Stanford EricaERICA STANFORD (National—East Coast Bays): Thank you. Thank you Madam Chair. I just want to come back to my Supplementary Order Paper and the need for two years because the Minister in the chair Kris Faafoi again is continuing to use COVID as an excuse. COVID is going to be with us for a while—who knows how long?—and it's not a reason for a wholesale transfer of power as he actually originally wanted for a long period of time. It's up to Ministers to get their departments match fit to be able to deal with what happens as a consequence of COVID.Now a lot of the submitters and also in my opinion said that nothing happened over the last 12 months by the Minister to get his department into a position to be able to deal with this and actually the truth came out today in the Minister's previous response to my question. We finally got down to the reason for this bill and the reason as the Minister told us is that his department does not have the capacity to process visas as they normally would. So when he told us a year ago that it was because they were at home and they couldn't process visas that actually wasn't the reason because that reason doesn't exist now and there are fewer people here. The real reason was that back then and now the department of immigration doesn't have the capacity even though they're at work to be able to process these visas.So the question is: are we giving the Minister an extra two years of this extraordinary power because of decisions this Government has made prior to COVID like closing down offshore offices and transferring that visa processing capacity to onshore? Are we now transferring that power to the Minister because of decisions that they've made for our immigration department who are now not able to process a couple of hundred thousand visas? As I said before there's 450000 fewer visas being processed across four different categories. We're only talking about a couple of hundred thousand people onshore and the Minister said 10 percent of the people who've come through managed isolation which is only 13500—you add those two together we're still only maybe at around 250000. That's still 200000 visas shy of what we were doing in 2019. So why is it that the immigration department can't process these visas and that we have to give the Minister the power to do it?It's really interesting actually I find that the Regulations Review Committee wrote to us and we asked—[Interruption]CHAIRPERSON (Hon Jenny Salesa): Order! Can we please not have side conversations in the Chamber? Sorry about that.ERICA STANFORD: That's OK—Hon Willie Jackson: Carry on—sorry sorry.ERICA STANFORD: That's OK; apology accepted. This is important because the Regulations Review Committee wrote to us and they were concerned about two years and so I'm concerned about two years. The New Zealand Law Society is concerned about two years. In fact every organisation who's submitted is concerned about two years. So it's really important that we get to the bottom of this as to why the Minister needs the powers for such a long time why his department don't have the capacity to do it. A year ago it was because they were at home; today it's because we don't have the capacity to do it. Which one is it because there are fewer visas being processed today than there were two years ago by 200000 and yet your department doesn't have the capacity to do that. There's only 13500 Critical Purpose Visitor Visas that they're approving. That's not that many even when you add it to the people who are onshore. So what are the reasons that this bill is required for such a long time?