Immigration (Fiscal Sustainability and System Integrity) Amendment Bill

on behalf of the Minister of Immigration: I move, That the Immigration (Fiscal Sustainability and System Integrity) Amendment Bill be now read a third time.

This bill is an important step forward for New Zealand’s immigration system and supports the Government’s broader priorities of driving economic growth and attracting the skills New Zealand needs to thrive. A strong, fair, and responsive immigration system is essential to delivering on our ongoing Going For Growth plan, supporting businesses, and ensuring New Zealand remains an attractive destination for talent and for investment. Immigration is vital to our economic and social prosperity, and this legislation helps to strengthen the foundations of a system that New Zealanders can have confidence in. It ensures that our settings continue to be fair, transparent, and fit for purpose in a changing world.

This bill is important to ensure that compliance and detention settings are more balanced and transparent to better align our provisions with the recommendations of the Casey KC and Heron KC reviews, strengthen both immigration risk settings and the protection of migrants from exploitation, enable the immigration system to respond to challenges with greater flexibility, and allow the cost of the immigration system to be recovered more fairly.

The bill delivers on these objectives through a series of targeted, sensible reforms. It introduces stronger safeguards for vulnerable people, including a higher threshold for the detention of asylum seekers and judicial oversight of out-of-hours compliance activity. These changes respond directly to the recommendations of Victoria Casey KC and Michael Heron KC, made in their independent reviews, and they reflect our commitment to transparency and accountability. It also addresses migrant exploitation by creating a new offence for charging premiums for employment offers. Charging for job offers is already illegal under New Zealand law, but it only applies when the victim is an employee here; it does not cover people who are extorted but who never arrive, or who arrive to find that the job offer has evaporated. This awful practice is causing real harm and is undermining trust in our immigration system. By closing these legislative gaps, we can prosecute more cases and send a clear message that exploitation is not tolerated in New Zealand.

The bill strengthens immigration risk settings by clarifying deportation liability for residence class visa holders who commit serious offences and by enabling the cancellation of resident status in those very rare cases where a person poses a significant security risk but cannot be deported immediately. These measures protect the integrity of our system while respecting our human rights obligations.

Flexibility is another key feature of this bill. It allows the Minister to respond quickly and fairly to unusual events, such as airline disruptions or natural disasters, where large groups of people are stranded in New Zealand. This ensures that our system can adapt to real-world challenges without unnecessary bureaucracy or costs.

I know there have been concerns expressed about the potential for overuse of those powers, but I’m very confident about the scrutiny and transparency provisions in the bill. The Education and Workforce Committee further slightly raised the bar regarding ministerial consideration. The Minister will have to certify that an exercise of the power is reasonably necessary to address the situation, and that it is a very appropriate addition.

Finally, the bill futureproofs immigration funding by creating options to share costs more fairly and sustainably across those who benefit from, or create risks for, the immigration system, or—with appropriate safeguards, including consultation—those who benefit from services in the wider community. Amendment Paper 445, passed by the House, made minor and technical changes that will ensure the workability of the electronic monitoring provisions. I look forward to those provisions being available. Electronic monitoring, where it is practicable, will be a very positive alternative for people who would otherwise have to be held in corrections remand facilities. There is a lot of work for both the Minister’s officials and corrections officials to operationalise electronic monitoring, which is why those aspects of this amendment bill will not come into effect until a year after Royal assent.

I would like to acknowledge the many submitters who engaged in the select committee process; their insights have strengthened the legislation. Also, on behalf of the Minister of Immigration, the Minister is very grateful to the Education and Workforce Committee, which undertook a thorough and thoughtful review, ensuring the bill reflects robust policy and serves the public interest. She also thanks her parliamentary colleagues for their constructive debate and careful consideration throughout all stages of this bill.

This is a balanced, forward-looking package of reforms that will help New Zealand manage risk, protect migrants, and maintain confidence in the integrity of our immigration system. I’m proud to commend this bill to the House.

The question is that the motion be agreed to.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. This bill is not perfect. The Labour Party would have preferred to see stronger safeguards—that is, clearer limits expressed in the legislation and stronger judicial oversight—on the new powers that allow the Minister of the day to cancel a residence visa of someone who is categorised as threat to national security; on the use of electronic monitoring; on the conduct of out-of-hours compliance visits, otherwise known as dawn raids; and, perhaps most importantly, on the detention of asylum seekers. But, on balance, we took the view that the positives in this bill—judicial oversight on the detention of asylum seekers, a new, bespoke regime that recognises the particular vulnerability of asylum seekers; the out-of-hours compliance regime, which requires a warrant of commitment; and a much stronger and clearer offence in law for people who seek or receive a premium for a job in order to get a visa as one of the ways of combating the exploitation of migrant workers.

On the other elements in the bill—the extended levy-making powers; the ability to cancel the visa of someone who’s classed as a threat to national security; the flexible powers, that is, the ability for the Minister to make a special direction for a whole class of people; and the provision around deportation and criminal offending—on all of those, Labour took the view that they, on balance, are probably useful and helpful additions to the system.

