Immigration (COVID-19 Response) Amendment Bill

In accordance with a determination of the Business Committee, I move, That the Immigration (COVID-19 Response) Amendment Bill be now read a first time. I nominate the Epidemic Response Committee to consider the bill. At the appropriate time I intend to move that the bill be reported to the House by 12 May 2020.

The coronavirus pandemic has had, and will continue to have, an extraordinary impact on the global economy and, of course, on our local economy here in New Zealand. The scale and speed of the epidemic has meant that we have had to work quickly and nimbly to respond and ensure that New Zealand is able to manage its consequences—the immigration system is a good example of this.

The underlying principle of the Immigration Act 2009 is that, except in limited circumstances, individual applications are processed by an individual immigration officer who carefully considers all of the circumstances of the applicant before deciding whether to grant a visa. This one-on-one consideration enables Immigration New Zealand to manage risk and make decisions tailored to each applicant’s circumstances. However, the scale of the epidemic means that we need to be more nimble.

Since the start of the epidemic, New Zealand has closed the borders to all but a few visa holders. Other countries’ travel restrictions and the consequential decline in flights from 700 per week a year ago to 25 per week now have meant that it is also difficult for travellers to leave New Zealand. Visa holders in badly affected sectors may lose employment and, as a result, no longer meet the conditions of their visas; others may be trapped outside of New Zealand and unable to meet visa time frames for travel to New Zealand through no fault of their own. Immigration New Zealand has had to suspend most of its offshore processing activities and has limited onshore capacity while the level 3 restrictions remain in place.

Previous Governments foresaw the possibility of an impact on the immigration system from an epidemic. The Act has a small number of emergency provisions that were triggered when the Prime Minister issued an epidemic management notice under the Epidemic Preparedness Act. Valid visas held by people in New Zealand, which would otherwise be due to expire, are automatically extended, so they will expire three months after the day on which the epidemic management notice expires, and adjustments can be made to detention on immigration grounds. Those settings have the effect of buying us time to address some of the practical challenges by giving onshore visa holders certainty about their visa status at a time of significant disruption. Around 80,000 temporary visas, which have been automatically extended under the epidemic legislation, will now expire on 26 September.

This certainty has been useful but more is needed to ensure that the immigration system can react in a timely and nimble fashion. It is the Government’s view that new powers are needed for a time-limited period. Under existing settings, temporary migrants who wish to remain in New Zealand must submit individual applications for a new visa or to vary their existing visa’s conditions when the migrant’s circumstances change. This can be where they need to be redeployed by their employer into a different role or to a different region, or to look for another job after being made redundant.

Applications are also required by regulation to include fees, passport photos, and travel documents. Receiving and processing such applications is not practical when Immigration New Zealand staff are working from their homes. In particular, they cannot meet banking requirements for handling payments. Waiving requirements on an individual basis is not practical, while individually processing thousands of applications at once is time-consuming and expensive and provides little certainty for affected applicants at a time where we need Government services to be able to be flexible and efficient. This bill therefore amends the Immigration Act 2009 to provide powers to enable the Government to respond appropriately and efficiently to the COVID-19 epidemic by providing additional flexibility in the immigration system. These powers will expire 12 months after enactment.

It is important that this bill is passed without undue delay, to enable immigration responses to the COVID-19 epidemic to be a flexible and efficient as possible at this time. The timetable I’m asking the House to agree to will enable these powers to be brought into effect this month.

This bill aims to ensure that the Government can respond appropriately and efficiently to the immediate immigration issues arising from the COVID-19 outbreak by providing additional flexibility in the immigration system where, for example, large numbers of visas need to be changed or extended at once. It does so by introducing eight time-limited powers. In order, through the bill, they are: (1) the power to extend, vary, or cancel conditions for classes of resident class visa holders; (2) the power to impose, vary, or cancel conditions for classes of temporary entry class visa holders; (3) the power to waive any prescribed regulatory requirements for applying for a visa with respect to classes of people; (4) the power to grant visas to individuals and classes of people in the absence of an application; (5) the power to extend the expiry dates of temporary class visas for classes of people; (6) the power to waive in any individual case the requirement to obtain a transit visa; (7) the power to revoke the entry permission of a person who has been deemed by regulations to have been granted entry permission; and (8) the power to suspend the ability for any class of persons to make applications for visas or submit expressions of interest in applying for visas.

