Estimates Debate — Vote Immigration

Thanks for the opportunity to take a call on Vote Immigration. I ask the question: is our immigration system working well? I ask whether the system is working well in the case of Sanil Kumar. Sanil Kumar was a young man from Fiji who came here on a work permit. He was diagnosed as having end-stage renal failure, was given dialysis, and was waiting for a kidney transplant. He was forced to leave and go to Fiji, and he died within a very short time of returning there.

The Associate Minister of Immigration has conveniently refused to answer questions in this House on this particular case. What she has been citing is that she did not have a privacy waiver and therefore she could not possibly talk about this case at all. But she knows very well that a privacy waiver does not apply to a deceased natural person. That is excluded from the Privacy Act. In any case, if the Associate Minister and the immigration system in New Zealand had done their work diligently they would have reached a different decision given the facts, as any Labour Minister of Immigration would have done. A Labour Minister of Immigration would have reached a compassionate decision on this particular case and this young man would be alive today—but he is not.

So why is the system under this particular Minister working in such a flawed way? Let us look at the facts. The facts are that this young man, as I said, was working here, he had end-stage kidney failure, and he started receiving dialysis. His family—two first cousins—began the process of being donors, the family began raising the funds, and they raised the $130,000 required to receive—

The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch): Order! Dr Prasad, this is an estimates debate on immigration. The member must tie that back to the estimates on immigration. It is not a debate about a medical condition or what has happened to a person. You must tie it back to immigration.

Well, there is something happening in the funding of the immigration system that does not allow it to actually make the kinds of decisions it should be making. The Minister is hiding behind the privacy waiver. In this particular case, were the agencies funded well enough to provide her with the right kind of advice? The Minister is hiding behind this fake notion that she wrote to me to talk about the funding of this particular case. She says that she took the unusual step in this case of writing to me and saying that I was making inaccurate statements.

The Minister did not write to me. The Minister cannot produce any evidence. However, the Minister did send me a copy of a letter that she had sent to David Cunliffe, which says that there was a $36,000 debt that Mr Sanil Kumar had for the dialysis treatment he was receiving. So I guess the funding of health and immigration is so bad that $36,000 is the price of a life for this particular Government. The Minister did not write to me about that. In fact, what I did say about the funding in this particular case was that there was no cost to the immigration system.

I knew that this family had come to a payment agreement and had said they would pay the debt. Indeed, they started paying this debt. The uncle had taken over this debt—a New Zealand citizen with a good job, a good family, and a good home in west Auckland. That family would have paid this particular debt, but, indeed, the Minister still made the decision on the basis of that. That was the first basis for the decision. Yet the statement about there being no cost to the State was absolutely true in this particular case.

This particular immigration decision was made based on a report that was received by immigration about dialysis being available in Fiji. Well, that report is also worth considering in its detail. What is it about the funding of the immigration system that it does not give this Minister enough resources to actually work out the risk that is in her own report—a report provided to her by experts in health about an immigration decision she has made? The report writes very clearly about dialysis available in Fiji. It says that—

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch): Order!

Yes, it is about the costing, about the funding of immigration and the decisions about this—

The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch): We are not interested in actual procedures in Fiji.

Well, I am trying to bring it within this particular area. I am certainly suggesting that the funding of immigration is not good enough. It is not adequate to allow this Minister to make these decisions. That particular report made it very clear that this young man risked death if he went to Fiji. Three months would be funded. Then he would find a donor. If he did not find a donor in 3 months, he would be taken off dialysis. It says here that he would have a few weeks to prepare for his death. This Minister did not have the expertise, did not take the time to have a look at the decision, and did not analyse the risks, and yet she made the decision that this young man had to return. The decision was made on two bases. One was the amount of resources, the funding this was going to take—that it would cost our system too much—and the other was that dialysis was available in Fiji.

The cost was being met by the family in New Zealand, and that is a fact. They had signed up to it. As far as dialysis in Fiji was concerned, there was no analysis of where it was available or how he would get it, and yet the decision was made. So here is this young man who went to Fiji. The last thing he said to me as he was leaving the airport—and it is reported on television—was: “I believe this is a death sentence.” This was a 30-year-old man, who was in all other aspects fine—a kidney transplant would have fixed him. He could have returned to Fiji and lived with his family, but this Minister made this particular decision for reasons that are unknown. Now the Minister is saying she does not have a privacy waiver—she is hiding behind that.

