Immigration (Mass Arrivals) Amendment Bill

Can I just say that this is a bill that the National Party will support today to a select committee, but it is a bill that does raise a number of concerns as well, and we want to test those out during the select committee process. We’ve got to remember that should there be a mass arrival in New Zealand, those who are part of that mass arrival are stepping ahead of some 20 million United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees refugees who are located at refugee camps all around the world. They are stepping ahead and jumping the queue on the around 1,500 refugees who we accept into this country every year. And it’s therefore important that we don’t have legislation that makes it attractive for these people smugglers to give it a go, getting across the Tasman into New Zealand or, for that matter, finding themselves somehow stranded inside some of the vast territorial waters that New Zealand has responsibility for.

So our position is simply that while we think that there is a whole lot of things about the immigration department at the moment—or the department inside the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment that handles immigration—that could be described as a bit of a shambles, it is important that the integrity of the immigration system is maintained. And so some look at this sort of provision is important.

What I think is most relevant in all of this is the time that the immigration officers and then the court have to determine the status of those who arrive on our borders. It makes it very clear, as the Minister has just said, that they are not normal passengers and that they cannot expect to be treated like that, and that they will be detained, under arrest, according to a warrant that will be issued once they do arrive on these shores. Where it gets a bit loose from that point is what happens to them. And so while the Minister says that the detention period should be for a minimum of time, the question is where that detention would be. Would it be, in fact, a situation where it becomes a little bit pro forma: arrive in New Zealand as part of a mass emigration—remembering that everybody who would be part of that would have paid some nefarious operator large sums of money in order to be able to get here—and then simply go through a process that means refugee status might be exercised or provided?

I think we’ve got to be very careful that we don’t have an administrative law that makes us an easy target when in fact, so far, unlike so many other countries, we have avoided this sort of mass arrival, not that it hasn’t been a prospect at various times in the last decade or so. There have been wide reports of there being boats that might be on their way to New Zealand, and, of course, that triggered the original 2013 legislation that was brought down by a previous Minister. When we come to the select committee, I think it will be very interesting to hear from immigration officials why they think they need so much extra time. It may seem like a lot, but if you can get the picture that none of these people arriving have a right to arrive. Anybody who arrives on an international aircraft today, on a passenger cruise ship, or even on a commercial vessel have a permission to be here. They are granted the right to come into New Zealand. None of these people are in that position. They’ve just decided they’re going to disregard our provisions, shortcut the whole arrangements for coming into any country, and just take their chances.

If the bill were to mean that their chances were pretty good at getting citizenship here and getting residence here, then I think we would have a little bit of a problem because we’d be signalling to a lot of these people that we’re an easy target. And remember, too, that the people who come on these boats, even though they’re a bit shonky and a bit rumpty, can afford to be there. They pay a lot of money. So the prospect of a better-quality ship coming to a country where there was almost no question about what the outcome was going to be would be very alarming indeed.

So we will, as I say, support this bill to the select committee today. However, we do want to go through—with the officials and those who might submit on it—our concerns to ensure that the bill is actually doing what it should do, which is deterring these operators from targeting New Zealand and making it clear that should they be successful in negotiating our waters, there is no automatic path that would lead them to a good outcome.

There will be subsequent speakers today who have considerable experience in the role. My colleague Michael Woodhouse, a former Minister, the Minister who brought the 2013 legislation to the House, will be able to elucidate a lot better on the concerns that we have with significantly more detail. So with that, can I say, once again, that we will participate responsibly in the select committee process. While the Minister describes this as a bill that is not overly consequential or not exactly the one that he would get most excited about—it’s very hard to work out what part of immigration he does get excited about—we will, of course, engage properly because it’s important and has, potentially, long-term consequences for New Zealand.

Kia ora e te Māngai o te Whare. I rise to take a short call on the Immigration (Mass Arrivals) Amendment Bill. For those just keying in to Parliament TV this morning, what this bill is about is preparation for the possibility that, at some point, we might face a situation where we’re going to get a mass arrival of refugees—a bit like the way that the Tampa picked up a sinking ship of refugees off the coast of Australia and delivered them to Australia. We know that there are people who do see New Zealand as a desirable destination, and why would they not? But we need to prepare for that, because, at present, the likelihood is if we had 300, 400, 500 refugees turn up in a tanker off the coast of Auckland or Whangārei, then we would not have the resources or the legislation in place to deal with them.

