Immigration Bill

I am so pleased to be able to speak to Part 4 of the Immigration Bill, and to speak only positively about advanced passenger processing. I was the Minister of Immigration when we introduced advanced passenger processing, and it was a very proud moment in my life. Extending the border offshore is certainly something that is of significant benefit. But it does raises privacy issues.

I will share a recollection I have of a privacy seminar that I spoke at, a short while after we had moved to introduce this measure. Justice Michael Kirby was speaking at the seminar as well; in fact, he was opening it. It was a very interesting debate, because he raised the question of the vast quantities of information held by airlines. It was a significant privacy issue, given that the information was in the hands of private organisations, and some State-owned organisations. Huge amounts of information are held by these carriers. The point he was making, though, was whether it was an appropriate digression from normal principles of privacy to allow those vast quantities of information to be brought together. His view was that there was a difference with the airlines bringing people into Australia or New Zealand—those were the examples that he was using. In neither Australia nor New Zealand does one have to produce an ID card just to be walking down the street. There are countries in the world where one has to produce an ID card if asked to do so. In New Zealand and Australia, something that we actually value about living here is that we do not have to have ID cards. He said that for us to be part of a process that enables us to know who is coming here, who they are, where they have come from, and why they are coming here, that is perfectly acceptable. I think that goes a considerable way to meeting a lot of the concerns that people have about information that is being held by carriers.

I think it is important that we can shift the border offshore, because we can manage a lot of the concerns we have as a small isolated island State and a lot of the risk around our borders. We are subject to some of the concerns that overseas countries have to deal with on an hourly basis, although in New Zealand it is on a daily basis, a weekly basis, or a monthly basis. So I am very supportive of this part of the bill.

We are getting into the detail of the Immigration Bill, and Part 4 is very much a process part of the bill. As the previous speaker mentioned—quite glowingly, I think, given her being the person who thought of it—this part also relates to the processes around advanced passenger processing.

I come back to the comment that the member for Dunedin North made about Part 1, particularly around the issue of review, because it is relevant to Part 4 in the context of the Supplementary Order Paper that the Minister of Immigration has brought forward. In fact, Mr Hodgson tabled an amendment for a review of this bill within 2 years, or alternatively 4 years. That amendment probably had members of the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee shivering in their boots when they thought about the fact that this bill has taken nearly 5 years to get to the Committee stage. I completely understand what the member was trying to do, but certainly a review in 2 years’ time would not be anything like as comprehensive as the making of this legislation. The member agreed that there were other ways to do it.

One way, I think, is to future-proof the legislation to enable those sorts of changes to be effected as opportunities and technologies come about. The Minister’s Supplementary Order Paper in relation to pre-screening and the trans-Tasman agreement that has been reached between Kevin Rudd and the Prime Minister is a very good example of the sort of future-proofing that we can do. We have here an amendment that will enable the processing of passengers before they get on to the plane from a biosecurity and a passport control perspective, and that will certainly speed up the process at the point of embarkation. I think that is a really good example of not waiting for a review to make that change, but also of future-proofing, because the provision does not just apply to a trans-Tasman service; it is written in a way that could apply to any international inbound service to or from New Zealand, albeit it would probably be most effective in a point-to-point transfer, and if a stop-off was required in transit in the Middle East or South-east Asia the system might be a little less effective. Nevertheless, we have future-proofed this part.

I also want to mention again biometric testing. Whereas in Part 2 we had the power of the Immigration Service to require biometric testing, we now have, in Part 4, an obligation on the passenger to supply that information. The same sorts of risks and onuses both on the passenger and on the Immigration Service remain, and I do not think it is worth relitigating that. But I acknowledge that this is another part where the obligation now falls on the passenger. We are into the business end of the bill and I certainly commend Part 4.

Although there are benefits from Advance Passenger Processing overseas, there are also downsides from that, and those have been identified by Amnesty International and the Human Rights Commission in their submissions to the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee on the Immigration Bill. I have an amendment to clause 89 to try to correct that situation.

Both the Human Rights Commission and Amnesty International say clause 89 may infringe article 14 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, according to which every person has the right to seek asylum. That is from the Amnesty International submission, and the Human Rights Commission’s submission is very similar in that respect. Clause 89 could also infringe New Zealand’s adherence to the 1951 United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, because it is out of the spirit of that convention to prevent asylum seekers from hopping on a plane to come to New Zealand to claim asylum, particularly, perhaps, when they are coming from a rather repressive country. I think New Zealand has flights arriving from Dubai and Shanghai—places with repressive Governments. There may be asylum seekers from those countries, and under clause 89 of the bill the aircraft carriers are supposed to deny those asylum seekers the right to get on a plane if they do not have fully effective documentation.

I have set out on Supplementary Order Paper 31 in my name an amendment to rectify that by adding to clause 89(1) the following paragraph: “(e) that the carrier or person or person in charge of any craft cannot be held responsible under subsection (1)(a) if the passenger is to claim asylum in New Zealand under the Refugee Convention 1951.” This amendment makes it clear that if someone comes off a plane in Auckland from Dubai or Beijing and claims asylum, then the carrier does not have any responsibility for that. It is important to put that provision into the legislation. Otherwise we are violating, as I said, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and our adherence to the 1951 convention.

Already the number of people who are claiming asylum at the border has gone down to virtually single figures, I think, and that is partly because of the Advance Passenger Processing system. We are already lucky, in that we are at the end of the chain in terms of the desire of people to claim asylum here, compared with, say, countries in Europe. We should not put additional legal barriers in the way of asylum seekers. It is a very important part of having a compassionate society that we should be open to people who come here to seek asylum. We cannot glory in having such a dramatic drop in the number of applications that we are receiving; that is not the mark of the humanitarian society that we should be.

I will take a short call on Part 4, which concerns arrivals and departures. This is not a contentious area at all. It does not deviate too much from the original 1987 Act.

I will make some comments about advance passenger identification. I think that is obviously a very important way that we can screen arrivals in New Zealand. I have had a tour of Auckland International Airport, and I was able to look at the very sophisticated ways in which immigration staff look at on-board profiling and pre-board screening. It is very sophisticated, and clearly that is the way to go to prevent people from reaching our borders and to stop them getting to our borders in the first place.

This bill establishes immigration control areas for immigration processing and maintains advance passenger processing obligations. In the debate on Part 2 we talked about biometric screening, and clearly that is the way of the future. Part 4 states that passengers travelling to New Zealand are obligated to provide biometric information. I note in clause 110A that people who are leaving must also allow biometric information to be obtained from them. I think that this is a non-contentious part of Part 4, and I commend this part to the Committee.

The question was put that the amendment set out on Supplementary Order Paper 31 in the name of Keith Locke to clause 89 be agreed to.

I seek leave for the Committee to report progress.

The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Rick Barker): Leave is sought for that course of action. Is there any objection? There appears to be none.

Progress reported.

Report adopted.

The House adjourned at 8.51 p.m. (Thursday)