Immigration (COVID-19 Response) Amendment Bill

I move, That the Immigration (COVID-19 Response) Amendment Bill be reported to the House by 29 April 2021 and that the committee have the authority to meet at any time while the House is sitting (except during oral questions), during an evening on a day in which there has been a sitting of the House, on a Friday in a week in which there has been a sitting of the House, and outside the Wellington area, despite Standing Orders 193, 195, and 196(1)(b) and (c).

We are asking for an expedited process through the select committee, for this process, for the simple fact, which I pointed out in my first reading speech, that the powers within the bill that was passed last year expire on 15 May. In order for the Government to have one of the crucial tools that we have used to keep New Zealand safe over the last 12 months, to be able to maintain the system flexibility within our immigration system, to respond to the pandemic that these powers approved by Parliament this year, it’s extremely important to continue to have as an important tool for the Government. As was said in first reading speeches, again, the powers that are in the amendment bill are the same powers that were dealt with in the Act as it is and which were taken through select committee. The only minor amendment, I believe, that is within the legislation—the bill that has passed now—is that the relevant regulations, time frame, the request in the bill is to move that window from a three-month window to a six-month window. Again, the existing safeguards within the current Act look to be extended as well.

We look forward to those in the public and members on the other side of the House having an opportunity to scrutinise the bill. Again, those powers are similar to what were traversed by the last select committee, the Epidemic Response Committee, in the last Parliament, and they contain powers relating to classes of persons that can only be exercised by special directions made by the Minister of Immigration, made public, and, of course, can be overturned. Again, after 12 months, it’s timely that a select committee and the public are able to have a look at that. Again, 13 submissions to the select committee last time—we encourage people, in the expedited select committee process, to have their say.

Can I thank everyone in the House for their contributions to the first reading debate, whether they support the bill or have reservations about the bill to support it at first reading. We want to make sure, again, that it gets the scrutiny that it deserves by the select committee. But, again, these powers expire on 15 May, and the Government wants to continue to make sure it has these powers to keep New Zealanders safe.

The question is that the motion be agreed to.

As my colleague Erica Stanford interjected when the Minister was speaking, the bill may not be materially different, but the conditions under which this bill is being passed are extremely different from 13 May 2020 when this House gave those extraordinary powers to the Minister. And I do acknowledge—as others have; Mr Utikere, I think, mentioned it—that the Minister has discharged his responsibilities responsibly and well. That is not the point, and the reason that the National Party will be opposing this motion—the reason is quite simply this. Twenty-one days—twenty-one days is not sufficient time to give appropriate scrutiny to the impact on the immigration system, on our business and migrant community, of the extension of these powers for another two years. Let’s bear in mind, the Minister did not refute my claim, and it’s in the Cabinet paper, that he wanted those powers to be indefinite. And had Cabinet not overruled him, we would be debating a motion for the indefinite granting of these powers with a select committee process that lasts three short weeks.

There’s a bit of a pattern emerging here in the Government since 2017, and I look forward to the data being analysed about how many bills have been passed under urgency, how many bills have been passed with a shortened report back for the select committees, because it will make quite telling reading.

In April last year, I represented this Parliament at a World Bank political forum. It wasn’t in a nice place like Geneva or New York; it was in Andersons Bay in Dunedin in the dark hours, in my pyjamas, where I Zoomed into this very informative meeting where Ministers and members of Parliament from around the OECD gave a report of the manner in which democracies had responded to COVID. The overwhelming theme of that was the degree of concern at what they described as “a form of executive fiat” and the overriding of the democratic processes that undermined the very democracies that we hold so dear. I’ve spoken of that in the past, and I think it’s relevant to this motion today. We’re doing it again. We’re treating the public with disdain by saying that this legislation that has quite a significant impact on a wide range of stakeholders—and I’ll go through them—can be appropriately scrutinised in 21 days.

It got, last year—and I chaired that committee, so I should know. I think we had seven days last year—seven or eight days, and that was—

💬 Hon Grant Robertson: We’re tripling it.

Well, yes. The Minister of Finance interjects that he’s being generous by taking it from seven or eight days to 21 days. I think that speaks volumes to the approach that this Government has. Because doing the right thing is a very different process from doing it in the right manner, and the Government has a significant power. They could’ve come to the House today and passed this bill under urgency—they have 65 votes out of 120. They do, I think, start to treat this place as a bit of an irritant, that parliamentary scrutiny is getting in the way of executive fiat.