Why is this bill important? Well, around the world right now, immigration policy is a political dumpster fire. Right-wing populist parties in so many countries, but including in the United States and across Europe, have campaigned against and demonised refugees and migrants. Sadly, they have succeeded in so many places. Political parties who were once committed to the 1951 refugee convention are now engaged in a race to the bottom. It distresses me to see the UK Labour Party and other European social democratic parties engaging in that race.

New Zealand needs immigration. The demographic modelling is very clear; we can’t survive in the same political and economic form without more young, skilled, energetic, hard-working migrants coming here and helping us develop this country. We have so many industries that have structural labour shortages. We need migrants, and we need to get better at getting them here to make new lives.

Respect for human rights, the 1951 refugee convention, is part of the modern history of this country. The values that underpin it—welcoming people who are escaping genocide and persecution to come here and make successful lives and become great New Zealanders—are absolutely at the heart of who we are as a people. It pains me to see parties like New Zealand First in this Parliament deliberately mimicking the corrosive and devise anti-migrant rhetoric of the UK Reform party. When you add to that attention seekers like Brian Tamaki openly and deliberately using racist, anti-migrant rhetoric in a desire to get a few more dollars in the collection plate—this kind of political rhetoric gives permission to the racists to divide our society and do damage to our democracy.

In my view, the best thing that we can do as a country and as a Parliament is to strengthen, not weaken, our adherence and commitment to international human rights standards; secondly, to be constantly improving and fine tuning the immigration system in a way that makes it clear to the public that the system is fair, it is well administered in the interests of the people of this country, and, of course, of migrants, to retain that public confidence in the system.

It is incredibly important, in this Parliament and in New Zealand’s society, that the centre holds; that we maintain a consensus—hopefully, a cross-party consensus—in this Parliament that New Zealand needs migrants, that we are better for migration, that migrants make an overwhelmingly positive contribution to our country, and that we need to get better at welcoming them, helping them settle here and become great New Zealanders. How we welcome newcomers and how we make them feel and how well we assist them to settle goes to the heart of our values as New Zealanders and who we are as a nation.

Ricardo Menéndez March: Madam Speaker.

DEPUTY SPEAKER: Apologies, I was just taking attention to some detail. Ricardo Menéndez March.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. We have more in common with asylum seekers and migrant workers than we do with billionaires and politicians on the other side of the House who seek to divide our communities and hand out billions of dollars to landlords, the fossil fuel industries, and the tobacco industry.

This is a Trojan Horse of a bill, because, for all the virtue signalling that we have heard from the previous members, the reality is that this bill is diminishing the rights of migrants and it also expands the liability of deportation for migrant communities. It also keeps painting refugees as though they are a security threat. When we hear narratives about the integrity of our immigration system and how important it is to manaaki migrants, why don’t these politicians, from whichever side of the House they come from, focus on genuinely improving the human rights of migrants, which, by the way, are not even recognised adequately in our Immigration Act, because the policies that come out of the Immigration Act are, effectively, exempt from the Human Rights Act. Migrants are actually not adequately protected in legislation when it comes to their human rights.

It’s really important to put it on the record that what this bill does is it creates additional tools for the Minister to, effectively, deport migrants. To say that this is about protecting migrants by, yep, adding an additional charge for charging premiums offshore and criminalising that while, at the very same time, gutting the supports that exploited migrants can receive is a joke. This is not a Government that takes migrant exploitation seriously, because, if they did, they would not have been cutting the length of time that someone can be on the migrant exploitation protection visa. It is simply not a serious Government when it comes to migrant exploitation and treating our migrant communities with the respect and dignity that they deserve.

On the Government side, we have had the New Zealand First party scapegoating migrant communities left, right, and centre. In fact, their whole whakapapa of a party has been on scapegoating migrant communities. On the other side, we have had the ACT Party, who have continuously scapegoated refugees and painted them as a security threat. Then, we’ve got National, who have not hesitated to use the language of the far right when it comes to “opening the floodgates”, in their language. I do want to say I’m incredibly disappointed that the Labour Party continues to support this kind of legislation, but, then again, I remember that as the Greens we have been fighting against unjust deportations, whether it’s a Labour or National Government.

The truth is that this came off the back of a mass arrivals bill that was not supported by human rights organisations. Introduced by the previous Labour Government—who refused to listen to the voices of human rights organisations who said, “Why this bill?”—they said, “Because we’ve got to prepare.”; in the same way the Government side has said, “We have got to prepare for mass arrivals.” But do you know what they have not prepared for? Our underfunded health system, our education system that is struggling to keep up with the needs of students, and our public housing stock. They prefer to use slogans of getting prepared for mass arrivals by boats or planes that have never happened and have not been able to be substantiated as an imminent threat.

The things that we do know we have to prepare for, they have failed to adequately resource. They have gutted our public housing infrastructure. They have gutted the ability for us to have inter-regional rail so that we can connect our towns and cities. Instead, they have given billions of dollars to the wealthy few and the companies that are wrecking our environment and our planet. If they are so serious about preparing for the actual risks that our country faces, they would be turning their heads to issues around infrastructure and the cost of living and the climate crisis, not this bill that seeks to continue treating migrant communities as a security threat, when most asylum seekers are actually lacking adequate support for them to be adequately settled in our communities.