Examples of how these powers could be used include making changes to visa conditions; allowing workers to be redeployed to a different employer or location; allowing visa holders currently offshore more time to travel to New Zealand within the validity of their visa; and suspending new applications for particular visa categories until global border restrictions are loosened and visa holders are able to travel to New Zealand.

One power, the power to grant visas without an application, is likely to be used only in limited circumstances—such as where individuals are too unwell to be able to make an application. I’m hoping that this will not need to be exercised, but there is a precedent. This power would have been useful to support people severely injured in the Whakaari / White Island eruption.

The powers in this bill are subject to a range of safeguards. The majority need to be exercised by special direction, and one, the ability to suspend the making of applications, requires an Order in Council. Some can be only exercised by myself as Minister of Immigration.

When it comes to special class directions, these directions must be published on the internet and tabled in this House. All the powers are also time-limited and subject to a 1-year sunset clause.

This bill will provide important powers to enable the Government to respond to the COVID-19 epidemic through providing additional flexibility in the immigration system. This will enable Immigration New Zealand to work appropriately and efficiently to support the welfare of some temporary migrants and situate us well for our economic rebuilding. I commend this bill to the House.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I would like to begin by thanking the Minister for his briefing last night on this bill. It is helpful to have a heads-up on the bill, and it is important that we get these things right. The Immigration (COVID-19 Response) Amendment Bill is one of those bills that is being rushed through. Of course, there are good reasons for that, but we can’t lose sight of the fact that last week a bill went through the House and passed something that the people that debated it didn’t know was in the bill. Even the Minister responsible didn’t know it was in the bill. We don’t know if there’s anything like that in this bill—I don’t see anything like that, but that’s possible. So it is important that these bills get good scrutiny.

I think that this is hugely important, this bill, in that we had arrived at the situation prior to the COVID outbreak, Immigration New Zealand (INZ) were well behind with 11,500 residency applications waiting to be processed. So they were already under extreme pressure and were in trouble, really, trying to deal with what was ahead of them. Now, this has been exacerbated, of course, by the current situation where we had a thousand people working for INZ that weren’t at work. Under level 3, 20 percent of those people are back at work, and when it goes to level 2, there will only be 50 percent of those people back at work. So we don’t have the resource on the ground to deal with these issues that are in front of us. Yes, I think we need to deal with these variations of conditions quite quickly and deal with them appropriately. I know there are people in Queenstown—it is a really good example of a lot of people that will be out of work in the hospitality sector and the tourism sector in general. That will be the same in other places like Rotorua and my own electorate in Hanmer Springs, with the announcement of the closure of the Heritage Hotel. Those things are going to be happening all over the country. At some point we will need to have a debate about what the future looks like for immigration in New Zealand, because it’s unlikely that we’ll need a lot of people to come into the hospitality sector to work where a lot of immigrants have come in, but that’s a debate for another day. We need to deal with this issue here and now.

That issue is often that people are stuck here through no choice of their own, and they are unable to work. In my own electorate’s case—and particularly where I live in Marlborough—people came into New Zealand to work in the wine industry as winemakers or cellar hands, skilled migrants on temporary work visas came in. Now their job is finished, they’re in Marlborough, they are actually willing to work, and they want to go out and prune grapes. Unfortunately, the way the system works at the moment, if the winery employs them as a grape pruner, that’s fine, or they can go and get another winemaking job with another employer. But they can’t do both. Unfortunately, a lot of the winemakers don’t prune grapes, but vineyards do. And, as we don’t have the people to do the job, we have these people in Marlborough and in other places sitting there and, in some cases, being supported by civil defence because they can’t go home; they don’t have the economic capability to look after themselves now. So we have a mess, and it’s caused partly because of the way this has played out. It’s not anyone’s fault; it’s just the way it is.

