Lees-Galloway Iain: Immigration Amendment Bill — Second ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeLees-Galloway Iain: Immigration Amendment Bill — Second Reading[Sitting date: 16 April 2013. Volume:689;Page:9408. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]IAIN LEES-GALLOWAY (Labour—Palmerston North): From time to time this Parliament unfortunately considers bills that can be described only as a solution looking for a problem. It is sad to say that the Immigration Amendment Bill is most certainly one of those bills. If we look at the stated purpose of the Immigration Amendment Bill it is “to deter people-smuggling and to enable the effective and efficient management of a mass arrival of ‘illegal immigrants’.” Let us look at the first part of that stated purpose. The most significant deterrent that we have to people-smuggling will never be a piece of legislation. It will be the Tasman Sea and our geographical isolation from the rest of the world. I know that John Key—Simon O’Connor: I raise a point of order Mr Speaker. I believe it is clear—Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER: I think I can guess what it is.Simon O’Connor: Yes. I believe a member is able to use props.Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER: Yes. Only the member may use a visual aid at the time he is actually speaking. It is not for other members to display.David Bennett: You’ve got it the wrong way round.IAIN LEES-GALLOWAY: No it is the right way round. I know that John Key thinks that the arrival of 66 Sri Lankan refugees in Western Australia vindicates his decision to push this legislation through but I have news for Mr Key. I know that he admitted today that he really does not have a clue. But the fact is that Western Australia as the crow flies is more than 5000 kilometres away from New Zealand. Cam Calder tried to suggest that this was not actually too great a distance for a boat to traverse. I would be interested to see a boat ploughing its way through the middle of the Australian desert to make its way to Auckland New Zealand. The distance by sea is much farther and it is a treacherous and difficult journey one that no other boatload of people seeking asylum in New Zealand has ever been able to achieve. And besides which that group of people by landing in Australia actually made themselves ineligible for asylum in New Zealand. So again Mr Key cites a problem that does not exist. We already have the law in place to deal with that group of people. Mr Key is clutching at straws to say the least.The second part of the stated purpose is to deter people-smuggling by creating a system that is so punitive that nobody would want to take it on. Well we know from experience that it simply does not work. Let us look at Australia. From the 1990s to the mid-2000s Australia introduced a range of policies aimed at deterring asylum seekers arriving by boat. Despite that between 2000 and 2001 there were 94 boats carrying 8455 people that arrived in Australia. It is not the legislation that will allow people or stop them getting into a country. It is simply the access and their ability to get there and getting into Australia is an awful lot easier than getting to New Zealand. The other side to this is the effective management of large groups of people arriving. This was modelled on 500 people making it to New Zealand but it actually talks about groups of 11 or more. Our system can already deal with those. This legislation on that front is absolutely redundant.The true purpose of this legislation is that it is another one of John Key’s WMDs—his weapons of mass distraction. Remember the first reading of this bill? The first reading coincided with John Banks getting found out for his dodgy donations. The Government needed a distraction back then so in came this bill’s first reading—for John Banks.The second reading coincides with the Government Communications and Security Bureau debacle—again this Government in desperate need of a distraction from John Key’s cluelessness. What will it take to get us to the third reading? That is what I want to know. What will be the next debacle that this Government wants a distraction from toget this bill to its third reading? This bill is quite simply about National’s natural fall-back position which is that when it is in trouble it engages in the politics of division—the nastiness the vindictiveness and the Draconian approach that only National knows how to do.