To use one horrid attack in West Auckland as the one example to justify stripping residency from asylum seekers is honestly disgusting. We saw charities on the ground, as well as advocates, including a former Labour Party MP from a refugee background, who at the time rightfully pointed out that that attack should absolutely not be used to diminish the rights of asylum seekers. What do we have now? A bill that seeks to strip residency status from people who may have sought asylum if they are deemed to be a security threat.

When we talk about a security threat, it’s also disingenuous for the Government members to point to issues around terrorism, again, pretending that refugees pose a terrorist threat to our country. The definition of “security” in our legislation also includes issues in relationship to reputational damage, effectively, to our country, which could be weaponised against our communities. We have seen that in the past in the way that black and Middle Eastern communities have been weaponised and targeted by politicians on the other side of the House. Not that long ago in the previous National Government, we saw an Opposition that was also quite willing to scapegoat Asian communities for a housing crisis that we were experiencing—the political football of targeting migrants and refugees and using that as a distraction to not deal with the serious issues that we have at the time, like housing, like healthcare, which is actually supported by countless migrant workers, who simply want to be treated with respect and dignity and yet are experiencing unsafe staffing conditions.

Additionally, this bill seeks to try and remediate the cuts that the Government has made to our public services, like health and education, by charging migrants levies without recognising that migrant workers already contribute disproportionately to the tax base to the services that we all need and use. Why? Because migrants, especially in the first few years of being here in this country, are unable to access many of these services that we all need, yet they’re contributing in tax. Now, the Government, after gutting our healthcare system, after gutting our infrastructure, and instead passing that on to the wealthy few—

Hon Casey Costello: Repetition.

RICARDO MENÉNDEZ MARCH: —have chosen to put in place levies. It’s interesting that Casey Costello, who tends to just use Philip Morris’ lines, says, “Repetition”, when, actually, in her contributions in relationship to this bill, she has failed to own up to the fact that her own leader has had a career of scapegoating migrants and refugees. All that she has said during her contributions has been slogans and completely frivolous contributions that do not address the issues in front of us. It’s actually disgusting that we have a New Zealand First Party that is quite happy to form a coalition with a National Party, who shows up to ethnic community events and does not own up to the fact that they have decided to form an agreement with the most anti-migrant, anti-refugee party in this Parliament.

The Green Party, instead of causing division by targeting migrant communities, is committing to taxing the wealthy few so that we can all have dignified lives, so that we can fund the public services that our communities need, instead of charging levies through this bill to make up for the cuts that they have made because they have realised they’re now having to make up for the shortfall due to the billions of dollars they have handed out to landlords and tobacco companies and the fossil fuel industry.

When it comes to electronic monitoring, it’s easy to say that it’s a better alternative to detention when it comes to mass arrivals when it was, once again, parties on both sides who supported having a mass arrivals regime. We tried to add additional protections for people subjected to electronic monitoring during the committee of the whole House stage. We tried to put in an amendment to exempt children from being subjected to electronic monitoring and that was not supported by the Government side. What that tells me is that they seem quite happy to have children escaping some of the most harrowing conditions that one can ever imagine being subjected to policies like electronic monitoring.

This Government paints these issues of asylum seekers as though we are receiving a huge amount of asylum seeking claims, but last year we had one asylum seeking case per 10 days. That’s a tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny fraction compared to the claims that countries like Canada, the US, and the UK see—extremely small amount compared to others. What we have as a country instead is an opportunity to boost the support systems and the judiciary, who can often help process those very same claims so that asylum seekers can be processed in a dignified manner, as opposed to pushing forward legislation that simply increases the liability of deportation and pretends that the Government cares about migrant exploitation, when every other action that they have taken tells us the exact opposite.

For example, they could have decoupled work visas from single employers to give migrant workers better mobility for when they are in exploitative situations, and they have chosen not to do so. Once again, the Green Party will keep fighting to hold both major parties to account for their policies on immigration and their track record of, when things get tough, pointing the finger at migrants instead of addressing the reality that we’ve got billionaires hoarding up a stupid amount of wealth at the expense of our communities and property speculators who continue making a buck while people go without. The Green Party does not support this bill and will fight to overhaul our immigration system so that it genuinely puts human rights at the centre of decision making.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I don’t know which bill that member was talking about, but I’m taking this call on the Immigration (Fiscal Sustainability and System Integrity) Amendment Bill. I’m taking this call on behalf of ACT to support this bill.

We know that immigration is important to our nation, but immigration doesn’t mean open borders for anyone and everyone. I know that is what the Green Party wants—open borders for anyone and everyone. They don’t care about national security. They don’t care about the safety of our communities. They don’t care about an immigration system supporting our economic activity. They don’t care about those things.

Ricardo Menéndez March: Point of order.