Last year, I described the Prime Minister as Rob Muldoon with slogans and kindness. That struck a nerve, but I stood by those comments then and I stand by them now—the irritant that this Parliament has for the very process of scrutinising the bill and making it better. And I would point out that in the very short time that we had last year for this bill to be passed, we actually made some very good improvements to it thanks to the speedy work that the submitters were able to do because we were all in lockdown, I think, or we’d just come out of lockdown. They probably had a little more time on their hands to be able to do that. These are not the same conditions.

We have precious little time now to hear from the stakeholders, and I expect them to come from three main groups. Businesses will want to know what this means for them, not so much for the people who are here and can stay, but for the people who aren’t here and they want to get in, and this bill will prevent that from occurring. It is a paradox, but we have a mismatch in skills. We have higher levels of unemployment and job seeker numbers in this country who will be competing for those onshore temporary visa holders who, as a class of visa holder, could have their stay extended, undermining the ability of those workers to get the jobs that are going. But we also have a number of highly skilled workers who businesses in New Zealand do need and who this bill may prevent from being able to bring in because of the border closures that will continue.

I think we’ll hear from migrant groups. In fact, I encourage migrant groups to submit to the select committee, at the risk of loading up my colleagues on that committee with a great deal of work and some long hours; it’s going to be the case anyway. But these migrant groups have been significantly impacted by COVID and the inability to leave or come, and we’ve got to hear what that means and what sensible suggestions they might have for improving this bill.

I think we’re going to hear from separated families. I think Erica Stanford has done an excellent job in highlighting the human side of the separation of families as a consequence of the Government’s response to COVID, and while the instruction leave was declined by this House—and it’s pretty clear where the objections were coming from—that, in my mind, will not prevent separated families from seeking to submit on this bill and tell their stories and point out how the legislative changes we’ve made are having a negative impact on them. All of that being done within 21 days and for us to be able to come back to this House and for the select committee to come back and say, “We have given the scrutiny of this bill every opportunity.” I don’t think they’re going to be able to say that, and I think that’s bad for lawmaking. It risks bad law being passed. A good law last year in one situation doesn’t make the same law being extended good law, and that has to be scrutinised.

So I expect we’ll hear from lawyers. We will hear from immigration agents. We’ll hear from the people who were at the coalface of our immigration system who have the real knowledge of what’s going on. We need to know and hear from them so that we can understand what we’re doing in the name of this bill.

We can’t do that in 21 days, and I’m sad we’re back here again. The pattern is emerging of an override or a lip-service to the parliamentary process. There’s some times when I’ve been in select committees when six months hasn’t been long enough because of the complexity of the legislation that we’re passing, and this is, on the face of it and in its detail, not a straightforward piece of legislation. I think the Minister said something like 350,000 non - New Zealanders in New Zealand last year on temporary visas. The number is probably pretty low, but one thing I know as a former Minister of Immigration is that every single one of those visa holders has a story that is different from the next, and one of the reasons we have such a huge piece of legislation in the Immigration Act 2009 and a mountainous pile of immigration instructions for Immigration New Zealand and their staff to follow is because every story is different, and that’s why we need to have discretion; it’s why we need to have exceptions to policy. It’s pretty much why we needed, last year, to have this legislation—so that we could keep things going.

The conditions have changed. I’m not convinced we need it now. I’m certainly convinced that we can’t give it a decent going over in 21 days. I’m sad for those committee members, because the motion also includes sitting on a Friday of a House sitting week, so that’s then the constituent work that MPs who would normally have been doing that; they may sit outside of Wellington, which means they may not be able to give proper attention to the other work that’s going to go on in this House. That is a very big encumbrance on the MPs who I know would be prepared to do that if they had longer or if the case for doing so had been strong—

💬 DEPUTY SPEAKER: Order! The member’s time has expired.

I thought the Minister did an admirable job of standing in the House this afternoon, attempting to explain why this legislation has to go through with the very minimum of public scrutiny applied to any bill. What he should have said is that “We just had our eye off the ball. We didn’t recognise that we were getting close to the time when the legislation, that was quite appropriately passed under similar conditions 12 months ago, was going to expire.”

I think what also sits in behind this is his recognition that his own department is in very bad shape indeed. I don’t think there’s any way that you could say anything nice about the immigration department at the present time. Now, while they’re dealing with a lot of different circumstances, that is their job. It’s what they’re meant to do. The question is: why are there well over 12,000 current applications for residence sitting in a queue, not being dealt with?