So what we’re going to do is: first, we’re going to cover a loophole that might suggest that such people turning up in their tanker, having been rescued, are going to have an automatic visa, because, at the moment, if you turn up as a passenger on a ship, you do have an automatic several-week visa. It is assumed that you’re legit. If you are not legit, then we need to make it very clear in the definition of “passenger”, that that doesn’t apply to you. So that’s change number one—it’s fairly straightforward.

Change number two is that we’re going to clarify—and it’s strange that this was not clarified before, perhaps—that it is on the person turning up to make their visa application, not on anyone else. If we don’t have a legal obligation on them to do it, then it is very hard for immigration officials to follow them up and hold them to account, and start to put them through the process. There is a grey area there; we’re going to clear that one up.

The third one is—and this comes down to the situation where there are huge numbers of people turning up—96 hours is all that an immigration official currently has to get a warrant of committal, should they need it, which is to detain a refugee that they consider is, perhaps, a flight risk or a danger to themselves or others. They only have 96 hours at present to get that through. If you’ve got 500 people on the dock in Whangārei, then that is going to be far too short a time to process them all in time for them to get the legal advice they need. We’re putting that out to seven days.

As Mr Wood said, this is a situation we need to prepare for, so in the virtual emergency of 500 people on the dock at Whangārei, we would have processes in place. I commend it to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. It’s a pleasure to take a call in support of this bill at first reading, and I have to say, since I heard about it in the last two or three days, I was having something of a sense of—

💬 Erica Stanford: Déjà vu?

—flashback and déjà vu, exactly. As the immigration Minister said, there are a number of people in this House who have memories of this bill first passing 10 years ago, and I was the Minister at the passage—not at first reading, which was introduced by Nathan Guy in about May 2012, but from subsequent readings from March 2013 to the middle of 2013.

I have very clear memories of a Labour Party that went to war with the Government over this bill—and my, how the worm has turned. Let me just remind the House of the sorts of things that Labour members were saying: Charles Chauvel, basically, said that he was embarrassed by the bill. Darien Fenton—if one remembers there was an advertisement on the TV; I think it was about road safety, and it had the term “ghost chips”—well, she referred to these as “ghost ships” repeatedly; saying, “This would not happen,” and “Why are we wasting the House’s time?” David Cunliffe, who very shortly after this bill was passed became Leader of the Opposition, basically said there was more chance of little green men coming from Mars than a boat landing on the shores of New Zealand.

Never mind that, for 1,000 years, wooden-hulled vessels have travelled the Pacific to be here. Never mind that ships were crossing the Indian Ocean with the intention of going around the Australian Bight and into the Tasman Sea, that a steel-hulled vessel had gone from Sri Lanka to Canada with 500 people on board. These things were real, and so I must commend the Labour Party for having a change of heart, and being alive to the risks—the very real risks—that this could occur. I’m not sure if they are as alive to the serious consequences that could emerge if even a small vessel—with a relatively small number of people—did arrive on our shores, and I want to go into why I think that’s a bit of a problem with some of the changes that we’re making, because it does have this impression that things would happen in an orderly fashion.

If one talks to those countries that are routinely experiencing irregular maritime arrivals, they will tell you that it is absolute chaos. And on those vessels, we are going to have those snakeheads—the pirates. In fact, if there is a hell, the hottest spot in that place should be reserved for these people smugglers. It’s also going to have victims—what I described 10 years ago as “willing victims”, but victims nevertheless—and, very often, children.

Now, the detention requirements for all of those groups, whether they are male or female, whether they are elderly or very young, whether they are criminals or not—is going to be different. And I think what the Government is doing, in this bill, is confusing the process of refugee determination and the period of that with the process of detention. Now, regardless of what one thinks about the ability for a mass warrant of detention, it’s my view—and that’s why I supported and passaged the bill 10 years ago—that it is necessary to work quickly to determine where the risk is and manage it. And I was at pains to point out that the detention facility should be commensurate with two things: the person’s individual rights and the rights of New Zealanders to be kept safe from some very dangerous people, or to establish the identity of people.

Now, if we take up to 32 days simply to make a decision about whether somebody should be detained for up to six months, it seems to me that there’s a somewhat circular argument here. What’s going to happen to them in the meantime? Well, it’s a bit hard to tell, and I think the answer—and the select committee should flesh this out—is that they’re going to be detained somewhere. So why are we changing the law to detain someone while a judge decides whether we should detain them? There are certain laws—and I think the lawyers in the room will know much better than I—under the Crimes Act regarding what a suspected criminal has in terms of rights and obligations for detention pending charges and then their appearance before a court. What we’re, essentially, doing here is giving the courts and Immigration New Zealand up to 32 days to determine that.

