Woodhouse MichaelHon MICHAEL WOODHOUSE (National): As my colleague Erica Stanford interjected when the Minister was speaking the bill may not be materially different but the conditions under which this bill is being passed are extremely different from 13 May 2020 when this House gave those extraordinary powers to the Minister. And I do acknowledge—as others have; Mr Utikere I think mentioned it—that the Minister has discharged his responsibilities responsibly and well. That is not the point and the reason that the National Party will be opposing this motion—the reason is quite simply this. Twenty-one days—twenty-one days is not sufficient time to give appropriate scrutiny to the impact on the immigration system on our business and migrant community of the extension of these powers for another two years. Let's bear in mind the Minister did not refute my claim and it's in the Cabinet paper that he wanted those powers to be indefinite. And had Cabinet not overruled him we would be debating a motion for the indefinite granting of these powers with a select committee process that lasts three short weeks.There's a bit of a pattern emerging here in the Government since 2017 and I look forward to the data being analysed about how many bills have been passed under urgency how many bills have been passed with a shortened report back for the select committees because it will make quite telling reading.In April last year I represented this Parliament at a World Bank political forum. It wasn't in a nice place like Geneva or New York; it was in Andersons Bay in Dunedin in the dark hours in my pyjamas where I Zoomed into this very informative meeting where Ministers and members of Parliament from around the OECD gave a report of the manner in which democracies had responded to COVID. The overwhelming theme of that was the degree of concern at what they described as a form of executive fiat" and the overriding of the democratic processes that undermined the very democracies that we hold so dear. I've spoken of that in the past and I think it's relevant to this motion today. We're doing it again. We're treating the public with disdain by saying that this legislation that has quite a significant impact on a wide range of stakeholders—and I'll go through them—can be appropriately scrutinised in 21 days.It got last year—and I chaired that committee so I should know. I think we had seven days last year—seven or eight days and that was—Hon Grant Robertson: We're tripling it.Hon MICHAEL WOODHOUSE: Well yes. The Minister of Finance interjects that he's being generous by taking it from seven or eight days to 21 days. I think that speaks volumes to the approach that this Government has. Because doing the right thing is a very different process from doing it in the right manner and the Government has a significant power. They could've come to the House today and passed this bill under urgency—they have 65 votes out of 120. They do I think start to treat this place as a bit of an irritant that parliamentary scrutiny is getting in the way of executive fiat. Last year I described the Prime Minister as Rob Muldoon with slogans and kindness. That struck a nerve but I stood by those comments then and I stand by them now—the irritant that this Parliament has for the very process of scrutinising the bill and making it better. And I would point out that in the very short time that we had last year for this bill to be passed we actually made some very good improvements to it thanks to the speedy work that the submitters were able to do because we were all in lockdown I think or we'd just come out of lockdown. They probably had a little more time on their hands to be able to do that. These are not the same conditions.We have precious little time now to hear from the stakeholders and I expect them to come from three main groups. Businesses will want to know what this means for them not so much for the people who are here and can stay but for the people who aren't here and they want to get in and this bill will prevent that from occurring. It is a paradox but we have a mismatch in skills. We have higher levels of unemployment and job seeker numbers in this country who will be competing for those onshore temporary visa holders who as a class of visa holder could have their stay extended undermining the ability of those workers to get the jobs that are going. But we also have a number of highly skilled workers who businesses in New Zealand do need and who this bill may prevent from being able to bring in because of the border closures that will continue.I think we'll hear from migrant groups. In fact I encourage migrant groups to submit to the select committee at the risk of loading up my colleagues on that committee with a great deal of work and some long hours; it's going to be the case anyway. But these migrant groups have been significantly impacted by COVID and the inability to leave or come and we've got to hear what that means and what sensible suggestions they might have for improving this bill.I think we're going to hear from separated families. I think Erica Stanford has done an excellent job in highlighting the human side of the separation of families as a consequence of the Government's response to COVID and while the instruction leave was declined by this House—and it's pretty clear where the objections were coming from—that in my mind will not prevent separated families from seeking to submit on this bill and tell their stories and point out how the legislative changes we've made are having a negative impact on them. All of that being done within 21 days and for us to be able to come back to this House and for the select committee to come back and say "We have given the scrutiny of this bill every opportunity." I don't think they're going to be able to say that and I think that's bad for lawmaking. It risks bad law being passed. A good law last year in one situation doesn't make the same law being extended good law and that has to be scrutinised.So I expect we'll hear from lawyers. We will hear from immigration agents. We'll hear from the people who were at the coalface of our immigration system who have the real knowledge of what's going on. We need to know and hear from them so that we can understand what we're doing in the name of this bill.We can't do that in 21 days and I'm sad we're back here again. The pattern is emerging of an override or a lip-service to the parliamentary process. There's some times when I've been in select committees when six months hasn't been long enough because of the complexity of the legislation that we're passing and this is on the face of it and in its detail not a straightforward piece of legislation. I think the Minister said something like 350000 non - New Zealanders in New Zealand last year on temporary visas. The number is probably pretty low but one thing I know as a former Minister of Immigration is that every single one of those visa holders has a story that is different from the next and one of the reasons we have such a huge piece of legislation in the Immigration Act 2009 and a mountainous pile of immigration instructions for Immigration New Zealand and their staff to follow is because every story is different and that's why we need to have discretion; it's why we need to have exceptions to policy. It's pretty much why we needed last year to have this legislation—so that we could keep things going.The conditions have changed. I'm not convinced we need it now. I'm certainly convinced that we can't give it a decent going over in 21 days. I'm sad for those committee members because the motion also includes sitting on a Friday of a House sitting week so that's then the constituent work that MPs who would normally have been doing that; they may sit outside of Wellington which means they may not be able to give proper attention to the other work that's going to go on in this House. That is a very big encumbrance on the MPs who I know would be prepared to do that if they had longer or if the case for doing so had been strong—DEPUTY SPEAKER: Order! The member's time has expired."