Dr PARMJEET PARMAR: All they want is—

Ricardo Menéndez March: I take personal offence at the imputation that we don’t care about national security. I take offence at the comment—

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Teanau Tuiono): You can’t take personal offence on behalf of a group of people.

Ricardo Menéndez March: I take personal offence. I’m part of the group that was mentioned.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Teanau Tuiono): Wait for a sec. I’ll just take some advice from the Clerk. OK, so the advice I have received is that, because this is a wide-ranging debate and the member himself has been wide-ranging in his comments as well, in terms of his references to other political parties, that is also afforded to other political parties to be wide-ranging. But I would ask the House to not be personal in your comments.

Dr PARMJEET PARMAR: Thank you, Mr Speaker. Resuming from where I left off, we do really care about national security. We care about supporting our economy, and we do care about supporting our community. We want to see that our immigration system is healthy and that it’s not compromising the safety of our communities or the safety of our nation. That is why we want to see that our borders are managed in the way we need to. We are learning new things in the immigration system, and we know that people are applying different kinds of mechanisms. They are becoming really innovative to dodge the system, so we have to keep up and we have to make sure that our legislation is able to keep up as well. That is why this bill is so important.

The other thing the Green member spoke about is the exploitation visa. He is concerned about the exploitation visa. On this side, we are trying to stop exploitation. We are actually working on the root problem rather than creating the problem and then seeing how we can solve that problem which has been created and let that problem be created on an even bigger scale. We don’t want that problem to be created on a bigger scale, but we want to see that we are minimising that problem, and that is why we are ensuring this bill goes through, which is about the integrity of our immigration system.

These policies are great—good policies are good—but if there are no compliance checks, there is no point in having good policies. That is why we have put some provisions in this for compliance checks as well. But, yes, of course, for out-of-hours warrants for compliance checks, there is going to be additional oversight through this legislation.

The final point I want to make—I’m not going through all the changes that this bill is making. The other point which I’m really happy to see in this bill is that we know that a lot of people, those who misuse our immigration system to bring people from overseas, those who really want to be here in New Zealand who can’t come through the normal legal channels so they are enticed to pay for a job offer which doesn’t exist—so these people, those who pay for those jobs, come here to New Zealand; they are not filling the genuine gap that we have in our businesses. They are here as surplus people, I would say, because they just want to be here in New Zealand and we want to stop that activity—charging premiums. Whether it happens here or it happens overseas, that needs to be stopped, and we want to see that our immigration system is bringing people—those who are genuinely filling a gap in our economic activity.

Overall, I would say it’s a great bill, and any party that cares about our immigration system being a sound system should support this bill. The ACT Party is really happy to support this. Thank you, Mr Speaker.

I rise to speak on the Immigration (Fiscal Sustainability and System Integrity) Amendment Bill. New Zealand First has always stood for a sustainable immigration system that serves the interests of our people and safeguards the vulnerable ones from exploitation. Before entering this House, I was actively involved in both investigation and advocating for exploited migrants, and I was invoking a lot of resource and energy in terms of providing the protections from exploitation that immigrants often need to have. It is from this experience that I appreciate how important these pieces of legislation are.

New Zealand First’s manifesto has consistently emphasised the need for integrity in the immigration system and a fairer cost sharing so that New Zealanders are not unfairly burdened. This allows the system to be sustainable. It is important in this House that we stand on our record of what we’ve delivered and how we’ve achieved for the betterment of this system, and I think this piece of legislation will deliver exactly that. We have a track record that shows we are committed to ensuring that exploitation is eradicated from our country, that our immigration system is sustainable, fair, and transparent, and that we are prepared for any event should we need to address the fairness of our system. Therefore, I commend this bill to the House.

Just for clarity for the House, if Te Pāti Māori is not here, that call drops down to the bottom and people compete for it at the end. It will then go to the next call, and this is a split call with Te Pāti Māori and the Green Party.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. This is a shameful bill, and we are proud as the only party in Parliament that opposes this particular bill.

What this bill does is it creates fear. It wants to divide and conquer and create a distraction from the fact that this Government and successive Governments have not put enough funding into our core infrastructure and public systems. This is creating an ICE-lite of the US by saying, “You know what? We don’t want the judiciary to actually exercise discretion—the legal experts of this country to exercise discretion—what we want, instead, is to make sure that that power is held with Immigration New Zealand, so that way, they can deport people as they wish.”

The fact that they have changed the language from “convicted” into “guilty” and also “found guilty” as well as “pleaded guilty” is shameful. Legal experts have submitted to say that the status quo is sufficient. The broadening is not going to be—and there’s no evidence to say that the broadening of this is going to be—good. This is not going to be a bill that is going to be palatable for my communities, because my communities are the ones who are going to be affected—not someone who, apparently, says that they will categorically support the bill for their leader, just to turn around and say they don’t support it two days later.

This is a bill that just basically says that we don’t trust the law and order system that we have here in Aotearoa. We don’t trust the decision of the judges—unless the judge is taking a punitive approach, in which case, you know what, they are doing a great job! What this bill does is look at punishing children. It is going to make sure that people who have already suffered from trauma are going to be further traumatised.

