Worker Protection (Migrant and Other Employees) Bill

I present a legislative statement on the Worker Protection (Migrant and Other Employees) Bill.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): That legislative statement is published under the authority of the House and can be found on the Parliament website.

Hon PRIYANCA RADHAKRISHNAN: I move, That the Worker Protection (Migrant and Other Employees) Bill be now read a second time.

Protecting our migrant workers from exploitation is a priority for our Government. The contribution of migrant workers to the New Zealand economy must be valued and, equally, their vulnerabilities must be addressed. The Worker Protection (Migrant and Other Employees) Bill strengthens our immigration and employment system by introducing a fit for purpose offence and penalty regime to protect migrant workers in New Zealand. As immigration continues to ramp up and we have more migrant workers on the ground helping our economy across different sectors, it is important that we put in place the right measures to protect them from exploitation.

Last term, this Government announced a coordinated end-to-end package of legislative policy and operational changes to reduce migrant exploitation in New Zealand. We’ve already made great progress, with initiatives like new reporting tools, the migrant exploitation protection visa, and an education and information pilot being rolled out so far. This bill builds on this work to further protect migrant workers from exploitative employers in New Zealand.

The Education and Workforce Committee finished its consideration of the bill and reported back to the House on 20 March. The committee voted by a majority for the bill to be passed, and it recommended minor changes that have been incorporated to improve the clarity of drafting. They do not substantially change the bill. I thank the Education and Workforce Committee for their work and robust select committee process while considering this bill. I would also like to thank the individuals and organisations who made submissions on the bill for their time, their expertise, and their engagement. Of the 44 written submissions, 35 supported the bill either as it was reported to the Education and Workforce Committee or in principle. Community Law’s submission to the select committee noted the importance of our suite of initiatives, including this bill, to prevent, expose, and investigate exploitation. They regularly see clients who don’t even get their minimum employment entitlements or who have their immigration status used against them. I was heartened to see the need for further work in this area be acknowledged so broadly across the submissions.

There are three key parts to this bill that I want to touch on. Firstly, we need to stop exploitation from occurring at any level. That’s especially important in stopping the most serious examples of exploitation we’ve seen in this country. This bill creates a penalty regime that will allow immigration officers to address low-level, non-compliant employer behaviour that is linked to migrant exploitation. Currently, immigration officers do not have any mechanisms outside of criminal prosecution to address low-level, non-compliant employer behaviour. Criminal prosecution is a time-consuming, expensive, and inefficient response for such low-level offences. Introducing infringement offences will ensure that even lower-level offending, like refusing to provide employment documentation, can be dealt with before it becomes more serious. Immigration New Zealand has estimated that it would issue between 500 and 1,000 infringement notices to non-compliant employers per year under this new infringement regime.

Secondly, we need to ensure that our immigration officers have the tools to verify that employers are complying with their obligations. This is about levelling the playing field so that employers who are trying hard to meet their commitments to migrant workers don’t get undercut or disadvantaged. Once the bill commences, designated and authorised immigration officers will be able to request employment documents from employers about migrant workers whose visas they have supported. Only employers who have supported a visa application can be required to supply documents, and the documentation can only be about those who have been supported on that visa, not other employees that an employer may have. The documents that can be requested are clearly stated in the provision—specifically, documents that an employer is already legally required to hold or can otherwise be expected to hold. It only applies to pre-existing documents and cannot be used to obtain a new statement or compel an employer to answer questions. These records would allow immigration officers to assess, for example, whether a migrant worker is being paid the salary stated in the employer-supported visa application.

I want to be very clear: the document production power does not provide a power of entry or a power of search; the robust legislative and operational safeguards are there to prevent this information from being used to target overstayers or other vulnerable migrants. Although immigration officers may exercise the power without reasonable belief of non-compliance, this is justified given that it’s a relatively un-intrusive power intended to enable just the auditing of employer compliance. This is a narrow scope with very carefully designed limitations. Immigration officers must also be designated and authorised to use the power and be issued a warrant of designation by the chief executive of the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE). In their New Zealand Bill of Rights Act vet of the bill, the Ministry of Justice concluded that the document production power was justified and did not contravene the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act.