Now, I fully support the ability of a person who isn’t a regular maritime arriver to have the right to access legal representation, and for them to understand what their rights and obligations are. But I’m not sure that the extension of time in this situation is going to ease or add to the chaos if a ship arrives on a Northland beach—or, more likely, gets into distress in the Tasman Sea. Of course, our international maritime obligations to protect go all the way out to, I think, New Caledonia, nearly. And then international maritime law requires a rescuer—if that’s the New Zealand Navy or other vessels—to deposit those people at the nearest jurisdiction, which would be New Caledonia or Vanuatu. I mean, that’s very unlikely that that would be practical, and so the likelihood is that these people are going to come back, let’s say on a frigate or an offshore patrol vessel, land at Devonport and then be processed. But let’s be under no illusions, this will be chaos. Their medical needs, their legal needs, their identity requirements, the need to speedily decide what the right level of risk is and the right place for detention is are not necessarily going to be aided by this. I’m open to being convinced, and I know the Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade Committee will do a good job on it, but there are some serious questions here.

What I like is that at least the Labour Party are now taking this seriously, because they didn’t 10 years ago, and they went very quiet while they were in Government up until now. They did a review, and, in fact, Immigration New Zealand and other agencies’ desktops review these scenarios from time to time—maybe they’ve identified a new risk that they’re tightening up, that’s fine. But I think we should all agree on one thing, and I would leave the House with some consideration of another: prevention is the best approach, because not only is this illegal; it’s hideously dangerous. I recall, in my second reading 10 years ago, I think the count that year alone—because the jump spot from Cisarua to the East Timor Sea was becoming a very, very popular trade route; trading in people, sadly—600 people drowned in the period leading up to that second reading. Perhaps it was in the previous year, I can’t remember. And that was only the ones they knew about. There could have been hundreds more. So it’s a threat to life, and we need to—even in our deterrence—make sure that that’s prevented.

The second thing is, I think the refugee convention is actually out of date. It was written in a time after the Second World War where there was the mass movement of people displaced by that terrible conflict. And it had provisions in it that imagined a scenario of people, basically, walking from one country to another, and the principle of nonrefoulement was, well, you can’t send them back. But of course, there are some countries around the world where asylum seekers have moved across several countries to get to a particular destination. So we have an obligation not to return them to the country that they started in, but we’re under no obligation to keep them here. It didn’t anticipate long-distance maritime arrivals, and I think it’s time, perhaps, for the United Nations to have a good look at that convention, if they have the courage. But with that, I’ll support the bill.

Kia ora, Mr Speaker. It’s my privilege to speak on the Immigration (Mass Arrivals) Amendment Bill for its first reading in the House.

This bill makes some technical changes to the Immigration Act to better prepare Immigration New Zealand for a possible mass arrival event. A mass arrival event is when 30 people without authorisation enter New Zealand and arrive on board one or more craft at the same time. This bill enables Immigration New Zealand to prepare for a mass arrival event with an established framework that can guarantee and respect the human rights of those who arrive.

This bill will make three key changes to the Immigration Act to make sure the legislation works as intended. It will provide the District Court with more time to consider an application for a mass arrival warrant of commitment; where the decision was supposed to take around 96 hours before, the judge will now have at least seven days to make a decision, giving more consideration to each case and allow time to organise legal representation for the affected migrants.

The bill will also ensure that the members of a mass arrival group will have to apply for entry permission and a visa. Because they arrived illegally, they will not be processed through the normal visa applications. This requirement will make sure that immigration officers can conduct processing, interviews, and other appropriate checks for any arrivals to New Zealand.

The last change made by the bill is that it changes the definition of “passenger” in the Act to make sure that they cannot avoid immigration checks and remove any possibility that members of a mass arrival group could be deemed to hold entry permission and a visa upon arrival in New Zealand. There have been examples of where a lack of clarity in this definition has led to some difficult situations for immigration authorities. This small change will solve this issue and guarantee that Immigration New Zealand has an appropriate framework in place to deal with mass arrival events. I commend the bill to the House.

I understand this is a split call.

💬 Golriz Ghahraman: Uh—I don’t think so.

No, sorry. I had the incorrect information. Sorry about that. I call Golriz Ghahraman.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I stand with great sadness to speak today on this bill. It is a sad day for our nation. It is the first time that a political party—certainly a Government—has made the humanity and the rights of asylum seekers an election-year issue. It certainly doesn’t seem like detaining asylum seekers without charge or trial would be a bread and butter issue for a Labour Government, but here we are. I stand and speak today as a former child asylum seeker.