Well, a privacy waiver is on its way to the Minister. It will be available, and I want to see what else the Minister will bring out for this particular case. The privacy waiver is on its way. There is nothing else to be released. This decision was made on the basis of $36,000 worth of debt, which was being paid for, and on the basis that dialysis was available in Fiji. All the risks were mentioned in the report, but the Minister refused to consider that.

Where was the harm? Where would have been the harm to New Zealand if we had allowed this young person to stay, if our system had been generous enough to let him stay? There is blood on the hands of those who made this decision, and they ought to actually come out and explain, at least to the family. So far they have hidden. They have hidden under this notion that we do not have a privacy waiver. Well, a young man need not have died. At least we would have given him a fair crack at it with a kidney transplant in New Zealand. Believing that there was a kidney transplant available in Fiji or that Fijians might send him to India was such a long shot, and the Minister knew that. It was absolutely a long shot.

Even the report produced by the Ministry of Health was a report based on a paper somebody gave at a conference. They did not even speak to anybody about what was available. It was a paper somebody had given at a conference some months ago. There are so many holes in this particular decision made by this Minister that the Minister ought to explain. It is typical of the kinds of problems there are in the immigration system today.

People tell me that the system is aimless. Decisions are not being made consistently in the immigration system. Two people applying, with exactly the same background, and even having gone to the same school, for the same kinds of job offers are receiving very different decisions. There are many, many cases now of the immigration system being so culturally idiotic that they will go and do interviews of families, of partners trying to come to New Zealand—this is New Zealanders going overseas, marrying, coming back, and their partners applying—and such a monocultural approach is being taken to assess them that they are being denied access to New Zealand.

Decisions in the immigration system are being made by people who are driven on the basis of numbers—the numbers of decisions they have to make. This system is broken. This system needs fixing, and this Minister ought to take responsibility for this case and for the system and, indeed, try to redress many of the problems that are there. Thank you.

Dr Prasad commenced his intervention on Vote Immigration in the Committee stage of the Appropriation (2014/15 Estimates) Bill questioning whether our immigration system is working well. Well, I can advise him and the Committee that it is working a heck of a lot better than it did when that member’s party was in power. When we came into office in 2008, the immigration system was in an absolute shambles. There were thousands of applications pending. The timeliness and quality of the decision making was poor. The Pacific division was in complete disarray. The Christchurch office was making its own rules and then changing them.

I find it quite disgraceful for that member to politicise the tragedy of the Kumar family in the way that he just did. He accuses the Associate Minister of Immigration of hiding behind a privacy waiver. That member got a privacy waiver and then put selective and incorrect data out into the public arena but refused—refused—to intervene and get the Associate Minister to the position where she could tell the whole story about that case. It is disgraceful that that member would continue to politicise that tragic situation when he knows that under the Labour Government from 1999 to 2008 the decision-making landscape was replete with inappropriate decisions that unfortunately had negative outcomes for Pacific residents with health issues. To come into this Chamber and say that this Government has blood on its hands is an absolute disgrace. I challenge that member to be very careful what he wishes for, because if that privacy waiver is ever given to the Associate Minister and the full story of that case is told, he will be very, very embarrassed indeed and will probably be quite pleased to be leaving this House. But I say this: the privacy waiver is a long way too late for that family. I do not believe, even if it is now given, that it is in anybody’s interests, least of all the Kumar family’s, to continue to litigate the facts of that case after Mr Kumar’s passing. It is a disgrace, and that member should be ashamed.

It is not surprising that immigration policy has been very much at the forefront of the discussions around this Budget. I am very proud of this Government’s track record on immigration. The Hon Dr Jonathan Coleman came and spent 3 years cleaning up the mess that was left, and Nathan Guy and I have inherited a much, much sounder Immigration New Zealand, with better timeliness, with a better quality of decision making, and—what is very important to me—very good feedback from its clients about the quality of that service. It is important to note that immigration is quite ubiquitous. It extends into all areas of Government policy. I think that when one looks at the National Government’s four priorities of responsibly managing our finances, delivering better public services, building a more competitive economy, and rebuilding Canterbury, immigration has an underpinning role to play in all four of those goals.

