Menéndez March RicardoRICARDO MENÉNDEZ MARCH (Green): Thank you Madam Speaker. I rise on behalf of the Green Party to support the third reading of the Worker Protection (Migrant and Other Employees) Bill. As other speakers have noted and traversed in the previous readings this creates a regime to aim to tackle low-level offending and wraps around other measures to discourage exploitation and I think most importantly to also create a regime that creates consequences for employers. I think this is what will contribute in this bill to addressing exploitation particularly the publishing of names of employers convicted of immigration offences. We're going to have to do a lot more work to prevent the phoenixing of companies who are caught in these offences but I think that the move towards actually having a register of employers who are caught exploiting workers will actually help create more awareness and accountability in order to send a message to employers that exploitation won't come without consequences.Through the passage of this bill one of the key things the Green Party raised—and I feel really stoked that we successfully secured amendments to the bill—was the use of information by immigration officials and how that information could be used. It's really good to see an acknowledgment that in order to create a robust system we need to take workers' experiences and migrant experiences into account and for this regime to work in practice we need to give migrants a certainty that they're able to raise matters of exploitation without them fearing that they or their colleagues will face adverse consequences. So we do welcome the Minister's Supplementary Order Paper (SOP) which comes from our own SOP as the Minister has acknowledged to tackle this.But there are unresolved questions. Look the ACT Party and the Greens may not have a lot in common on many topics but the previous speaker James McDowall raised some really valid points in terms of having to keep a close eye on how this will end up working in practice. I think that Immigration New Zealand will need to take a really robust approach to ensuring that the SOP will work as intended because as Mr McDowall said once the case manager sees some information they can't unsee it. That is so true in terms of then what may drive decisions within Immigration New Zealand regarding how further investigations may happen in practice.The other thing we wanted to touch on as this regime will start being put into practice is addressing the core drivers of exploitation. Yes again the consequence component is really really important and this bill does go some way towards addressing this but ultimately one of the key drivers of exploitation is how we set up the visa system altogether. I think unlike the other side of the party that wants to abolish the Accredited Employer Work Visa scheme I want to make sure that we build it in a way that enables this bill to work as best intended so that a lot of the low-level offences that are being caught by this bill are not a direct result of the way we've designed the visa system—right?—because so much of the low-level offences that we see and actually more serious offences that we end up seeing come from the binding of workers to single employers. That in itself creates the power dynamics and the situations where we end up having a bill like this trying to address some of those offences right? So I do urge—well and this will fall on Minister Little more than the Minister in charge of this bill—to address employer-bound visas so that actually we can focus on the offences that come from employers' behaviour and not because of the way we've designed the visa system.But overall we do support this bill and we do think actually that this will be an evolving piece of work right? We will need to see how the infringement regime actually—whether they're punitive enough to discourage exploitation happening whether we need to tweak those settings in the future whether we are also creating the wraparound support for migrants who are raising exploitation to enable this bill to happen and therefore we'll need to have a conversation about the settings of the Migrant Exploitation Protection Work Visa and whether those themselves are enabling workers who are in workplaces that are being affected by this bill to adequately be supported into other forms of employment because right now it's a six-month visa and there's no entrenched support for people who need to leave their visas to that one in order to escape exploitation.So I think the key message that we want to send is that in order for this bill to work as intended we need to look at the broader settings of the immigration system and at all levels we need to incorporate workers' voices and migrants' voices because the SOP from the Minister and the contributions towards this SOP were coming from constituents that we talked to who they themselves said I'm really scared of raising these matters with Immigration New Zealand because of fear of them being put into a limited visa." which that visa then doesn't allow you to apply to other visas in the future right? That is the experience that many migrants are facing right now.So I'm really keen to see the passage of this bill really keen to see this working in practice and really keen to continue to work with the Minister to make any further amendments that may be required."