When I first entered politics, I didn’t think I’d be doing it as the first refugee MP, but I’ve realised that that representation is actually pretty essential in this House and in politics. So I stand to ground us in who this bill is actually about—people like my parents who had to escape Iran under one of the most oppressive regimes in the modern world. The absolute violence against women by the regime and against its political opponents meant that we had to flee, and my little hipster, activist parents landed here in New Zealand with their nine-year-old daughter that they didn’t want to raise under oppression, claimed asylum at the border. We are talking about Afghan women judges who have to cross the border, now, into Pakistan; we’re talking about Hong Kong democracy activists; the Uighur community in China; we’re talking about the people of Ukraine. Anyone who’s willing to get on a boat and somehow make it to a country like New Zealand in the South Pacific probably deserves a medal, rather than to have their rights suspended.

So what are we talking about? A John Key Government passed this law first, talked about irregular migration first, talked about mass arrivals, and how we need detention powers—10 years ago—and, yes, this side of the House railed against it. Today, we have a Minister who is also the MP for our country’s most diverse electorate of Mt Roskill, saying, actually, what John Key did didn’t go far enough: 96 hours of detention to determine whether or not a person is a risk to our country isn’t long enough—we want a month; we want 28 days. To put that into context, you can be caught with a smoking gun, standing over a dead body, charged with murder—or to use a real example, you can be the Christchurch terrorist—and you still, rightly, have a fundamental right to appear before a judge or a magistrate within a day to determine whether you are, in fact, a risk to the community, and whether your detention is lawful.

Twenty-eight days without the right to appear in front of a court because they’ve approached our border and asked for help—without charge or trial; without the right to have their risk as individuals determined independently. This isn’t their whole asylum case; it’s just their detention rights we’re suspending. And this is a Government and a Minister who knows that, thus far, asylum seekers, when they land here by air and are detained, are detained at Mt Eden Prison, and won’t guarantee that criminal prisons won’t be used to exercise the power to detain asylum seekers, now for 28 days, without the ability to challenge.

We, just a year and a half ago, had a full independent inquiry into asylum seeker detention in this nation—so far, only handfuls of people arriving, because it’s only air travel that’s really available to asylum seekers. They are being held, and have been held by successive Governments—Labour- and National-led Governments—in Mt Eden Prison—maximum security, criminal prison—and Victoria Casey QC, who conducted that inquiry, courageously outlined the abuse that they were suffering; the sexual and physical violence that they’d been suffering; the absolute isolation and trauma of having escaped a war or really serious persecution; gay men from Iran who would be executed; Afghan women, is what we’re talking about. The absolute trauma of having to be displaced and escape your nation—they were being held in Mt Eden Prison, and this bill is extending that power, today.

So let’s not call it a “technical change” and degrade those communities even further. Let’s not talk about how much how many extra rights we’re giving them. Let’s think about who else in this country we would face—look them in the eye and say, “Guess what! We’re doing you a great favour. We’re taking away your rights to challenge detention. We’re going to put you in detention, probably in a maximum security, criminal prison, without charge or trial, for a month while we let you access a lawyer, maybe.”

Now, the Government says this is because we lack the resource, we lack the legal expertise, to give these people a chance—like we do to the most serious criminals—to appear before a court and challenge their detention. If they were honest about that, if this was what this bill is about, where’s the resource? Where’s the training programme that they’re also introducing for lawyers at the District Courts to be able to deal with asylum cases? Where’s the resource we’re putting into our courts because, actually, most New Zealanders are having to wait quite a long time to access justice here; where’s that? Where’s the rest of the Victoria Casey review recommendations, where she said that detaining asylum seekers is actually a breach of international and domestic law in this country because it’s perfectly legal to approach a border and claim asylum?

Let’s look at what New Zealand actually stands for. This is a compassionate nation who wants to do our fair share in the global space where displacement has happened, where war has happened, where oppression has happened. We are much more like Hungary and Poland and Germany, who are just coming together to try and feed and clothe the refugees; creating new public transport tickets for them; trying to ensure that Ukrainian children crossing the border by the hundreds of thousands—not just hundreds, not just two, three hundreds, which is what this bill is apparently about. Look at the people of Pakistan when the Afghan community came across. None of those nations made law to detain the refugees. The only countries who have had a punitive response to this fear—and it is just fear—of so-called mass arrivals have been the Liberal Government of Australia, and the Conservative Party of Britain, who is passing a similar law today.