The thing is: how do we fix it? Yes, this bill—I hope that the Minister will be prepared, and his officials, to address that very issue. Hopefully this bill will allow that issue to be dealt with quickly and efficiently so that those people can go back to work in a different role. Yes, it’s Kiwis first and always will be and should be, but we don’t have the Kiwis for some of those jobs, and we’re supporting those people anyway.

I think that there has been some criticism of this bill, and particularly from Lane Neave, a law firm in Canterbury, who put an article out that was quite critical of the bill. As one immigration adviser described it to me, this is a leap of faith, this legislation; we don’t have time to consider it. Yes, I think that’s a fair criticism, and it’s something that this House does reluctantly, but it has to. But it is incumbent upon the Epidemic Response Committee and the Minister’s officials to ensure that all of the questions are addressed, that the questions are not only just addressed, they are addressed in detail so that we ensure all the fish-hooks that will be in there are dealt with.

I think one of the other key things with this bill is that there is little to prevent the Minister from using his powers outside of the direct health response. I’ll give you an example: an international student visa holder, the Minister could, overnight, strike out their right to work while they’re here. Now, how would they support themselves? There are some international students here in New Zealand, and there’s already talk from the universities that they want to restart that. Now, the Minister may give assurances that that’s not going to happen, but, nevertheless, under the bill, that could be possible. We know the kind of pressures that will come on when the vast numbers that will lose their jobs materialises. There will be real political pressure on us all to try and soothe those issues and deal with them. That might be one thing that comes out of that, and I think that would be really a very bad move because this bill’s premise is to actually look after the migrants that are in here. So that has to be the underlying response to this issue, remembering also that there is an absence of appeal rights for the exercise of these powers.

This is perhaps the one Government department where a Minister has the most controversial power: to have power over individual people’s lives. When people appeal for a visa or their right to stay or whatever it happens to be, and the Minister, if they do exercise that right, there is no appeal to that. So we have to be very careful that those legislative powers are tightly defined. That is something I’ll be looking forward to exploring further in the select committee. So it’s with that qualified support that I commend the bill to the House.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. Just a quick contribution to reinforce some of the contributions that were made by the Minister of Immigration. To reflect on the two speeches that have already been made: these are not normal times, so in order to manage a process which is, obviously, not running at full steam, the Minister and the Government has seen fit to pass this legislation.

To give us a scale of what the issue is here: as of the end of April this year, there were approximately 350,000 temporary visa holders here in New Zealand; just a little over 200,000 have work visas whose visa employment conditions may need to be varied as we respond to the COVID crisis; nearly 75,000 student visa holders, whose conditions may need to be amended in able to change their course of work or extra hours until the education providers are reopened; and a little under 57,000 on visitor visas whose expiry dates may need to be extended. So there is a scale that we have to deal with, and also a need to do that at speed and to also be nimble.

Pointing to the comments of the earlier member, there are safeguards within this piece of legislation for the measures that have been put in place, most notably the 12-month sunset clause within it, and the necessary steps taken in some instances to get an Order in Council to use some of the powers that are made in, obviously, not a normal way. So it is needed because of scale and the need to be nimble. But to address the point that the member Stuart Smith made, who was just previously on his feet: there are safeguards built into this to make sure that we are doing the right thing as well as being pragmatic in dealing with the response and recovery to COVID.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I have a pretty strict rule of not speaking on matters related to immigration. I get the sense that I would sound like the drunk at the end of the bar talking about the good old days. But I’ve broken that rule twice in a week, which is another measure of the extraordinary times we are in, basically because members of the select committee that would normally talk about immigration issues aren’t here, and, indeed, this bill, the Immigration (COVID-19 Response) Amendment Bill, is going to the epidemic response subcommittee, of which I will be the chair for the next few days.