The document production power is an important tool for protecting migrant workers because it means that there can be proactive checks to verify that employers are complying with their legal obligations. It supports the overall objective of the bill to deter employers from exploiting migrant workers. We know that migrant worker exploitation is under-reported; we must be proactive.

Thirdly, we need to hold exploitative employers to account. The bill will allow MBIE to publish certain information about employers who have committed immigration offences. Currently, employers who breach their obligations under the Employment Relations Act are published on a stand-down list. This bill will allow immigration offending to also be made public and ensure that the names of employers who breached their obligations under the Immigration Act are made available. The stand-down list is a crucial tool to allow both prospective and current migrant workers to know if an employer is compliant with New Zealand’s employment law. This bill will require employers to respond to requests for information from the labour inspectorate or immigration officers within 10 working days. Currently, there are no specified time frames. We need this to create that level playing field. Immigration officers will, however, have discretion not to impose a fee where there are genuine reasons for delay.

The Worker Protection (Migrant and Other Employees) Bill will also amend the Companies Act to allow the courts to disqualify people who are convicted of migrant exploitation, or of people trafficking, from managing or directing a company. This change will prevent people who have used company structures to exploit others from doing so again in the future. It is only appropriate that we don’t allow people who commit these offences to continue managing companies and employing potentially vulnerable people.

No one stand-alone action will address migrant worker exploitation entirely. But with a suite of measures, including education and awareness raising, the provision of reporting tools for migrant workers, and these new powers and offences, we can prevent exploitation from occurring. We can protect those migrant workers who are subjected to exploitation by providing the tools enabling them to leave the exploitative situation, and we can take enforcement action to deal with employers who continue to choose not to comply with their legal obligations. I commend the bill to the House.

The question is that the motion be agreed to.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. Well, I’m not sure that the Associate Minister for Workplace Relations and Safety will be surprised in hearing tonight that the National Party will not be supporting this bill. The bill doesn’t solve the problem that the Minister believes it’s going to solve, and it goes after the wrong people. It was interesting to hear her speech tonight about the coordinated, end-to-end programme, the suite of things that this Government are putting together to try to end migrant exploitation, but the real, difficult, hard, gnarly end of migrant exploitation has not even been touched by this Government. This bill is one of those things that sounds good and it sounds nice and the Minister made all the right noises, but, actually, the real big gnarly things that are actually causing migrant exploitation are not being gone after.

I can tell you that the single biggest thing around migrant exploitation that this Government should be doing is going after wage recycling, because, actually, by forcing up the rate that migrants need to be paid to the median wage, which is now $29.66 an hour, all she’s done, all this Government have done, is mean that migrants are now paying more in terms of wage recycling for the jobs that they were always paying for, and they’re doing this by paying back their employer overseas, in bitcoin or in overseas bank accounts that are difficult to trace. This bill doesn’t go anywhere near addressing that real problem.

What this bill does, and I warned them about this in my very first speech, is it goes after super, super low-level minor infringements that actually are good employers who are trying to do the right thing who might get caught out, because, actually, when you’ve got a really tight labour market and a massive labour force shortage, when companies are trying to do the right thing, but are just trying to jimmy things around to make ends meet—

Angela Roberts: Jimmy things around?

ERICA STANFORD: Oh, so Angela Roberts doesn’t like the words “jimmy things around”. Let me give her an example of an aged-care facility who—we all know that they’re short of aged-care workers and nurses—find that their nurse coming in is going to be late or that they can’t bring in their next nurse because they’re so short, so they ask their migrant nurse or their migrant healthcare worker to work an extra hour. Guess what? Ping, because that’s against the conditions of their visa, which would be pinged under this bill. So in a really tight labour market when people are just trying to make ends meet and actually make sure that they are caring for people, in the case of an aged-care association, they would be pinged under this bill.