That is who this Government is aligning us with, and those are not New Zealand values. What makes me sadder still is that it’s election year. This is a Government that killed hate speech law reform because it proudly said it wouldn’t make those vulnerable communities a political football in election year, even if that law was going to result in protection, long term. But it is happy to make our refugee and asylum seeker communities political football today—this year, in election year—in order to take away our rights.

So it makes me sad for our communities that believed a Labour Party Prime Minister when she said, “This is not us.” It makes me sad for Amnesty International New Zealand, who fought for the Victoria Casey review into asylum seeker detention and celebrated its recommendations. It makes me sad for Victoria Casey QC; the people of Mt Roskill; the Tamil community who’ve seen the Australian billboards in northern Sri Lanka that said, “Don’t come here by boat, we will detain you”, because that’s now New Zealand—under a Labour Government.

It makes me so sad for all of Aotearoa who turned out, thousands upon thousands, after the Christchurch shooting happened, to say “This is not us.”, to say “We are a welcoming and inclusive society.” It’s incumbent upon us to say that you can and have an absolute right to escape torture and oppression, to raise your babies in peace, and reach a border any way you can. And you know what, if we had a Te Ao Māori approach to migration and refugee rights, I guarantee you we wouldn’t have a punitive approach like this when people arrive.

So, at best, this bill is an unnecessary waste of this House’s time; at worst, it’s breathtakingly reckless. But we will continue to stand with our communities as this bill and their humanity gets debated. We will continue to stand for human rights, and, I say, at least in October, we know if this is not in fact us, that we’re going to need a much bigger Green heart in the Labour Government.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I rise on behalf of ACT to talk about the Immigration (Mass Arrivals) Amendment Bill. I note that it’s not often that we get to debate amendments to the Immigration Act since literally everything in the system is guided by immigration instructions that don’t get to have any scrutiny in this House, so we’ll take whatever we can get.

Nevertheless, it is unclear that there is a need to include this piece of legislation in urgency this week. The chances of a mass arrival—that is, people being smuggled here on a boat—are close to zero, and the Minister has even stated and pointed out the fact that it’s never happened. That’s not to say it won’t happen, but is this really something that needs to go through urgency amongst everything else? Probably not.

There are countless more things in the immigration system that could do with improving, and on the face of it, this looks like a bit of a framework for little reason other than to perhaps contrast New Zealand’s approach to this issue with that of the UK, which—as the previous speaker, Golriz Ghahraman, has highlighted—is occurring at present. Nevertheless, we will support the bill to select committee with some reservations, noting the issues that I’ve talked about in urgency—the issues with the bill—and the Cabinet paper containing many redactions under national security, which is really helpful. We’ll trust that the Government knows something that we don’t, and take a good-faith approach. I would note that if the ACT Party was given a chance to have a briefing from officials to discuss this in advance like the other parties were, we could have asked our questions then, but it certainly wasn’t extended to us.

So the concept of detaining asylum seekers for a month without charge or evidence is somewhat cagey from a human rights perspective, and when the Government is trying to convince us that they’re doing this for the right reasons, I’m getting a little bit more sceptical. The Cabinet paper indicates that one of the purposes of this bill is to give migrants human rights and “freedom from arbitrary detention”. That’s a bit ironic. It’s like the old “imprison you for your own safety” kind of concept.

In reality, this bill enables longer detention, and in some sort of a quasi-detention facility that is not particularly outlined. Whether they’re talking about Mt Eden or the Māngere detention centre, officially known as the refugee resettlement centre—it could be; we don’t know—that hasn’t been explained, other than things like a “low or no security facility”. So, like what, a managed isolation and quarantine hotel or something?

Humorously, the departmental disclosure statement states a concern: “There may be risk to New Zealand’s international reputation, on the basis that this proposal enables detention without warrant of an undetermined duration”. I think that is a concern that the select committee should actually look at to go “Have we gone about this the right way?”, particularly in comparison to other countries and the risk of this actually occurring.

There’s also a fair amount of talk about natural justice, but I’d ask where is that in the bill? Natural justice is about being innocent until proven guilty and freedom from arbitrary detention, and this bill seems to do the opposite.

So a few ancillary points. As the Hon Gerry Brownlee has pointed out, those other refugees in the UN system might feel a bit undercut by this, and, of course, those on legitimate pathways—those who are waiting with the speed of the parent category, for instance, and how slow that is, and languishing in residency queues and waiting for their 2021 resident visa will be wondering about the very different treatment going on here.