That subcommittee is going to have the Herculean task of getting advice, calling for, and hearing submissions on this bill and the bill that has previously been debated, the COVID-19 Response (Further Management Measures) Legislation Bill—considering it, suggesting amendments, and reporting back to the House by this time next week. That is no mean feat, but I’m confident that we will be able to do that, and I’m really pleased that we are doing that. I’m not going to relitigate previous comments about the risks of hastening a legislation. As my colleague Stuart Smith said, we will support it, but we do have some concerns, and I want to just articulate some of them.

The explanatory note is very interesting. It, basically, talks about wanting to assist the visa holders, but, actually, the principal goal of this, it seems to me, is to assist Immigration New Zealand with the potentially overwhelming amount of work that it would be required to do to issue visas past the three-month deadline, or at least it’s the later of the three months after the epidemic notice is issued, or the expiry of the visa. So while Minister Faafoi did talk about the 350,000 visa holders that could be in New Zealand right now, it’s by no means the total population of what would be required to be done. That would be a much, much smaller number. I was surprised at those numbers, frankly. That seems to be nearly 100,000 more than the number of temporary visa holders in New Zealand a couple of years ago.

I have a tremendous amount of sympathy and compassion for them right now. I cannot imagine what it must be like to be in a foreign country—even one that you’ve chosen to go to as a working holidaymaker or an international student or an essential skills worker—and to find oneself in the middle of a global pandemic where everything shuts down and the income supply is in the short run immediately curtailed. I commend the Government for including overseas workers in the wage subsidy—I think that was a sensible thing to do—but that’s going to end. There is fear—I know there is fear. My colleagues Mses Walker, Dowie, Dean, and I were on a Zoom call with southern mayors a couple of weeks ago, where Mayor Boult from Queenstown Lakes District articulated what was going on there. It is a tremendous potentially humanitarian problem. I don’t think that is overstating the issue. I think it is going to be very difficult but very important for the Government to decide what is to be done about that. I see this as very much a temporary measure. I am open to the view that it’s not necessary for 12 months, and I trust the Minister of Immigration will be discerning in the application of the powers that we are granting him.

Somewhat of a gentle rebuke, I think, knowing those terrific staff at Immigration New Zealand, but, nevertheless, we don’t have the same problem with the Ministry of Social Development. We don’t have the Minister for Social Development issuing a blanket order to give jobseeker support to a population. It still needs to be considered on its merits on application, and while the Ministry of Social Development is under tremendous strain at the moment, it will resource up, it will find ways, to get through that problem. I think this is kind of kicking the can down the road a bit, in a couple of ways, because eventually Immigration New Zealand is going to be hit with a bow wave of applications from people who want to stay but for whom that will not be possible.

While we talk about the humanitarian challenge and potential there—crisis in the minds at least of those people affected by it—one needs to be very clear that, as my colleague Stuart Smith said, Governments of both colours share the view of a Kiwis-first approach to immigration policy. Therein lies the conundrum, because I understand why the Minister would want to do things like a blanket variation of conditions. Indeed, when I was Minister I found that the variation of conditions process was probably on occasion a little too strictly monitored by immigration officials. But now we’re going the other way, and what we’re saying is Kiwis are going to be losing their jobs in their tens, if not hundreds or thousands, and they are in a contest for what work is available when the hospitality, tourism, adventure-tourism, construction, and education sectors all come back online—how do we apply that Kiwis-first approach?

It worries me. It worries me because overseas workers right now are not eligible for income supports other than the wage subsidy—and I don’t know what thinking the Government’s doing there. It’s a difficult one because the taxpayer has been very clear in its support for the generosity that needs to be shown to those people and small businesses that are at risk right now. But we’re about to go off a cliff and the jobseeker numbers are going to rise dramatically, and it worries me that we are going to pit overseas workers and New Zealanders in a contest for the same roles. The Minister shakes his head, and I’m not sure whether that’s more in hope than confidence, because the powers that he has here will enable potentially international students to work more than 20 hours a week. It will enable essential skills workers who have lost their jobs to go into other industries, to go into other parts of the country.