I made the point in my first reading speech that we need to be more flexible in these times rather than going after these people who are just trying to do the right thing. I was in a meeting in Wānaka just yesterday talking to the hospitality sector, who said to me, “We are so short-staffed here that we can’t open up our hotel for 100 percent capacity; it’s got to be 65 percent. We’ve got migrant workers working here that could be doing other jobs every now and then to try and make things work, but we can’t do it.” Guess what? Under this bill, they would be pinged for just trying to do the right thing in a tight labour market, which these guys created because they couldn’t get the borders open early enough. They’re going after the very people who are just trying to do the right thing, who have been pinged by this Government because they couldn’t get their act together last year. That is not a good bill.

Where they should have been going, as I have mentioned already, is after the wage recycling.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): Can I just remind the member of Speaker’s ruling 114/5: in a second reading of a bill, the comments or the debate is to be confined to matters contained within the bill and not at length matters which are not provided for in the bill. So, a comment, yes, but half a speech, not so much.

ERICA STANFORD: Thank you, Madam Speaker. Well, let’s move on then to some of the comments by the submitters in this bill, who were making the very points that I have been making, firstly around flexibility. Business New Zealand have basically said in their submission to us that the broad definition of an offence is just unworkable and stomps over the nature of the employment agreement and mutual agreement between the employee and the employer. An employer commits an offence now by allowing an employee to work in a way not entitled to under the Act—in practice, for example, where the aged-care nurse may be required to cover that extra shift or that extra hour because a colleague is running late. This constitutes now a legal infringement, reducing the flexibility of the workforce in an environment of extreme skill shortages. Removing the ability of workers and employers to meet mutual agreement to ensure critical services and firms can operate will create backlogs and fewer services.

A second thing that was brought up in the select committee process was around the fact that many times migrant workers want to do more than their job that they’re doing. And an example that I can give you, which wasn’t mentioned in select committee but perfectly explains this point, was the cherry orchardist that I spoke to yesterday, who said they’ve employed migrant workers to string out nets. Those migrant workers said, “Hey, we’d really like to do more and learn more about horticulture and work in different parts of the business, and learn more and improve our skills.” And that, again, under this bill, as said by Business New Zealand, will be penalised. So in an environment where we’ve got workers who are here, who are wanting to do more, who are wanting to learn more, this bill penalises them. That was warned about at select committee by Business New Zealand.

Again, the real issue that was complained about in select committee was around the fact that migrant exploitation is rife and is not being investigated. This bill, as I mentioned, goes after people who are just trying to do the right thing. But, in fact, 10 percent of complaints about migrant exploitation at the serious end are actually never looked into. There was a report last year that said there are over a thousand reports about serious migrant exploitation—serious migrant exploitation. Only 10 percent of those were looked into. I want to read this House a text message that I got yesterday from an immigration agent: “Do you remember those exploited workers I told you about? Things with INZ are going super slow and the owner of the business is about to leave New Zealand.” This is just another example of the serious nature we have in this country of serious migrant exploitation that is not investigated.

The worry that was brought up at select committee around this bill was that the focus of the Government is on the wrong people. It’s on low-level people who are just trying to be flexible in their businesses, who actually have said in many surveys that they want to do the right thing, but they just need more education because quite often the number of rules that Immigration New Zealand keep changing is overwhelming. They want to do the right thing, yet the serious end of town are not being investigated, and the worry always was—and it was at select committee, with the submitters—that the focus will now be on the compliance officers, who are desk-based, making phone calls and asking for records when, actually, the serious end of town is not being investigated. There are not boots on the ground. There’s no investigation going into the serious breaches, and we can see that by all of the reports, so that the comments at select committee were very much around: we are going after the wrong people.

These are people who are just trying to be flexible, who are trying to do the right thing, who are sometimes confused by the rules, who just need education. Whereas the people at the serious end, despite what the Minister came out today and said—that there is a suite of policies—there has been nothing. There has been nothing that this Government has put out that shows that they’re going to go after wage recycling—not a single piece of legislation around that, nothing at all. There’s nothing in this bill around wage recycling. And there’s certainly nothing in terms of more boots on the ground and more emphasis on those people who are at the serious end of town.