As we are seeing in this bill, we are seeing that hapū and iwi have not been consulted as a part of this. Te Tiriti is not a part of this. There is no part of this bill that talks about manaakitanga as a core principle of the Treaty of Waitangi, because when people are coming here, rather than taking the approach that we should be taking, instead, we’re saying “Don’t you dare do anything. Don’t you dare express the fact that you have also suffered trauma.”

We have just recently seen what we have done in terms of the abuse in State care. The Greens have also been incredibly vocal of the fact that we want to break some of these vicious cycles that we’re seeing. Yet, in this bill, we’re seeing that same level of care, that same level of understanding, has not been extended to asylum seekers, to refugees, to migrants—and the fact that every other party in Parliament is supporting this, which is shameful. All of you are happy to go to meetings and community events and celebrations and pose with ethnic communities to get a photo, to get their vote, but when the time comes to speak for, or on behalf of, our communities, you shy away; you stay silent.

You know what, this is something that is going to create a double tax system. You’re saying that migrants are coming here, they are working, they are residents, they are doing all this, they are paying tax dollars—but that is not good enough for you; they should be paying an additional levy on top of it because they are putting our health system and public education system in burden. You know what? So does decades—decades—of underfunding in the education and health systems. That is why that is. Stop scapegoating my communities—stop scapegoating my communities. Seriously, this is something that we have seen over and again.

The previous speaker, Ricardo Menéndez March, has spoken about the fact that we are seeing these sorts of bills coming through regardless of who is in power. During the committee of the whole House stage, people in this very party—regardless of who you are—have raised concerns over some parts, yet they still support this bill. They are happy with the fact that levies are going to be used not for the purpose of a levy but as an extra tax for migrant communities. That is shameful. At what part of this bill—at what part of being a New Zealander—is it OK for us to do that to one group? Why, at the same time as we’re giving $2.9 billion to landlords, $200 million to offshore oil and gas, and $200 million to the tobacco industry?

The Greens will fight for migrants, and we will not support this bill—and, apparently, we’re the only party here who are willing to do that.

Thanks, Mr Speaker, for giving me the opportunity to speak on the final reading of this bill. I just want to again acknowledge the great work of the Education and Workforce Committee. We clearly did good work in terms of the amendments, and that was talked about both in the second reading and in the committee stage. Therefore, I want to commend it to the House.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. First of all, I want to acknowledge the emotion in the House today, particularly from my Green colleagues, but also from my ACT colleagues, I think. Obviously, this is the kind of bill that that becomes an issue in, and I would suggest that it has, in fact, been a robust debate throughout, where really the whole issue and the issues in this bill have been canvassed robustly by this House, and that’s what we’re here to do.

I support this bill, and I want to talk about why. The first thing I want to talk about is something that has not been talked a lot about but was talked about in the committee of the whole House stage, and that is the issue around premiums of employment. I’m talking about that because I know a little bit about it from a practical level. When I was an employment lawyer, I had this case when I was relatively new to the profession. I had three Indian chefs who had been kicked out of their employment when they had attempted to join the union. The employer had kept their passports, and they were in a really difficult position with regard to immigration. We told their tale in what was, I think, the Employment Tribunal at the time, rather than the Employment Relations Authority, and we had an interpreter tell their tale. Their tale included that they had given premiums to the employer, and the tribunal member at the time dismissed this out of hand. They said, “That’s just ridiculous. That wouldn’t happen.” The interpreter stepped out of the role as interpreter because he was so shocked. He said, “Excuse me, sir, but this happens all the time. This is called ‘bakshish’—this happens all the time.”

I look back on that case, because it had some other features that were pretty shocking. These guys were working 92.5 hours a week, they were working through dinner and lunch, and they were living on the premises. Their work was dismissed by the employer, who said they weren’t really doing anything at all—they were layabouts, and they were lying, etc. We had a contract that had a company seal for one price, which had been given to immigration, and a company seal on another price per week’s work on another. The tribunal awarded an amount under the minimum wage for the first 40 hours but refused to allow any extra money for the extra hours worked, because there was no requirement under the law for that. These are the things that make relationships like that exploitative. I think back to that time, and I think, “If only we had taken it seriously—if only that tribunal member had taken it seriously.” Because it was outside of the norms and values of that time, the tribunal member just immediately sided in that way with the employer and thought that these people were lying and making it up. It was just beyond his experience.

I’m glad to see the law catch up a little bit here, and it’s a really good lesson for me. I think there would have been a lot less pain if we had taken it seriously. I think some of the concerns that the Green Party have expressed about exploitation are very real. We haven’t nailed this one; there’s a lot further that we can go to make sure that people are not trapped in exploitative situations as migrants in this country. There are other places we can go.

I think we have to come to this from a realistic point of view, and I wanted to talk about the other situation that I know a little bit about. That is the situation of the New Lynn stabbing. That was a situation where people knew that the person involved was radicalised; they knew he was very dangerous; he was an asylum seeker. They were in a very difficult situation. The judges were in a difficult situation with regard to him being—I think he’d spent more time in prison on remand than he could be kept on for. The police were in a really difficult situation, and I think they had two officers constantly tracking that man, because they were just waiting for the bomb to go off, basically. That would not only have cost people a lot of money doing that, but people were in real danger, and there was a real price to pay.