The choices for the courts are interesting: granting entry, detention, or releasing with or without conditions. Given the Cabinet paper has a large number of redactions on national security grounds, it’s kind of surprising that there is no sort of more obvious escalation, whether that’s extended detention if the situation warrants it, or even deportation. So it may sound a bit crass, but if a boatload of al-Qaeda showed up, the options in this bill are actually the only options—and I highly doubt it.

So, overall, we’ll support this at first reading, like I said, so that it can have some scrutiny in a select committee, because, so far, it hasn’t had any with external stakeholders other than internal Government agencies. So I commend it to the House.

Kia ora, Mr Speaker. As I begin this morning, I do want to acknowledge the Green Party member Golriz Ghahraman for her contribution to the House. This is legislation, obviously, that we are considering this morning, but in listening to her address, definitely it’s something that’s real, something that is actually reality for people, and so I acknowledge Golriz Ghahraman’s contribution and life story—and her family being able to be here.

Now, in reflecting on this piece of legislation, the Immigration (Mass Arrivals) Amendment Bill, I’ve been looking a little bit at the numbers and the statistics, and I’m really saddened to see, in the past 30 years, how quickly it’s changed in terms of those who are seeking asylum in parts of the world. And I look at the statistics back in 1991 when there were very, very few people, if any, in this position who were refugees in other spaces—but in terms of those seeking asylum, which rose from near zero in 1991 to, in 2021, it being around 4.6 million asylum seekers around the world.

I would hope that we would live in an age, in a time, when these measures are not necessary, but they are at this time. I would dream of living in a world—I guess sometimes I am trying to be the optimist—where regimes would be in a place where people would feel safe, included, and secure in their own homes, but that is just not what it is in the world we live in.

So this is a piece of legislation I’d like to take us to select committee to consider and to open up to the wider public to have their contribution on it. So I won’t delay it any longer and I commend this bill to the House.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. National will also be supporting this bill to the select committee. And just following on from that last speaker’s point, the Green Party did raise some very valid points around the issue of people seeking asylum in New Zealand, and it’s probably a very rare event that anyone will get to New Zealand in these circumstances. The major issue is really the Australian border that, effectively, has become the New Zealand border in this situation. And what happens is that Australia has taken a very tough stance over a number of years and different colours of Government as well have continued that tough stance purely because of their geographical location. And we’re not far off when you consider our wider sea location as well. In some ways, you probably would want to welcome anybody that comes to the country at the moment, because we can’t get anybody into New Zealand through the immigration system. And I guess, in some ways, if they do make it all the way to New Zealand, they do deserve that gold star.

But the reality is that this is a bill that’s there for a valid reason, and that valid reason is that we want to have integrity of the immigration system. It’s not just about those people that may be able to get on a boat and get here. It’s actually about all those people that come here through working holidays, come here through other mechanisms, that set up home in New Zealand, have a family here, maybe don’t meet the income thresholds, maybe don’t meet the education thresholds, and find that they have to leave. That’s part of our immigration system that actually needs to be looked at as well. If we’re going to have an open book, as the Green Party says, for asylum seekers, then how do we treat people that actually work hard in the country that have come here, got a job, got a family, got a situation going, and then we send them home after a number of years? That’s the dilemma that we actually face as a country, and that’s the reality on a large scale.

So if we’re looking at welcoming people, that’s actually the biggest deficiency in the New Zealand system at the moment. The reality is that people just can’t get into the country under the current Government settings—the settings that have destroyed a lot of New Zealand’s economy. They’ve put back a lot of New Zealand vital industry and service providers and, you know, really are a reflection of very poor policy settings from this Government over a number of years. The opportunity is now to change that. The Government addresses it every so often in a very cursory manner without any real change. We’ve closed our borders to letting people into this country, effectively, and that shows that New Zealand’s closed to the rest of the world.

There’s a certain point where people won’t want to come here anyway, you know. At the moment, we still provide a standard of living that’s worthwhile to come to. But you can see the situation, if the current economic malaise continues, that people will just not want to come to New Zealand. And you’re already seeing that in migration now. The top-tier migrants don’t come to New Zealand. They don’t. We don’t get the top-tier migrants in the world. They go to Australia, Canada, America, or they go to the UK. They don’t come here and that’s because our economy isn’t strong enough. If we want the best people here, which we do, and if we want as many of the best people here, as we do, and if we want as many of the people that just want to make a chance for their future life here, as we do—asylum seeker or hard-working people that have come on other visas—then we should welcome them.