The other thing that I mentioned in our first reading speech was that we would not support this bill if it didn’t make some changes around the reasonable grounds. There was nothing done at select committee to change that. There is no requirement for a desk-based officer, when they’re requiring documents from an employer, to have any reasonable grounds to ask for those documents. So as we mentioned in our first reading speeches—that the officers will very likely go on fishing expeditions, when many of these companies who’ve had to be accredited have already given all of this information and will have to give it again when they become re-accredited; are now going to be asked for it again, placing massive burdens on them when there are no reasonable grounds for those officers to require those documents—I said that our support would hinge on that. It didn’t change. And we will not be, therefore, voting for this bill.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I rise to take this short call on the Worker Protection (Migrant and Other Employees) Bill. The member who just took her seat, Erica Stanford, listed a few reasons why the National Party is not going to support this bill, which is disappointing, because it’s at moments like this that this House needs to come together and address this serious issue. But then, migrant exploitation happened throughout nine years of the National Government. It was happening under their eyes; they haven’t done anything about it, so we are not surprised. However, she tried to underplay these serious offences as low-level offences. Underpaying people is not a minor offence; it’s a serious offence. It’s a crime. Denying people their basic rights such as smoko and lunch breaks is not low level; it’s actually a serious offence and a crime, and these are some of the things that this bill is trying to address.

I could go on and on and on, but it’s quite clear, and I’m sure that some of my friends who will be speaking after me will address some of these points as well. This bill implements legislative changes to help address temporary migrant worker exploitation that were announced in July 2020. The bill proposes to amend the Immigration Act 2009, the Employment Relations Act 2000, and the Companies Act 1993.

In 2018, Cabinet agreed to progress an action item to take serious action on migrant exploitation. This culminated in the temporary migrant worker exploitation review. The exploitation exists on a spectrum. It takes many forms. It’s rampant in our country. It’s happening. It’s ugly, and needs to stop. I believe that this bill is going to play a significant role in doing just that.

I’d actually like to thank the Minister for her hard work in bringing this bill in the House, because this was much-needed legislation. Every day, we see stories in the media where people are severely exploited to the point of people attempting to take their own lives because they don’t see any way out of the issue.

I’d like to thank the members of the Education and Workforce Committee. Regardless of the member disagreeing or not supporting the bill tonight, as a committee we came together and did good work in scrutinising the bill. The officials, obviously, worked hard to report the bill back to this House. This is a serious issue. This is a very important issue to not only the migrant community but actually to us as a country. It’s a bad image for our country and gives us a bad reputation. It’s important for our businesses as well. So it’s timely legislation. It’s very important, and I commend it to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. It’s a pleasure to rise to contribute in the debate on this bill, but as my colleague Erica Stanford has actually signalled, the National Party will not be supporting this bill. And I have to say, I’m disappointed that we had to get to that position, because there are aspects of the bill that we do actually agree with in the sense that nobody—I don’t think anyone in this House—wants to see migrant workers being exploited. And it is something that we need to do something about.

As Erica Stanford has actually mentioned, it is really disheartening to find out that out of more than a thousand reports relating to allegations of migrant exploitation, only about 108 were investigated by Immigration New Zealand and the inspectorate. And that’s sort of, I guess—who’s good at maths?—less than 10 percent. But instead of actually investigating these complaints where migrant workers have actually laid those complaints to the authorities, we now get to a point where the Government is actually legislating for a law which basically wants Immigration New Zealand to—without necessarily any cause—dig into the financials of a company to find out if there is actually abuse in the system; whether there is in fact exploitation of migrant workers. As I said to start, I don’t think anyone in this Chamber agrees to actually have migrant workers or any workers being exploited, because I find it really abhorrent.