What is annoying about this is that there are businesses up and down this country trying to get in skilled people who they cannot get locally. Despite their efforts to recruit, they cannot get them locally, but they also cannot bring people in because of that massive backlog that has been accumulating inside immigration for such a very long time. It is a privilege to come into New Zealand. It’s a privilege to become a resident, no question. But it is also a necessity for our economy to have the workforce that drives the economy that allows us to all afford the lifestyle that we have in this country.

As the Minister said today, with the stroke of a pen, he’s settling the next 12 months’ worth of applications for over 300,000 people. Now, it sort of gets the mind boggling a little bit. If you think of how many towns in New Zealand you’d have to bundle together to get 300,000, how many parts of Auckland you’d have to separate out to get 300,000—

💬 DEPUTY SPEAKER: Order! Can I ask the member to speak to the motion. It’s not a—

I’m responding to the comments made by the Minister. I’ve got them written down here in front of me. So if he was able to say them, I should be able to respond to them. I’ll do my best—

💬 DEPUTY SPEAKER: No, I’m waiting to hear how that—because in what he said he did relate it to why, at the end of that, it needed a shorter report-back time frame. So I’m asking the member to do the same.

Well, what I’m making the point about is that he was very creative about offering a reason to the House for that shortened time frame. The simple case is that they had their eye off the ball; no question at all. So now we have a bill that we’re supposed to in just 21 days—21 days available to the select committee to consider this list of eight extraordinary powers. I think when you have that volume of people—300,000-plus who are here on temporary visas now, more than 12,000 waiting in the queue with their residence application, and then thousands offshore who have left New Zealand for one reason or another who want to come back to various jobs here—all will want to have a say on this, as will their employers.

We know what the situation is in the agricultural industry and the horticultural industry at the moment. We know that there are other industries throughout the country who’ve got all sorts of issues they want to deal with. You know, the thing that is extraordinary is that the Minister is giving his department these powers, because in the end it’s the department that makes the recommendations to the Minister about how to exercise those powers. Yet he sits there, knowing that this is a department that is not operating at an optimum level at all. So, yes, there should be a longer scrutiny by a select committee so that you can have the general public gaining a greater degree of confidence about the exercise of these powers.

I don’t need to go through the whole eight of them, but when you have the power to waive the requirement to obtain a transit visa in individual cases, by special direction, the public need to know what that is all about. The public need to know what that’s all about, because the way I read it, it means that someone coming from a country that has a very, very large amount or a considerable amount of COVID-19 infection—and we’ve seen the actions taken by the Government today to prevent people from one country coming in for a period of time because of that very sort of thing. But this would apparently give the department via the Minister, or the Minister via the department, the opportunity to in some cases say, “No, no, don’t worry about it. Come straight in.” Now, the public need to know that. The immigration service need to explain to all of those consultants out there, the many lawyers who live off the end of this stuff, exactly what that means, but, more importantly, to all of the communities around the country that want workers, to find out what that also means.

There’s also the power to waive any regulatory requirements for certain classes of application by special direction. In other words, if someone has the favour of the Minister, then they can get whoever they like in, and that is a very, very broad power. I remember this House once railing about some powers granted to a Minister in here, referring to them as “Henry VIII” powers. That is totally “Henry VIII”—totally “Henry VIII”.

💬 Hon Grant Robertson: The member has similarities.

And I see his lookalike over there, shaking his head and saying “No, no, that’s not the case.”, but it is. It is simply a provision for the Minister to decide who comes and who doesn’t. Nothing short of that. You could go on and say, “Well, there’s the power to suspend the ability to make applications for visas or submit expression of interest in applying for visas by class of people by Order in Council.” Well, that would certainly mean that it would simply mean that we’d pick out particular countries and say, “The doors are open—in you come.”

💬 Hon Grant Robertson: Talk about the motion.

The doors are open—in you come. Now, that might be, as Mr Robertson, the finance Minister, is pointing out, a good thing. I don’t know why he would think that was a good thing when there needs to be an understanding by the general public of what that means. He and I would take a different view on that. Those are the sort of things that get sorted out at a select committee, by allowing people to come in over a period of time to make their submission.

Now, the other thing that goes back behind all this is that there is clearly a flagrant disregard for the lawmaking processes in this country being exercised by the Government at the present time.

💬 Hon Grant Robertson: Oh, come on!

Because while they’ll sit there waving their heads from side to side, the reality is it’s happening all the time, happening very, very frequently. There would not be a week of Parliament this year when there hasn’t been some kind of truncated process put in place, some kind of urgency taken, or some kind of extra power grabbed by the executive to run the country. Mr Robertson sits over there chuckling away. He knows it’s the case—he knows it’s the case. I see he’s got his tie off, so he’s off down to the club shortly to talk to all the local punters and tell them what a great Government they are.