These freedoms are very important to the Labour Party, in terms of making sure that there is a balance—but there is a balance. There are victims in this situation—and that’s not scaremongering. It’s something we have to be responsible about in this House. We have to think our way around really hard problems. We can’t always stand on the moral high ground if there are going to be real victims in the situation. In that case, we didn’t have the law right, and people paid a really high price. I think it’s really important that we think around this and that we don’t let our sense of moral rightness get in the way of looking around a problem. These are tough problems.

I want to come to probably the one I struggled with the most, which is the “mass arrivals”. That’s a hard thing to do—it’s really hard—and we will have supporters, in the Labour Party, who will be upset by this and not think that we’ve got it right. What I would say to those people, and to the ones who didn’t support us who are in the same position, is that this is a piece of legislation that attempts, again, to deal with the reality of the situation. We are in a time of great crisis where people will travel a long way to get away from oppressive situations and from desperate economic situations—they will take enormous risk—and we will struggle to cope when they arrive on our shores, and we will do our best to make sure that they are treated justly in those situations. It won’t be a case where we will close our eyes to that situation. These are very real predicaments that we face as a country.

I for one would like to see us take on a lot more refugees in this country and expand our definitions. I for one see that as being a pathway to reaching out to a world that’s in crisis. I’d love to do that, and I’d like to put my actual energy into making sure that we actually do reach out to people in those countries—not only to refugees coming to our own country but as supporters of their capacity to stay in their own countries. From what I understand, most refugees would actually rather be at home. That’s their predominant wish—to go home—and I get that. I think that’s really important. We need to not close ourselves off in New Zealand.

I appreciate that we can be subject to a lot of forces at the moment that are quite evil—they’re quite fear-based. I don’t intend to suddenly succumb to those kinds of fears, and I don’t intend to encourage them in others, but I think it’s incredibly important that we have a realistic law with realistic boundaries that actually helps protect that. People won’t get fearful if they don’t have examples of not feeling safe. That’s a really important part of what we’re doing here. We’re assuring people that we learnt the lessons from something like the New Lynn situation, where we’re responding to it because of the actual reality of the world we live in, which is not ideal. Not everybody is a saint.

I am wanting to say that I think the debate in here over this bill has been robust. You saw how carefully my friend Ingrid Leary went through the bill and asked questions, and you have seen it be tenacious, but we’ve ended up with a bill that we’re supporting, and that’s why we’re not joining the Greens in opposition to the bill—because this is reality. We hope that this bill deals with it, if not perfectly, then in a way that is thoughtful and is compassionate.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I commend the bill to the House.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I’d just, like others, acknowledge that this isn’t an easy area to make policy in. We’ve struck a few bills that have similar themes to this, much like the Crimes (Countering Foreign Interference) Amendment Bill that this House debated as well. It is a question of really looking at security interests and balancing those against the rights interests that clearly also exist.

I do spend a fair amount of time speaking to parts of our migrant community and our former refugee community in Auckland. Whenever I’m speaking about the immigration space, I find myself using the words “the God grant” when I talk about the discretion that the Minister has, and that’s really because of two reasons: firstly, because the discretion itself, even under the current legislation, is incredibly broad. The Minister has really robust powers to make decisions without providing reasons in the current legislation. The other reason I call it a “God grant” is because those powers have this impossible ability not just to affect the lives of individuals but to affect the lives of generations to come.

I think about when the Hon Phil Twyford was the Minister for Immigration and Kabul fell. Within days, our Government stood up a system to look at who needed to come to New Zealand urgently and set up a system of visas to do so. I think about the families that I know now who have children who will grow up as Kiwis—so, again, “the God grant” seems like a fitting way to term these extraordinary powers in what is rather an extraordinary Act. We did, of course, the same with Ukraine, and there will be Ukrainian children who grow up as New Zealanders as well.

As it is “the God grant”, it’s also “the God grant” when a Minister decides not to use their powers, as we’ve seen here this term when the Minister hasn’t set up a system in response to the humanitarian crisis and the unfolding genocide we’ve seen in Gaza. Extraordinary discretionary powers, and probably, if you look at the set of legislation, some of the broadest powers that you will see in terms of how it can impact people’s lives, which is why several of my amendments at committee stage tried to not provide an anchor on the discretion—I would say they would provide more of a compass in terms of guiding the Minister’s discretion, to direct the Minister to turn their mind to our obligations under the Genocide Convention, under international human rights law and humanitarian law.

I say this all to make a very simple point, which is: although those amendments weren’t accepted into the bill, those obligations still exist. As this bill becomes an Act, certainly on our side of the House, we will be looking to ensure that the Minister, when they’re exercising discretion under these very broad “God grant” powers, is turning their mind to international human rights law, humanitarian law, and our obligations under the rights system here.