We do also have a process where we have minimum wage settings, we also have when people are applying for visas they have to meet a certain wage criterion for them to be granted visas. But one of the problems that a lot of migrants have—migrant workers actually have—is that when they’re tied to a particular workplace, they can’t often alter or change jobs easily. I mean, that is an aspect of the immigration rules that the Government should perhaps make more flexible so that migrant workers could easily move from, let’s say, an abusive or an exploitative employer to another job that may not be exploiting them or is actually treating them better or paying them better rates, but instead they are tied to an employer.

The bill, basically, removes the requirement of the desk-based officer to have reasonable grounds for suspecting there is a compliance issue, essentially meaning that they can go on a fishing expedition. There are three infringement offences that workplaces can be charged with: if an employer employs a migrant they are not authorised to employ, or if the migrant the employer’s authorised to employ isn’t working in a way in which their visa states they must. And some of the examples that Erica Stanford actually talked about, I have come face to face with some of these issues, with constituents, migrant workers who have actually complained that they would like to increase the hours of work because they wanted to sort of do more study and actually learn about the industry that they’re in and learn the New Zealand way of practices, and they are not entitled to even change the dates that they have because they were given a particular visa for certain days that they actually worked and they couldn’t even change that. And if the employer doesn’t supply requested documents within 10 days. So those are three factors that will actually get the employer pinged and potentially fined up to $100,000, or even jail time for serious offences.

The thing that really sort of bothers me is that—I wasn’t actually part of the select committee, but to read that Zespri New Zealand kiwifruit growers also actually had serious concern about the bill. The line I’m particularly concerned about in their submission was that “This [bill] is contrary to the principles of natural justice and will permit enforcement bodies to make arbitrary requests.” I think that should be something we should be concerned about.

The other one is Business New Zealand, who actually said that “Duplicating the functional roles of the Labour Inspectorate and Immigration NZ without sufficient assurance of resourcing and consistent service delivery from both Departments” is actually worrying. When recently I had a constituent who rang my office to assist them because their temporary work visa was expiring, they had had a job offer for a full-time job in a highly paying managerial position, and they had, in fact, gone through an immigration agent. The company needed to become an accredited employer, which took some time, and they had to do job check. It’s been months. It’s been months, and they still haven’t got their work visa.

The issue is that Immigration New Zealand does not actually have the capacity to even process visas where current workers who are already here working cannot get a work visa to continue working, and here they are on a fishing expedition to ping employers who are having difficulty finding workers. This is a bill that could have actually worked in terms of—you know, in select committee there are things that different parties would actually agree to if they had perhaps worked together better. Perhaps it’s a bill that maybe we could’ve supported, but it did not quite fit that threshold where we can actually support it. I oppose this bill.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. It is a pleasure to rise and take a call on the Worker Protection (Migrant and Other Employees) Bill. It has been a privilege to be on the select committee that has been shepherding this bill through its processes, the Education and Workforce Committee. I want to thank and acknowledge everyone who did submit on this bill, and those in this select committee from across the parties who did engage in good faith, even though in the end we couldn’t agree.

I think that it’s really clearly a demonstration of where our focus is and where our priorities are. This bill is about the exploitation of workers, so we’re probably starting in a different place from some of the other members in the House. So we’re really proud to be bringing this. This is about looking after our temporary migrant workers who are vulnerable. We need to look after them. We don’t just have a moral imperative, but an economic one. We know how important these workers are to our economy and we need to make sure that we look after them.

Simeon Brown: Get Immigration New Zealand doing their job.

ANGELA ROBERTS: We know that this bill sits within the wider work to combat migrant exploitation, which started with the temporary migrant worker exploitation review. It’s really pleasing to be able to remind the other side of the House, who seem desperately concerned about the capacity for Immigration New Zealand and Employment New Zealand, and remind them that we have increased resources to meet those exact issues that have been raised: $50 million is not exactly nothing.

Simeon Brown: Spending more, but it’s doing worse.

