Street Maryan: Immigration Amendment Bill — First Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Street Maryan: Immigration Amendment Bill — First Reading 
[Sitting date: 03 May 2012. Volume:679;Page:1966. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
Hon MARYAN STREET (Labour) 
: 
 The Immigration Amendment Bill is not about immigration. This bill is a distraction. It is a badly thought-through piece of legislation that has been thrown on to the Order Paper at this moment in order to deflect attention from some of the Government’s current headaches. That is why we have seen today the withdrawal from the Order Paper of the pieces of legislation in the name of John Banks and we now have this inadequate and ill-thought-through piece of legislation which is designed to address a problem that we clearly do not have.  
Labour opposes this bill for a number of reasons. We recognise at the outset that human trafficking is one of the most despicable activities that human beings can engage in. We recognise that human trafficking requires coordinated intelligence from around the globe in order that it be defeated and that it be defeated in the places where it starts not in the places where the poor victims finally fetch up.  
We need to ensure that New Zealand is not a soft touch but we need also to balance our reputation for compassion and neutrality in these matters and this legislation is inadequate on every count. The United States for example has a special visa category which is called the victims of human trafficking visa. The United States has a process for addressing the problem. Our Minister of Immigration who has brought this bill in—New Zealand’s Minister not the Labour Party’s clearly by any stretch of the imagination—just this week had dinner with the Secretary of Homeland Security for the United States Janet Napolitano. I would have thought he would find that out. In the course of conversation he might have discovered that there is a visa category for victims of human trafficking. Surely that is a place to start not an asinine piece of legislation that says that more than 10 people is a crowd and that we will prevent any mass invasion on our shores of more than 10 people—which is a crowd—coming from the most oppressed the most impoverished and the most needy parts of our neighbourhood.  
So simply on humanitarian grounds this legislation is inadequate. If the Government wants to deal with human trafficking then say so and do not get an inadequate Minister of Immigration to put up an inadequate piece of legislation. This does not deal with human trafficking; this is a knee-jerk scaremongering piece of law that in no way enhances New Zealand’s reputation and in no way addresses the need for international cooperation in order to lessen reduce mitigate and get rid of human trafficking.  
The truth of the matter is that we do not have a problem at this point. And even if we were to safeguard against this happening in the future due to all of those people who are the victims of human traffickers getting highly sophisticated pieces of naval equipment that enable them to navigate their way from the Middle East and Asia to Auckland then we need to make sure that we are starting in the right place and this law is not the right place. The people we see on our television screens who are the victims of human trafficking come in boats that can hardly make it from Indonesia to the tip of Australia. They cannot even make it across that narrow strait. They sink lives are lost and they sell everything they have in order to pay exorbitant amounts to human traffickers who have no interest in whether these people live or die. So they are sent out on rust buckets—or perhaps Mr Banks’ cabbage boats; I do not know but that is about the size of it. They are sent out on these vessels and they perish. To say that we are at imminent risk—so imminent that this piece of legislation has to be introduced today—of an invasion of boat people is a complete nonsense.  
What we have in the regulatory impact statement is the following statement in the section about status quo and problem definition: “Recent experience in Canada confirms that a mass boat arrival in New Zealand of up to 500 people is now a real possibility.” That captures my attention. And then what do we have? “[Information withheld].” I am sorry but if we are to debate this bill intelligently information should not be withheld from this House. If people have been able to make it in rust buckets from somewhere in Asia to Canada and on that basis we know that they are also setting sail for New Zealand then let us have the information. But quite frankly if they fetched up in Canada they took the wrong turn. If they fetched up in Canada where is the link that says we are imminently at risk? There is no evidence. The Minister has failed to produce it and what we have got is a piece of legislation that damages our reputation.  
Let me go on and quote another bit from the regulatory impact statement: “500 people arriving and claiming asylum would be costly and challenging to manage.”—yes I agree with that—“Currently only about 350 claims for refugee status are received annually and about 85 percent of these claims are made by people who entered New Zealand lawfully.” We are not even taking the people we should be taking. We have an allocation a quota of 750 refugees per annum. We are doing about 350. There is capacity for us to take more of the right people—the people whom we with all the privileges and advantages that we have in this country ought to be taking to assist to rehabilitate and to become functioning human beings again.  
 This legislation with its inadequate un-thought-through ridiculous provisions quite frankly is an affront to any intelligent immigration policy. But worse than that it will do damage to our international reputation. We took those boys from the  
Tampa 
—that Norwegian vessel that picked them up—and years on they are contributing members of our society. We take Burmese refugees; they become contributing members of our society. We are a long way off the non-existent problem that this stupid piece of legislation purports to address. There is no more profound waste of Parliament’s time than a piece of legislation that addresses a problem that does not exist. This should be turfed out on its ear and the National members who have spoken in favour of it to date should go back look over their  
Hansard 
 and be ashamed of the position they have adopted. Thank you.