This legislation has a distinct purpose, but the real issue in New Zealand about immigration is that we don’t welcome people. We’re not open to people coming in. We’re not open to people coming in with no qualifications, no income, but that have aspiration and hard work in their genes. We should be more open to those kind of people as well. They’re the future of this country and we missed that opportunity and it may not last forever, because they’ve got plenty other choices in the world to go to.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I will just take a short call today on this Immigration (Mass Arrivals) Amendment Bill, and note that it is obviously at its first reading and will be sent to the Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade Committee, who will do a really good job at scrutinising this and eliciting feedback and some input from the public. But, at its essence, the bill was, essentially, making three key changes, and those three key changes are about achieving the best balance between what’s within the best interest of New Zealand and, more importantly—and it’s worth emphasising—what’s also in the best interest of those people who are coming here, and sometimes being smuggled here, in perilous situations.

Those three key changes revolve around changing the definition of “passenger”, which we’ve heard other people speak to today. The bill seeks to clarify and make it explicit that it’s the responsibility of the person coming in through that mass arrival, or through that group, to actually apply for that entry and that permission. It also provides the District Court, as we’ve heard members talk about previously, with a little bit more time to consider the application and the mass arrival warrant of commitment.

I also think it’s worth mentioning that, separate from this legislation, the Government is progressing work to develop that community management approach to assist what will be limiting the detainment of asylum seekers whilst their claims are being processed, including those who actually arrive in that mass arrival, and that was part of the Victoria Casey review. So we’re very pleased to be able to progress that work and commend this bill to the House.

E te Māngai o te Whare, tēnā koe. This bill is about Aotearoa New Zealand’s preparedness. While we haven’t yet experienced a mass arrival, this Government is forward-thinking with this bill and is preparing for any potential mass arrival.

This includes supporting Immigration New Zealand with the tools it needs to prepare to respond appropriately to any potential mass arrivals. It’s also about doing that in a way that upholds the human rights of the migrants—the vulnerable migrants—that are involved in this.

I worked with refugees and migrants in the UK. The stories that they told me were very, very extremely devastating and heartbreaking, but one thing was very clear, and this is the desperation that they had for their safety and the safety of the people they love: their children, their parents, their brothers and sisters, their husbands and wives.

And so while there is a process of entry into Aotearoa New Zealand, those who do not use this process should not be denied their human rights. While not part of this bill, there is another piece of work that this Government is working on that is related to this bill, and that is the development of a community management approach that will assist in limiting the detainment of asylum seekers and those who are on mass arrival while their claims are being processed, which is a good thing. This is a good bill, and I commend this bill to the House.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I’m pleased to rise in support of the Immigration (Mass Arrivals) Amendment Bill. I just want to start by saying that it’s worthy of note that the Minister, Michael Wood, invited both the Hon Gerry Brownlee and myself to two extensive briefings on this bill and full access to his officials. I just wanted to note that and thank him very much for the bipartisan approach that he’s taken to this bill, because this is the kind of bill that absolutely deserves that kind of approach, a bipartisan approach.

With that, it’s important just to go into some of the detail of the bill, because while we support this bill at first reading, it is worthy of noting that there are a number of things that need to be thought about by the select committee and we have to ask the officials some questions around, especially around the detention part. I have a good friend of mine who was involved back in 2012, I believe, in an exercise of mass arrivals in New Zealand, which was held at Devonport Naval Base in the North Shore electorate, where they practised an exercise just like this. I think many of the things that are being discussed in this bill today were things that they considered back then, because as the Hon Michael Woodhouse explained today in his contribution, it is not, as described, an orderly process but, actually, it is organised chaos: people arriving without any documents, with different health statuses, trying to work out who are the people smugglers, who are the criminals, who are the genuine refugees. It is a process that can take a really long time and it needs to be worked through.

So one of the things that this bill attempts to do is to give warranted officers and then the courts more time to process these applications. It was the case, or currently is the case, that you can hold someone for 96 hours while a determination is being made. What this bill attempts to do is to allow, again, someone, a warranted officer, to take that 96 hours to make the application and then the judge has up to seven days to make a determination and then 28 days if that’s not practicable to consider it in that time. What the court is determining is the risk and who these people are and where they should be held. So if you have—obviously, you’ve got potential criminals on the boat who are the smugglers, you want to know who they are, you want to know who the low-risk people are, who the medium-risk and high-risk potential people are, so that you can then place them in facilities determined by their level of risk.

The question, though, is that if you’re taking 28 days to do this, as Michael Woodhouse alluded to, what do you do with them in that time? I don’t think that’s been answered in this bill, and that’s something that we want to ask officials, because it would be my understanding that you would detain them either at a high-risk facility like Mt Eden Prison, potentially at a naval base like the one at Devonport, or up in Whangaparāoa or somewhere else, but the bill doesn’t make clear what you do in the meantime. Do you assume that everybody is high risk and we go with a high-risk facility while that 28 days is being borne out? But I can certainly understand, because during that process back in 2012, you know, one of the things that came out was that it does take a long time to process people, and I can understand where the Government is going with this.