Now, that in some industries may well be the right thing to do, because, as Mr Smith said, we have a bit of a challenge getting people to work in certain industries. Now, it’s not impossible. I was the Minister after the Psa outbreak, where a number of workers were lining up at Work and Income after jobs were lost, but with employers and contractors still wanting to bring people in from overseas to do that work. It does take a firm hand to say, actually, that’s not appropriate. So there are challenges.

However, that said, I also support strongly things like the Recognised Seasonal Employer (RSE) scheme , and I think there is an opportunity here to be more finessed than this gives the Minister the power to do. That is to say, where there remain genuine labour shortages—and I think the industries that benefit from the RSE scheme could well be amongst them—then that’s fine. Let’s see if we can get those workers in, and, indeed, most of them come from the Pacific. I’m sure there is thinking going on about what to do about that. But the reality is that most of them aren’t; most of them are actually in the very industries that have been decimated by COVID—hospitality and tourism. Why would we be giving extensions to, I don’t know, a Chinese tour interpreter, a visa, and then allowing them to go and work in any other part of the industry when we don’t have Chinese tourists? So we really do have a problem.

The biggest problem I think that is going to come before the Government in the not too distant future is the question of the expectations from those people that won’t be met. We’ve got a residency programme that’s been slashed by a third, under this Government, nearly, and, yet, a great number of the people who are here on essential skills and temporary visas want to stay permanently, and they’re not going to be able to, and they weren’t before COVID, and it’s going to get much harder after COVID. We need to start that conversation as a country. We’ll hear a little bit of it, I think, over the next few days in the consideration of this bill when we hear from the Migrant Workers Association and the Association for Migration and Investment. But it is absolutely crucial that in our efforts to make things better in the short term that we don’t make them worse in the long term, either for the overseas people who are here and potentially stuck or for those New Zealanders who have lost their jobs and are desperate to find new work, to provide for their families, in industries that they might not be used to.

So I look forward to that conversation. It’s going to be a speedy one. We’re going to be back here next Tuesday. But in the meantime, I support the Minister and I commend the bill.

I rise to take a call on the Immigration (COVID-19 Response) Amendment Bill. I rise to support the sentiments expressed by the Minister of Immigration along with the former Associate Minister of Immigration the Hon Kris Faafoi.

The issue at stake here is a change to our immigration settings that enables the Minister to exercise extraordinary power. That power, obviously, will be exercised within a policy envelope, and, given the tremendous level of interest that our party has in the role immigration policy will play going forward in the COVID recovery, there will be lots of discussions as to what is an acceptable envelope. But the Minister has made quite a compelling case, and I don’t think all of our MPs realised how many global citizens were actually caught up by this COVID lockdown—into the hundreds of thousands—and we do need to reflect a level of humanity in dealing with their awful situation. They are not able to pack up and go home. They do want, in many cases, to remain in the country, and I look forward to the submissions that will inevitably flow.

In the general policy statement, the bill outlines—and, actually, the departmental disclosure statement is very helpful as well—the specific time-limited categories of power; eight of them. This enables the cancellation and variation of conditions. Whilst the borders aren’t going to be open in any comprehensive sense any time soon, this does raise some deep questions as to how we reorientate and retrain our own young people, rural and urban, whilst at the same time maintaining a flow of international migration that adds to the knowledge base of New Zealand.

Prior to coming to Parliament today, I took the opportunity to speak to the Auckland University of Technology vice-chancellor, Mr Derek McCormack, who pestered the Helen Clark Government—very successfully, if I recall—to gain the status of a university.

💬 SPEAKER: No. It was his predecessor.

