Fenton Darien: Immigration Bill — In Committee 
Fenton Darien: Immigration Bill — In Committee 
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DARIEN FENTON (Labour) 
: 
 I am very pleased to take a call on the Immigration Bill. I want to let members know that I will be relying on very fine former Ministers of Immigration to look at the detail of the bill but I was on the select committee— 
Keith Locke 
: Which one? 
DARIEN FENTON 
: All three of them actually. I was on the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee chaired by the Hon Vui Mark Gosche. I was on the select committee with David Bennett who has now taken over the chairing and is not doing a bad job. He aspires to be like Mark Gosche but he has not quite got there yet. 
Hon Member 
: You’ve gone soft. 
DARIEN FENTON 
: Well that is true. I also recognise the officials in the House tonight. We got to know each other rather well I think over the very long period that we considered this bill. 
As other speakers have said Labour supports the bill. We will consider the amendments because it is a large and difficult bill and it deals with some very tricky issues. We have to remember when we debate this bill that those on the receiving end of it are real human beings. It will affect people’s lives. During the select committee process I found some of the issues quite difficult to grapple with. There were things like detention—locking people up—classified information and special advocates. On the surface those things seem pretty harsh. But the thing that I primarily learnt in my time considering the bill is that immigration by its very nature is discriminatory. There is not a Human Rights Commission aspect to it where one can say that one group of people should not be treated differently from another because of human rights legislation. We reserve the right to decide who can live and work in New Zealand and I support that. I must say also that I support the “Kiwis first” policy when it comes to jobs. But I support our doing that in a humane and compassionate way. We have international obligations. We have an international reputation. We are a country of migrants and we all have stories in our families about those who came here hoping for a better life. 
I want to address the purpose clause and in particular clause 3(2)(b)(i) which is about “contributing to the New Zealand workforce through facilitating access to skills and labour;”. The bill was drafted debated and referred to the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee in very different times from today. It was a time of high employment and of growth and New Zealand was relying on skilled migrants to fill the gaps in our workforce that we could not fill ourselves. Of course that has now changed but during those few years many migrants came here on a promise that they could start a new life here. They thought New Zealand was a good choice. We went out and encouraged them to come here and we said they would be welcome here. As I said things have changed dramatically since then because of the recession. 
I want to reflect on one particular group of migrant workers who are facing difficulty at the moment. Over the past few weeks telecommunications workers have been locked in lawful dispute with a contractor called Visionstream over that company’s determination to force those workers into “take it or leave it” owner-operator contracts. About 100 migrant workers are affected by that mainly from the Philippines but from other countries as well—South Africa Fiji India and others. Many of them live in the North Shore area that I work in and indeed where the Minister in the chair the Hon Dr Jonathan Coleman works. It is a shocking position that they find themselves in. Some of them left their homes and jobs with the biggest telecommunications employer in the Philippines and they came here at our invitation believing that New Zealand was a great choice. We advertised on the Web that it was a wonderful place to come. We needed them and they were encouraged to come here. We needed them to do the job because we did not have skilled workers here to do that work. Actually we still do not. But the workers in that group who are on work permits are in no-man’s land. They have no choice about accepting the owner-operator model because their permits do not allow it. They cannot swap from being on work permits over to the business migrant category—they just cannot. 
Visionstream has indicated as I understand it that it would employ the migrant workers but only on fixed-term contracts. I am told that Immigration New Zealand has said that is not acceptable. I know they are still waiting to hear and I know that the Minister of Immigration has said that he is keeping a watching brief on it and I hope that is right. Even the Hon John Carter the member for Northland said to those workers when they came to see him that they should not sign that contract because it is such a bad one. So they wait. 
Another group within that group of migrant workers managed to get through the work-to-residence requirements and are now New Zealand residents. They have been made redundant. They have been given 4 weeks’ notice with no redundancy pay nothing. They are not entitled to any assistance—nothing—until they have been here for 2 years. I understand those rules but the point is that a major New Zealand company is using its power to force its workforce into less pay and poorer conditions. Those migrant workers who came here with hope whom we invited here who have skills we need and whom we needed at the time are being thrown on the scrap-heap. 
I wanted to address the purpose of the bill but I also want to ask the Minister to do what he can to intervene for those workers. It is a terrible situation. It is not something that any of us feels good about. It is bad for those workers and their families but it is also bad for New Zealand. It is bad for our reputation. We will need those workers when the economy picks up. We will need migrants I am told to look after us when we all grow old. Apparently we will need lots of migrants so we will have to do a lot better when it comes to how we treat migrant workers. They do have rights; they have rights under our international obligations. But they have rights under New Zealand law as well. I do not want migrant workers whom we have invited here being put at the top of the list of people we are going to get rid of first. That is happening as well. They have rights and we need to enforce them. We need to make sure that this particular group of workers are looked after and that we do something about them. I implore the Minister to intervene; otherwise how would we ever get skilled migrant workers to come here? Thank you.