ANGELA ROBERTS: So what we’ve done is that we’ve increased those resources, we have new reporting tools, and we also—obviously somebody hasn’t quite kept up with what’s going on. We do actually have a Migrant Exploitation Protection Work Visa, and so it would be helpful if we were debating a bill in the House that everybody had their facts straight on and kept up with the significant progress we have made in this Government to support our migrant workers in a wide range of ways.

This bill means that we have a more proportionate and efficient enforcement kit for our immigration officers and labour inspectors to deal with low-level offending. This is actually about making sure we can support employers to get it right before things get really out of hand. The penalties and the exploitation are significant. And because of that, I commend this bill to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. At the first reading, ACT supported the Worker Protection (Migrant and Other Employees) Bill to select committee to see whether our concerns would be sufficiently addressed and the bill’s unintended or otherwise kind of obvious consequences fixed, and to hear from a wide range of stakeholders—although the total submission list wasn’t particularly sizable in this case. We specifically said migrants deserve a voice and an opportunity to help craft a law that directly affects them, and the select committee is an opportunity for this to take place. Now that this bill has been through the select committee process, ACT is not satisfied that meaningful improvements have been made, and the risks that we identified in the first reading have not been substantially addressed, and we will, therefore, no longer be supporting this bill.

Since the first reading of this bill, there has been a good number of changes to the Government’s immigration policy and instructions, with new pathways opening up and a seeming abandonment of the great reset, which is well overdue. There have also been more cases in the media spotlight recently—or should I say a flashlight at five o’clock in the morning?—and more reports of nefarious, unlicensed immigration advisers charging extortionate amounts of money for things like recovery visas and Accredited Employer Work Visas, which is a perfectly foreseeable consequence of migrants having to get a job offer and their visa tied to their employer, among other factors.

If the accreditation system worked as intended, then a bill of this nature would not be required. It would be unnecessary. And while it is true that some people will always try to break immigration rules, that is a minority, and this legislation is akin to breaking a walnut with a sledgehammer, given the powers it grants immigration officers. Employers go through an accreditation process, which has been well canvassed here this evening, and again when they reapply, though I note the Government has, of course, extended the accreditation period for businesses, which is a good thing, but if that causes a problem and opens up the potential for exploitation, then that’s a policy design issue.

Some of our earlier concerns that I raised in the first reading: granting immigration officials and labour inspectors the power to request documentation from businesses on pretty marginal grounds without reasonable cause is very problematic; further, the 10-day requirement for producing that documentation is unreasonable in the context of natural justice. These broad powers could result in officials overly targeting actually compliant businesses rather than focusing on the problematic ones. This bill unduly extends the power of the State in interfering with businesses—employers—and it almost assumes that businesses are all guilty. And that is a highly disruptive place to start from.

Additionally, I have a concern with the lack of focus and clarity in this bill. As it stands, it could unfairly impact migrant workers themselves. I raised concerns about the consequences for migrants if they report their employers, in the first reading. They could find themselves in a world of trouble. They could wind up being served a DLN, a deportation liability notice. If the goal of this bill is to hold unscrupulous employers accountable by imposing these fines for every unlawfully hired employee breaching rules, that could be a positive outcome. However, the potential repercussions for affected workers must also be considered. How will this infringement regime, which targets the lower end of migrant exploitation, protect migrant workers and encourage whistleblowing?

I’ll also emphasise the question I made in the first reading, because I think it’s still very relevant, which is whether migrants can trust the decision-making ability of Immigration New Zealand (INZ), given that nearly half of the appeals to the Immigration and Protection Tribunal are successful, indicating INZ often makes mistakes—and they’ll admit that themselves—in examining cases. This raises concerns about the reliability and accuracy of their decisions and is certainly not a positive reflection on INZ. Can an agency with such a track record be trusted to use the powers in this bill fairly, or will it become an enormous fishing expedition that makes life hell for business owners?

To address exploitation, ACT has long held the view that the Government should allow migrants the freedom to change jobs easily—if their employment situation becomes untenable—by way of removing the tying of visas to a single employer and job type. We would have also liked to have seen more specific protections for migrants to make it clear that this is not about punishing them. It is important to offer a bridge to a safety net that encourages whistleblowing and supports migrant workers.