There is no doubt that we are in a global contest. We are in a contest for skills, for foreign investment, for international students, and for tourists, and the degree to which we succeed in that contest is very much a part of the policies, processes, and technologies that we use to deliver a good immigration service. Under Vision 2015, which is very much underpinned by successive Budgets, including this one, there has been quite a transformation away from bricks and mortar and a branch-based structure. When the service and the application processes are put online, we will see what I am confident will be a much, much more efficient application process, where case officers can concentrate more on the quality of the application than on chasing around after paperwork. I think that is an important difference, and it will also achieve the Government’s goal to have at least 70 percent of transactions with the Government online.

But I want to move to two specific areas, and, indeed, the main one does underpin the Government’s objective for the rebuild of Canterbury. The Minister of Labour, Simon Bridges, and I have jointly announced over $7 million of new funding to support the Canterbury rebuild by protecting vulnerable workers and ensuring safe workplaces and fair workplaces. I think this is very important. I have become somewhat concerned at the risk that migrant exploitation, although low, could grow, particularly in the Canterbury region as the rebuild commences. There is no doubt that we are going to need to rely very heavily on migrant labour to assist in the rebuild. The Minister for Tertiary Education, Skills and Employment has invested heavily in skills and training, and we will see our young New Zealanders becoming qualified and being at the front of the queue.

💬 Carol Beaumont: Obviously not enough, given the reliance on migrant workers.

That is right. It is not going to be enough. We understand that. I think both sides of the Committee accept that although there were great opportunities for young New Zealanders—job seekers and trades trainees—to participate in the Canterbury rebuild, given the pace and scale of the work that is required, we are already and will in the future increasingly rely on foreign migrant labour to assist with the rebuild. So it is important to me that those workers understand their rights and obligations and that employers also understand that they need to treat their workers fairly and that there are sanctions for not doing so. That is why the Immigration Amendment Bill (No 2) before the House will significantly increase the penalties for the exploitation of lawful migrant workers, and I am disappointed to note that the Labour Party and the Green Party are not going to support that bill. The important thing about migrant exploitation is prevention. I have been working hard in the migrant community to ensure that people have the confidence to speak up, knowing that in this country the rule of law can be obeyed. I am confident that with the extra resources that we are putting in through Budget 2014, we will be able to do that.

The other part of the new money that came out of Budget 2014 was for the refugee resettlement programme. It has not had an increase in funding for some years. It is important to me that we ensure that the settlement outcomes for our refugees are as good as they can be. The review in 2012 that led to the refugee resettlement strategy identified that just 43 percent of quota refugees are in full-time paid employment 5 years after they arrive in New Zealand. That is just not good enough, and that is why we reframed the settlement strategy around work as an important indicator of good settlement outcomes. I think with this extra funding we will certainly be able to do that.

One of the most disappointing parts of Budget 2014 was the oblique reference in Treasury documents to strongly positive permanent and long-term migration being misunderstood by the media and by certain elements in this House as somehow an immigration bow wave coming through into New Zealand. Nothing could be further from the truth. Positive net migration is being largely driven by New Zealanders not leaving and more New Zealanders coming back. Indeed, the residence programme has seen a reduction of over 20 percent in resident visas in the last 6 or 7 years. But it is important for people to understand the difference between net migration and immigration, and even members of this House still do not, with some of their confusing interventions.

I think we have dramatically turned round the performance of Immigration New Zealand. I am very pleased with the way in which that department operates. It is important that we have policies that are not too loose—nor too tight, for that matter—and that are skills-focused but fulfil our humanitarian and family reunification obligations. I think they do that, and I am very pleased with their performance.

Vote agreed to.

Vote Lands agreed to.

Vote Senior Citizens agreed to.

Vote Women’s Affairs agreed to.

Vote Courts agreed to.

Vote Revenue agreed to.

Vote Pacific Island Affairs