I raised a number of amendments trying to include them, but I also raised a point at the end about the imposition of conditions on people who were released into the community and that there was potentially some unfairness around that. The Minister’s response was that that wasn’t a penalty, and I was listening intently. I would just say that there is a trend, internationally, of recognition in some jurisdictions of the fact that even when something is framed as a civil penalty in the law, it can feel like a criminal penalty in truth. I know that that has happened, for example, in the US, where it’s been said that labelling a sanction as a civil sanction is not determinative of its status, but also in Canada, where the Canadian Supreme Court has rejected the argument—it also noted that it was possible, in some cases, for non-criminal sanctions to be considered punishment for the purpose of double jeopardy, and the same in the European Court. Those human rights interpretations, in my view, are also very, very important.

The final thing I’d say is that my view is that this is one of those bills that should be reviewed, and it should be reviewed very soon once we’ve seen how it operates in the context of those human rights principles.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. It would do well for one party in particular in this House to remember a tried and true saying: a failure to plan is a plan to fail. This bill is about planning. I commend it to the House.

Often when we’re out in the electorate, we get asked as MPs why there isn’t more cross-party collaboration. It’s quite tricky sometimes to explain that if the Government of the day is setting an agenda and then expecting everyone to agree, that is not collaboration. However, today, I think as parliamentarians we can be proud that what we have seen is a truly cross-party collaboration and bipartisan journey that started actually under the previous Government and shows pretty good lawmaking.

I think that the indicator of that is that we’ve landed on something that is not perfect, as the Hon Phil Twyford said, but it is something that probably all of us can live with—apart, perhaps, from our friends in the Greens. When I look at the way they have characterised this debate, they have expressed moral outrage at what they see as an impingement on human rights and a targeting of immigrants. I don’t share that view, but I do have to say that I was very suspicious of this bill when it was first discussed under our Government. What I wanted to know was, really, what is the problem we’re trying to solve here? Is this something that is American or Trumpian in its intended impact? Is it hysterical or is there going to be a real problem?

As times have continued, we have seen continuing issues on the high seas involving asylum seekers and pirates. We have continued to see the huge immigration problems in Europe. Then, I’m also reminded of our own recent history with the really unfortunate stabbing in Auckland. We must remember our immigrant communities, but we also must remember the communities that have been impacted by that event and the sovereign inability to deal with a very high-risk known situation. That is something that was a gap in our law.

We can also go back to the Tampa scenario of 2001 when we did have a mass asylum, effectively, because there were the refugees on the Tampa, the Norwegian container ship that happened to be near Australian waters. There was an impending election in Australia. Those people were rejected from there and sent to Nauru. There were hundreds of people on board, and 43 children, and 133 of those were eventually accepted into New Zealand by the compassionate decision-making, in my view, of the then Prime Minister, the Rt Hon Helen Clark, who has talked about that event as one of her proudest decisions.

When we talk about the contribution of some of the people from these communities who have endured real hardship and been shown manaaki in New Zealand, we have Abbas Nazari, who went on to become an international scholar who settled in New Zealand. They have gone on to have families, as Vanushi Walters has said, so that we have descendants of people who have benefited from the manaakitanga that we have shown and who in turn have contributed immensely to our society—the fabric of our society and the richness of our society.

The problem is, as the previous speaker said, the failure to plan is planning to fail. If I look at what the Green Party are suggesting, if I think of the counterfactual about not having a system, in fact, I think we will end up with a situation, if there is a mass asylum scenario, where it will be way more unfair for the people trying to enter New Zealand. It will be considerably more arbitrary. They will be more exposed to human rights abuses, and I’m sure that that is the last thing the Green members would want. I think it’s really important for us to be pragmatic and understand that this is not a fiction; this is a real risk. It may be a low risk, but it is a real risk, and that is why we need to have a solution which may not be perfect but which we can all live with.

Having said that, I do agree with the comments from my colleagues that we would have liked to have seen some more caveats on some of the extended powers. There are ministerial powers that have been extended, and they haven’t had the proportionate oversight or accountability, in my view, so we will need to keep an eye on that.

Also, we did see, I think, in terms of looking at a cross-party approach, the really diligent manner with which this bill has gone not only through the House but through the Education and Workforce Committee and a Minister of Immigration who seemed very engaged and willing to listen and to make amendments, particularly around the electronic monitoring situation. We did have amendments and also recommendations that came out of the select committee which discussed the concern that they would be a boundary protection tool rather than a containment tool. That is indeed what we have managed to land on, which is quite a big shift from what was originally proposed, and I think that shows the democratic system working effectively.

I too would like to have seen the Minister perhaps have more influence in her own executive when it came to the application of what Vanushi Walters has described as the “God powers” when it comes to visas being able to be granted to the families of those who are suffering in Gaza. I have been continually in contact with many families in my own electorate. We have a lot of Palestinian families down in Dunedin. They have been to hell and back, quite frankly, over the last couple of years.