So, fundamentally, Government policy itself makes exploitation worse, and we would have liked to have supported this bill or efforts to improve or decrease migrant exploitation. But, ultimately, this bill needs a balance, but all we have, frankly, is Government hypocrisy at its finest. Thank you, Madam Speaker.

I rise on behalf of the Green Party to speak to the Worker Protection (Migrant and Other Employees) Bill second reading. I sat through most of the submissions at the Education and Workforce Committee, and I acknowledge the work of the committee.

The bill, in and of itself, creates a kit of infringements that the Government hopes will do some work to stamp out exploitation, and we made it clear in the first reading that out of the kits, the Government or policy interventions the Government could use, we think—and this is one of the areas, actually, I find myself agreeing with the ACT Party—one of the most effective interventions is to decouple work visas from single employers. But, at the same time, we do acknowledge that there are unscrupulous employers who are getting away with exploiting migrants with little consequences, and so we do think there is worth in exploring a set of infringements to enable employers being held to account, and to discourage this type of behaviour.

One of the key points that we raised during the first reading, which was then echoed by the New Zealand Law Society, as well as the Human Trafficking Research Coalition, was regarding the use of the information collected as part of this kit for the purposes of future visa applications. During the select committee, we were reassured that it could be, in theory, operationalised to prevent this from happening, but we do not think that goes far enough. We do actually think that, ideally, there should be protections in law that guarantees to migrants that whatever information Immigration New Zealand collates won’t be used for the purposes of determining future visa applications. The reason for that is that often exploited migrants are finding themselves breaching their visa conditions as part of the exploitative conditions that they find themselves in and so, by not having those protections, what we are creating is a situation where migrants may not feel confident being part of that whistleblowing process.

We do not think that making changes to the bill that would have enabled and entrenched those protections would have jeopardised the holding of these employers to account, and this is why we do look forward to the committee of the whole House process to explore the Supplementary Order Paper that we’re going to be tabling on that. So our support will continue to be based on the possibility of making these changes and we look forward to future debates to unpack those. Kia ora.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I must admit that I’m a little bit perplexed by the contributions from National Party colleagues this evening. If the law is breached, yes, there is an obligation to ensure that there are tools and architecture to make sure that the law is complied with.

I was then also confused by my colleague Melissa Lee’s contributions where she lamented the non-investigation of certain breaches. However, that’s exactly what this bill is there to address in terms of the production of documents.

I think it is really worrying when there is a dismissive approach to the experience of exploited migrants. It is not simply an academic spectrum; it’s an experience of marginalisation, and if you’ve spoken to migrants who are experiencing cumulative what the Opposition might call lower-end breaches, it is an experience of marginalisation, and we absolutely must do something to address that.

There’s a saying that goes “Don’t confuse justice with the law”. Justice is about fairness; it’s about just outcomes. The law is about the tools that we need to get to those just outcomes, and I think sometimes people believe that if we simply make something illegal, like paying someone less than the minimum wage, then compliance just follows. In truth, there are areas of society by which either their lack of transparency or their architecture leads them away from justice.

So I would like to commend the Minister for introducing this piece of legislation to the law, and it’s a piece of law that recognises part of what I would call the existence of keyhole employers. What I mean by that is that in certain industries where there are cumulative breaches, employers have so much control over a workplace that they can, essentially, close the door and only let you see what they want you to see through that door. The production of documents is really significant here as it does allow the opening of the doors. It is a tool that ensures that we’re working towards fairness, as opposed to just setting up laws that aren’t complied with.

There are other aspects of this bill which also will make it more fair in terms of workers who are facing these abuses that other members have spoken to, so I will not speak to those. I only say that I commend the Minister and the committee again for their work on this bill, and I commend this bill to the House.

Members, this debate is interrupted and is set down for resumption next sitting day. The House stands adjourned until 2 p.m. tomorrow.

Debate interrupted.

The House adjourned at 9.56 p.m.