It is worthy of note again, though, that although this is a low risk, there is a risk. It’s not no risk, like the Labour Party in Opposition said 10 years ago when they vehemently opposed the bill that the Hon Michael Woodhouse put forward, and he made some of those comments back then about, you know, some of the comments that the Labour members had made at the time about how this was akin to little green men landing, you know, on our shores. It is a real risk, albeit a small risk, and I do remember a case when I was working for Murray McCully many years ago—and it would’ve been around this time, actually—of a threat.

So I understand that the reason that the Minister is bringing this bill—and if you read between the lines—is that there is some risk, and it is an important time, 10 years on, to take a look at this piece of legislation and figure out if it can be more fit for purpose. But I think we can take from the fact that the Minister is bringing this bill that, reading between the lines, there is some risk and we need to be prepared for a mass arrival, and also balancing the rights of those who are seeking asylum with the rights of New Zealanders to be safe and protected.

I guess the next question, of course—I mean, this bill is just dealing with how to detain people according to their risk and giving them the rights that they deserve. What’s not talked about in here, I guess, and what Gerry Brownlee alluded to, was what happens then, and it’ll be interesting to talk to officials around the length of detention time. As I understand it from the bill, I think it’s new section 317AB from memory, you can detain someone for up to six months, and then application can be made to hold those people for longer, up to 28 days at a time, I believe—317AB(2)(b), if I’m right.

So it is important to ensure that we are detaining people in a facility that is the right facility for their level of risk, and that is what this bill wants to do. It gives the courts more time, like that seven days or up to 28 days, to determine that, because, of course, they will need to go to Interpol, they will need to go to the local authorities of the country of origin of that person and ask questions about their identity and previous convictions to determine who they are and what sort of risk they are. But also, more importantly, it is to sort out who are the real criminals on that boat, which are the people smugglers, the ones—and as I was talking to Michael Woodhouse just before, you know, they’re not going to identify themselves, and potentially people in the boat, the asylum seekers, are going to be fearful of pointing them out as well. So determining who those criminals are and who those very high-risk people are for the point of detention is very important.

So I just want to reiterate to the Minister my gratitude for the way that he’s invited myself and Gerry Brownlee into briefings and given us access to his officials so that we can get a really good understanding of the bill. It is important that we do this in a bipartisan way. We will support the bill. We think that it is time that we take a look at this legislation after 10 years. We do have some questions to ask around what happens to those people in the 28 days, what sort of facility they’ll be held at, because I am concerned about pregnant women, women with children, and if we’re still determining their level of risk after 28 days, are they going to be held somewhere like Mt Eden? That’s something that I think we need to figure out, because it’s not clear in the bill—unless, of course, I’m missing something, but Michael Woodhouse and I have the same concern there.

I don’t think there’s anything more that needs to be said. I look forward to scrutinising the bill at select committee and getting some more information, especially around that 28day period and where people will be held. With that, I commend the bill to the House.

Thank you so much, Mr Speaker. I rise this afternoon to speak on the Immigration (Mass Arrivals) Amendment Bill with pleasure.

I am, myself, an immigrant. I came here in 2004 with my family. Like so many people, I chose New Zealand for its beauty, for work-life balance, but fundamentally as a great place to bring up my two children—then aged four and eight.

I had a lot of hoops to pass through, but in no way was my experience comparable to that of my Green Party colleague Golriz Ghahraman and the experiences that her family had coming to New Zealand as refugees. For that reason, this process is going to be extremely important; the select committee process is going to be important to ensure that we are upholding the rights of some of our most vulnerable people. I’ve heard Opposition members today speak of pregnant people and ensuring that we make sure that they are catered for adequately.

There are just three simple changes in this bill: providing the District Court with more time to consider an application for mass arrival; warrant a commitment clarifying that it’s a responsibility of members of a mass arrival group to apply for entry permission and a visa; and changing the definition of “passenger” in the Act to remove any possibility that members of a mass arrival group could be deemed to hold entry permission and a visa upon arrival to New Zealand. With that, I commend this bill to select committee and to the House.

The question is, That the Immigration (Mass Arrivals) Amendment Bill be considered by the Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade Committee.

Motion agreed to.

Bill referred to the Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade Committee.

Instruction to Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade Committee