run the country, I say that, in many respects, that is what judges are for. Ultimately, they are our last resort and we must never get to a situation in which we say that we will ignore what a judge says, or do what we are doing here, which is not just ignoring it but repealing everything that the judge has ruled on. Once we go down that path—we had a debate earlier today, on the Solomon Islands, and we are nowhere near that situation, but we do just wonder where that road will take us.

This legislation is making New Zealand a laughing stock overseas. We have always prided ourselves on the way in which we administer the law here. We are able to go overseas and say to people that if they do a deal with New Zealand on certain specified terms, which are known to everybody, we will make sure that we honour those arrangements and that they are properly carried out, and we will not come down with some judicial type of guillotine and bring the whole process to an end.

It is hard to understand precisely from this bill how many countries are involved, but on page 3 of the explanatory note, under the heading “Nature and magnitude of the problem”, it states: “There are currently around 20,000 general skills category (GSC) residence applications (involving approximately 46,000 applicants) on hand waiting to be processed. This equates to around 2 years of potential GSC residence approvals.” In the time that one gets to try to follow this type of legislation that is being rushed through in this way, one gets slightly confused about the size and the magnitude of the whole thing, but perhaps the next Labour Party speaker can clarify whether there are, in fact, 46,000 people who are involved under this legislation; that is, as applicants only. Then one asks oneself whether those applicants have spouses, children, or other kin who might be coming along with them; and the mind boggles as to just how many people there are—throughout, I assume, east Asia mainly, but also, perhaps, Africa and Europe—who, in one way or another, could be affected by the high-handed way the Government has dealt with this legislation.

New Zealand First has made it clear that we want to reduce the number of immigrants coming to New Zealand who do not have skills and suchlike. Our policy is closer to a target of 10,000 skilled immigrants to New Zealand, so that we could assimilate those people and they could have a chance to make a good contribution. Is 10,000 people right?

R Doug Woolerton: That’s right.

Mr Doug Woolerton confirms that it is 10,000 people. I must be right. We want to see that number of people coming into New Zealand. We do not want to see the 190,000 people that according to the geography department of the University of Waikato came in last year. I am referring to the report by Dr Richard Bedford, the Professor of Geography and Deputy Vice-chancellor (Research) at the University of Waikato, who convenes the Migration Research Group; Dr Jacquie Lidgard, a Research Fellow; and Dr Elsie Ho. Is Dr Jacquie Lidgard a good lady?

R Doug Woolerton: Absolutely.

That is right. Doug Woolerton says so, so she must be a good lady. Dr Elsie Ho is the Senior Research Fellow, and I am sure she would be a “good fellow”, as well, as far as Mr Doug Woolerton is concerned. She is in the Migration Research Group. Those three people have gone to the trouble of collating all the New Zealand Immigration Service’s statistics to the end of 2002, and they have come up with a figure that floored me. Every time I touch immigration figures, I am more and more staggered by the way in which the Labour Government is selling out New Zealand’s heritage. If we say that 6 percent of New Zealand’s immigrants come from east Asia, and if we then swung the figures around and took 6 percent of China’s population—which is about 78 million people from 1.3 billion—and said that 78 million Europeans, Africans, or South Americans were living in Beijing, I think that the people of Beijing would be a bit upset to have 78 million foreigners living in Beijing—or the equivalent, say, in New Delhi. India has a population of about 1.1 billion. If 66 million South Americans, or Chinese, or Europeans were living in New Delhi, there would be hell to pay. There is no way they would tolerate that sort of takeover of their country, but here we have this minority Labour Government doing that type of thing to New Zealand, in the sense that in the last few years we have had 6 percent of our population coming in from overseas. In 1929 Auckland’s population was 200,0000. Now, every 10 years Auckland’s population grows by 200,000, and the majority seem to be immigrants from east Asia. That is appalling.

This is a very sensible bill. One could say it is a no-brainer. It allows the Immigration Service to prioritise applicants based on their contribution to New Zealand, and how could any party possibly object to that? What did we learn from this debate? We learnt that Dail Jones does not like immigrants—sure, he now has his New Zealand passport, and tossed in his Pakistani one. We heard that Winston Peters does not like immigrants, but I guess that makes sense: even though he reckons he is Chinese. He does not like Māori either. It is a good bill; let us get it passed.

💬 Rt Hon Winston Peters: I raise a point of order, Madam Speaker. The member cannot get up and claim that somebody said that he was from some other race, when the person never made that claim at all. I tell that green-behind-the-ears lad that he cannot say that in the House, otherwise he will get something back in the way of a personal response that he will not like.

💬 Hon Murray McCully: I raise a point of order, Madam Speaker. I put it to you that some words were spoken, over which offence was taken. I would have thought it was the practice of the House in such a circumstance that the member who has caused the offence should be invited to withdraw and apologise. I heard the words, and I think Mr Peters was perfectly entitled to take offence. I put it to you that the proper course is for you to ask the member to take the normal steps.

💬 Hon Richard Prebble: This is rather an interesting point. I am not sure that it is as easy to decide as it might be. We now have the race relations legislation, so if one accuses somebody of being another race, can that person take objection? Is that within the rules? I think what the member is really objecting to is that the honourable member who was just speaking, whom I understand has just discovered he is Māori—and Christian Cullen is a Māori, as well, apparently—

💬 David Benson-Pope: Speak to the point of order.

💬 Hon Richard Prebble: I am speaking to the point of order. The point of order is whether the member should be required to withdraw, and I think the real objection that Mr Peters was raising was that he never claimed he was Chinese. I was there, and I do not think he did. What he said was that if one goes back far enough, one finds that Māori came from China. Some people have said that that means Māori are Chinese, but, of course, that is not so. There are many people in China who are not Chinese, and so there are possibly Māori in China. I do not know whether that is right, but I think the member was saying that if one goes back far enough—

💬 Rt Hon Winston Peters: Five and a half thousand years.

💬 Hon Richard Prebble: I am obliged to the member for that. I think that he is asking the member to withdraw because of his claim that Mr Peters had claimed to be Chinese. In fact, Mr Peters did not say that, he just said that some of his relatives came from China 5,500 years ago.

💬 Madam DEPUTY SPEAKER: I think the member is right. I just caution members about referring to race like that. Perhaps the member might like to stand up and withdraw and apologise.

I am delighted to do so. I withdraw and apologise.

💬 John Carter: I raise a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. We have about 30 seconds to go before the House lifts, and rather than having someone start, and then have his or her speech interrupted—

💬 Madam DEPUTY SPEAKER: The time has come for me to leave the chair.

Debate interrupted.

Sitting suspended from 10 p.m. until 9 a.m. (Wednesday)