One of my dear Palestinian friends has gone to the bedside of her incredibly ill father in Gaza with no certainty about the visa status of family members there and also of her own immediate family. That is a failure of this Government, in my view, to do the right thing and to afford the access to families and use those “God powers” in a way. Now, I’m not suggesting that’s the Minister’s fault. I just don’t understand why the Minister perhaps doesn’t have the influence to be able to make that happen when that would be the right thing to do—and she’s very aware of the concerns from my community.

I’m also a little concerned that a New Zealand Bill of Rights Act vet doesn’t appear to have been done on this bill. That would have been ideal, particularly given all the competing rights that were involved here. What we did see through the committee of the whole House, right near the end, was that there could be either an unintentional or an intentional extension of conditions on people who may not normally have that requirement legally, as a result of the way the schedules operate. We did ask the Minister in the chair at the time, the Hon Casey Costello, to explain whether that was intentional or unintentional, because if it was intentional, that would be rather sinister in my view. If it was unintentional, then it would have been an opportunity to fix that up. Vanushi Walters spoke very clearly about the way that could be done. In fact, she dropped an amendment on to the Table that would have tidied that up really nicely, but unfortunately we didn’t see that.

I want to agree with some of the things that the Greens have said, because I do think that they are real concerns in our country about the type of support that we offer to refugees. While I support the comments from my colleague Helen White about needing to up the number of refugees that we take—because the world is in such a conflicted and vexed and precarious situation—we also do need to ensure that we have resourcing so that they cannot be re-traumatised by their experience of coming into New Zealand. I don’t think we have those resources even at the right level currently and we need to make sure that we do so. Better mental health supports, for example, might be able to avoid the situation that we saw in Auckland last year. There are no guarantees for that in PTSD-type situations, but at least mitigating the risks around mental health scenarios would be really important.

Also, not just assuming that migrant communities are going to be dropped into a particular city because that’s where many of their community are. I know, for example, for many of our rainbow community, they would actually rather be in communities away from immediate families or connections where LGBTQI+ rights are a difficult conversation in their own countries.

We do need more resourcing, we do need to show a bit more love, I think, to our refugee communities, but, ultimately, one of the best ways we can do this when it comes to mass arrivals, in my view, is to make sure that we have a well-considered and thoughtful system that treats people fairly and humanely, that protects national security, and gives them every judicial process available that we can to make sure we are treating them with dignity and compassion. I commend the bill.

I commend this bill to the House.

Kia ora, Mr Speaker. It’s a privilege—and it’s a heavy privilege—to stand and speak to this legislation this afternoon. I was in the House last night and a lot of today listening to the arguments, listening to the critique of this legislation. Again, it is not words on a page but the lives of people and of communities, as we’ve heard about. We’ve heard people talking about their own electorates and about the migrant refugee families that will be impacted, potentially, or their whānau from across the seas.

I reflect on what we’re talking about this afternoon, and I think of the privilege we have to live in these Shaky Isles, the privilege we have to live in such a beautiful place at the bottom of the world, a place of peace and tranquillity, and a place that people want to come to, because for so many people around the world, there is not peace, there is not tranquillity; there is struggle, there is famine, there is war, there is persecution, and the list goes on.

As has been said by the Hon Phil Twyford, our lead on this legislation, and by the speakers that followed from the Labour Party, we do support this bill. We do say it’s not perfect, but we know that we need to put things in place to ensure that there are protections and that those migrants, those coming in, are looked after.

As I look at the words and the different clauses of this bill, I just want to make a point around the 1951 refugee convention. Again, we’ve moved so far into the 21st century and beyond that convention that we just need to pause and again remind ourselves of what we are doing as a nation in terms of our responsibility to refugees, to those who don’t have the privilege that we have in this space. As I listened this morning and this afternoon, there were nine amendments to the Immigration Act, and, again, these were about ensuring that we improve and fine-tune the immigration system.

We did some work in the previous Government on these changes, and I think we could say that, yes, we have a party that is opposing it, but when it comes to the majority of the House, we’ve landed in a place where we can agree and we can move forward. Some of that is to look at the broadness of a piece of legislation like this, even though it’s around a specific group in terms of refugees or those coming to New Zealand.

It is interesting as I look through the bill and look at things like the ministerial powers that this will provide around granting visa applications. When I look at the criminal offending and the deportation changes that it brings, the challenges when it comes to the need to potentially cancel somebody’s residence or visa-class application, and when it’s looking at the out-of-hours warrants—and we talked about electronic monitoring, and it is a challenge. As my colleague Vanushi Walters said, this piece of legislation, if it does pass this afternoon, which I assume it will, is legislation we would and should revisit in the years to come to make sure that we aren’t overstepping the mark, to make sure that this isn’t something that goes unchecked. I would rather not have someone locked up in a prison. I would rather not have someone on electronic monitoring, but it’s a better position than being in prison.

We look at asylum seekers and the reason they would want to come here, as I said at the start of my contribution, and we need to ensure that we modernise the laws of this place. Again, the last bit is around the immigration levies and what that looks like.

This is a small piece of legislation that can potentially have a big impact, and we hope that is for a good reason, and that it does protect refugees, those coming into our country. We have privilege and we have diversity in this country, and we should share it with others, and we should be open. Therefore, I commend this bill to the House.