Oh—OK. So I thought I’d pick the brains of Mr Derek McCormack. He outlined to me that a university such as his has about 20,000 students, 17 percent of international character. Those are students that do contribute financially, and those are students who are entitled to work for a period of time. But the challenge now lies with the tertiary sector, ensuring, as they go forward, how they can compete in the absence of a comprehensive opening of the border.

I was left with quite a healthy respect for the level of thinking that is taking place in our tertiary institutions, because I draw a distinction between those legacy anchor institutions and the proliferation of other private training establishments, which I will not taint this speech by talking about, or problems associated with that sector.

So other than to say that we support the sentiments reflected by the Minister of Immigration, this is a tricky area. This does give considerable authority to the Minister; however, it enables him to deal efficiently with the variation of conditions pertaining to thousands—hundreds of thousands—of men and women from overseas who are here. I do say, however, that those decisions will be exercised within a policy envelope, and that policy over time will be developed by the coalition Government. Thank you very much.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I’m pleased to take a brief call in this Immigration (COVID-19 Response) Amendment Bill. This is, of course, the introduction, and as my colleague Stuart Smith has indicated, National will support it in the first reading. It is really important—this is being considered by the Epidemic Response Committee, and my colleague the Hon Michael Woodhouse referred to a couple of the larger organisations that represent migrants and migrant workers, but I would encourage others to participate in the process. Sometimes the most effective submissions are those of very personal stories and examples of when things don’t work.

Obviously, for most New Zealanders at the moment, COVID-19 doesn’t work, but for the 350,000 temporary visa holders that are in New Zealand, they’re kind of stuck in a bit of limbo. When, traditionally, as the Minister pointed out, an individual applicant would have their application considered by an individual immigration officer, that’s clearly not feasible at the moment. If you look at the different categories of visa holders, because I think sometimes there’s far too many generalisations around those who are on work visas—if I reflect on my own electorate, if I reflect on essential workers and those courageous men and woman who got us through the five weeks of level 4 lockdown, many of them were here on essential skilled visas, particularly in our healthcare area and also our aged-care sectors.

So, yes, there is this priority for Kiwis first, but there is a complete and utter naivety if there’s an expectation that someone who’s working in a hospitality job, or was six weeks ago, next week could turn up and work in an aged-care facility. We are very fortunate in this country to have incredibly skilled workers in a whole range of different sectors, many of those heavily occupied by those on work visas, and the suggestion that they could be replaced any time soon is a bit naive. That’s not to say that that work doesn’t need to begin, and I think one of the things that I think is really important in this process, and that I hope will come through in the submissions to the Epidemic Response Committee, is managing expectations.

So there’ll be a lot of people here on visas, whether they’re student visas, whether they’re visitor’s visas, whether they are essential skilled visas, and, actually, as a country, we need to be clear with them about their expectation of a future here in New Zealand. The future after COVID-19 looks very different than it was six months ago, and, you know, there are many people in very challenging circumstances at the moment. I’ve heard, unfortunately, from far too many of them who six weeks ago were working and now they’re ringing the welfare civil defence line asking for housing and food support. That is never a situation those people envisaged they would ever be in in a country they have chosen to come to because of opportunities. So we do need to do right by them, and I’m hoping that the Government is doing some work on that at the moment.

It’s not just about allowing their visa conditions to change and the time frames to change; actually, there’s a much broader issue of support for those who are in New Zealand at the moment, in a way that they’re not getting supported at the moment. I do hope that people do take the time—although it’s a short report back, it will be considered by a select committee. I think the lesson came last week when the wrong bill was passed. That cannot happen again. Even though there’s an urgency in terms of delivering a solution, both to those who are here as migrants and also to Immigration New Zealand, who needs to solve this issue, it still needs fair scrutiny.

So, as I said, National will be supporting this in the first reading. We want to make sure the issues are explored fully. There are extraordinary powers that are provided in here and a lot less scrutiny that’s going to occur, so any time that happens the unintended consequences do need to be considered carefully.