The reality is they’re losing their opportunity in this case to exercise some of the freedoms they should have to express their views.

💬 Greg O’Connor: We don’t have to tell them; they tell us.

And there’s Mr O’Connor, over there. He’s another one who’s always on about how great the Government is, how wonderful it is, how much it’s in touch with the people.

💬 Greg O’Connor: No, we get told—

Now, he’s shaking his head, saying, “No, we’re not.” Well, at least he’s got the moxie to admit that they don’t really care about what people think. They just want to do whatever they can. It’s this sort of action where a Government simply decides, “We don’t want to hear too much from the people. We’re not really interested in what they might say.” And while the Minister stood there making an interesting case, he should have just said, “Look, we took our eye off the ball here. It’s still necessary and so we want to keep going with it.” That might have been a better position to take than giving the absolute flimflam that came out and will be part of the Hansard record today.

The National Party, having said all that, recognises that we have to have some mechanism to try and sort out the abysmal state that the immigration department are in. We do have to have some mechanism to give security to those 300,000 visitors or work visa people in New Zealand at the moment who are contributing to our economy. We also need to make it clear that when people are coming in, there might be an opportunity for a Minister to consider some classes of worker that are absolutely essential in our economy. While we don’t like this process, we recognise that for a short time longer, that may be necessary. But why two years? That seems to lack any ambition at all, to try and sort out a Government department that has not stepped up and recognised the conditions that it should be delivering on for New Zealanders in getting through their big workload.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. Now, the ACT Party opposes this bill because it suspends a system that is already one of the worst-performing parts of Government, and it acts as a fig leaf for a Minister who’s made no effort to reform and encourage the performance of his ministry. Worse than that, now it’s been referred to the Education and Workforce Committee for a truncated process, and for a lot of the time that this bill is intended to be before the select committee, the House won’t be sitting—there is a recess—and so that makes it much more difficult for us members of the Opposition to coordinate with our stakeholders and with those who are interested in submitting. So it’s yet another example of a Government that’s under pressure, that comes to Parliament with excuses like “Well, we need to do it under urgency”—another one of these “Dog ate my homework” moments that we’ve heard from other Ministers in this Government.

The ACT Party believes that rather than extend these extraordinary powers till May 2023, the Minister could alternatively have said, “Look, my department wants to offer a better way of working that’s fairer for those people here on work visas and those applying to come to New Zealand to work”—who are desperately needed by businesses and engineering and construction and the primary sector—even tourism. It turns out that with the travel bubble with Australia about to be extended to the nine states of Australia, New Zealand will need hundreds, if not thousands, of ski field workers, who don’t typically come from places like Ōhākune or Wānaka or Queenstown; they come from Brazil, they come from Europe, they come from Asia, and they come to New Zealand for the experience of working here, enjoying our culture, and contributing to our economy.

So rather than offering an opportunity for New Zealand’s businesses, which depend on this temporary labour—

The member needs to actually speak to the motion. It’s about shortening the report-back time frame for the select committee. You need to reference those to the motion.

💬 SIMON COURT: Thank you for your direction, Mr Speaker. So there are many, many stakeholders who would like an opportunity to contribute to better public policy when it comes to immigration, and they will have an extremely limited opportunity to prepare submissions to the select committee. We already know that the immigration authorities and the Minister have provided a confusing and inconsistent response to those stakeholders and those affected by poor decision-making, and by allowing such a limited amount of time at select committee, that’s doing nothing to restore the confidence of those sectors affected in this Government or in the immigration Minister and his department.

We understand that up to 7,000 people have applications, expressions of interest, for residency on ice, plus thousands more, which, in theory, could be being processed within a two-year time frame, although there is no actual time frame for their expressions of interest for residency to be considered. Currently, that is all suspended. So while the Government may consider that this is success, it really shows you what a low bar and what a lack of ambition the Government has, actually, to create better public policy. It also shows, by offering such a limited opportunity to consider this bill at select committee, how reluctant they are to expose their poor public policy, their flawed approach to regulation, their lack of concern about the regulatory impact of these types of bills.

Again, that is why the ACT Party opposes this bill, but we will be encouraging our stakeholders and those affected to, as quickly as possible, make effective submissions—although, judging by the repeated assertions of the number of votes that this Government has in the House of Parliament, we don’t expect them to listen to the concerns of stakeholders. They’ve shown an arrogance and an unwillingness to respond to the genuine concerns of stakeholders, people in the primary production sector, those tourism businesses desperate not just for tourists but also for the workers needed to staff their businesses.

ACT will continue to oppose this bill, although we look forward to proposing better public policy and better solutions at select committee. [Interruption] Thank you, Mr Speaker.

Order! Members, don’t seek the call until the member speaking has taken his seat.

I move, That the question be now put.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I’m looking forward to speaking to the motion in opposition.

Can I just say that there wasn’t any reason given by the Minister today that held any wait as to why we need a truncated select committee process. Basically, the only thing that he said was, “Well, this bill is basically the same as last time; therefore, we only need 21 days.” As my colleague Michael Woodhouse pointed out earlier, the conditions surrounding this bill are entirely different than they were a year ago. There are so many more things to consider now than there were a year ago. We do understand that a year ago, when we only had 10 days from the introduction of the bill to the legislation being in place, that process needed to be quick, and we were wholeheartedly on board with it. We were in a pandemic situation. We didn’t have any clarity about what was going to happen. We are in a very different situation now—the conditions are very, very different—and the one thing that strikes me from the Minister’s speech today is he left out so much information that is going to be required at select committee, and we are going to need a much longer period at select committee to consider these conditions that we are now in.

The conditions that we had a year ago, where we had our immigration case officers being at home, where we had 350,000 people on shore who needed their conditions of their visas varied, and we had people who needed to leave New Zealand. Those conditions now are very, very different. We didn’t hear anything from the Minister today to shed any light on why he needs these two years, so the select committee process that we need to go through is going to be required—a proper select committee process—to unearth all of these things. There wasn’t anything said today about whether or not all of the immigration case officers are now working from their place of work. There wasn’t anything today to indicate how many people are now on shore needing these visas to be extended—so all of that information we are going to need to require at select committee.

I know that last time we held the select committee, there were only 12 submissions. This time I have heard from—as Michael Woodhouse said, there are three groups of people, but I have heard from so many immigration advisers and lawyers who want to have a say on this bill, who are questioning the reason for two years, who are going to need time to put their submissions together. And here we are, we’re having another short time frame that was completely unnecessary. This can’t have been a surprise to the Minister that this was going to run out. It’s in legislation. As Chris Bishop said earlier, the only thing that we can expect happened was that he just forgot about it and it wasn’t until one of his officials said, “Hey, maybe we should do something about this.” He went, “Oh, quick, yep. We better put this through.”

Can I just say, though, while the reason he’s asked for this short time frame is because the bill is significantly the same, in his opinion, as it was a year ago, can we just think for a moment what would have happened if he’d got his way in Cabinet and there was no sunset clause, and we were stuck with this shortened process? We would have had an entirely different bill. So it is only by the fact that he didn’t get his way to have either three years or no sunset clause at all, which is what he actually wanted. It’s only by the fact that the Cabinet said no to that that he’s able to stand up here today and say that the bill is much the same as it was a year ago. But, actually, that could have been very different, and we would have been stuck with a very short time frame in order to get this passed with a significantly different bill.

But as I said, the conditions around this bill are very, very different. Although Mr Greg O’Connor said that this Government is a victim of its own success—actually, it’s a victim of a Minister with his eye off the bill, which is why we’re here debating this motion to give 21 short days that we’re going to have to sit over a break, on Friday. For the members of the committee, like myself, who are constituent MPs who have meetings booked and events booked during that time, it is going to be very difficult for us.

I know that I have 10 minutes. I am not going to take that whole 10 minutes today, because I’m sure everyone wants to get out of here and get home to their electorates, but I would just like to finish by saying there was no need for this shortened time frame. The Minister could have brought this bill at the end of last year, and we could have had a much longer process for those immigration officials, for those immigration lawyers, and for those migrant groups. I know that those split migrant families will want to come to the select committee. They’re all working, they’re all under extreme stress, and now they’ve got hardly any time to put their thoughts down on paper and come to a select committee. This is unfair on those stakeholders, it’s unfair on split migrants, it’s unfair on the visitors that are here or the Recognised Seasonal Employer workers that are here in this country to give them such a short time.

Finally, we oppose this motion, not only because the Minister has dropped the ball, but also for the fact that he is just very lucky that he didn’t get his way in Cabinet—this bill isn’t significantly different. The only reason that it is arguably much the same as it was a year ago is because his Cabinet colleagues turned him down on no sunset clause. But the way that the Minister has conducted himself around this has been short of what we would expect from a good Minister and we oppose this motion.

I move, That the question be now put.