The other point that I want to just add is whether or not the Associate Minister, who has responsibilities for considering exemptions to policy, is also going to take a “new environment, new rules” approach, because many electorate MPs will have faced some absolutely heart-wrenching immigration cases at the moment, and it is absolutely critical that when there are ministerial decisions to be made, they are also considering those based on the circumstances we face as a country, whether it’s a situation I’m dealing with where half the family is overseas trying to get back to continue their work in New Zealand—we’ve got to be far more compassionate and practical and pragmatic about how we reunite those families and how we ensure that those critical essential workers are able to continue their work in New Zealand. Thanks, Mr Speaker.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I rise on behalf of ACT in support of the Immigration (COVID-19 Response) Amendment Bill. I’ll just make a couple of comments about the process there.

I spoke earlier in the afternoon in opposition to the COVID-19 Response (Further Management Measures) Legislation Bill. I think this one has a few aspects that make it worth our support, even in these rushed circumstances. One is that unlike the 133 pages that we had dumped on us, with less than 24 hours to compute what that legislation would mean in the context of the other laws it was changing, what we have here is a 16-page bill that, largely, changes the Immigration Act.

Secondly, not only is it much shorter, but it is also a piece of legislation that, as Michael Woodhouse noted—although he said this with a certain amount of cynicism—is, by and large, about the administration of the immigration department, and I’ll get to why I think that’s actually very needed.

The other thing I think that the Minister’s done that is very responsible is that all of this has a sunset clause, and if the principle is we need to rush legislation to deal with the COVID-19 crisis, then it’s perfectly fitting that we don’t make permanent changes and long-term decisions in the context of a crisis. So I think the Minister’s actually made some really good decisions about how this legislation works.

It is absolutely necessary. If you’d asked me a couple of years ago could any Government department drive more people, more constituents, to the door of my electorate office than Auckland Transport (AT), I would have said, “No way. It’s impossible.” Well, I have to say, over the last couple of years AT’s actually improved a little bit, but immigration has become the leading reason that people come to see me in my electorate office, and, I dare say, MPs’ electorate offices up and down the country, because I get a lot of similar feedback and chatter from other MPs. That problem is not a subject for today—but it does need to be resolved—but it has been badly exacerbated by the COVID-19 crisis, and some of it is for very obvious reasons. The closure of the border was always going to be difficult for immigration, quite obviously. Secondly, the general sense of crisis was going to make a lot of people’s situations difficult—not having work, and so on.

But as the legislation identifies, it was especially going to be a problem for the administration of immigration law, which is all set up to do one-by-one or case by case consideration, when, actually, whole classes of people have been affected by the COVID-19 situation. So I completely support the idea that we’re going to have some general determinations that will help whole groups of people who, through no fault of their own, are caught up.

Let me just give a couple of examples—people that have contacted me. An immigration agent from Hamilton—they’ve got people who are all ready to go, to come here, and they’re not going to be able to do it, and, yet, they’ve bought property. You know, the difficulties that people are facing as a result of this crisis, being caught between two countries, are in many cases harrowing.

I give the example of—the Minister will know a perennial topic for me and people that get in touch with me—the Recognised Seasonal Employer scheme (RSE). Now, you know, at the moment, Porirua is closed. They are trying to individually process visas and agreements to recruit, and the result is that the RSE scheme at this rate will be all but null and void for the coming summer. That has real impacts. I think the Government needs to be clear. If they think that the horticultural industry is supposed to employ Kiwis for the season, then they should come out and say that, because at the moment that’s the result they’re getting to by default.

Nevertheless, this legislation is proportional to the crisis. It’s much needed. It’s going to solve a real humanitarian problem for a lot of people, and for that reason I support it on behalf of ACT and commend it to the House. Thank you, Mr Speaker.

Bill read a first time.

Bill referred to the Epidemic Response Committee.

I move, That the Immigration (COVID-19 Response) Amendment Bill be reported to the House by 12 May 2020.

Motion agreed to.