Stanford EricaERICA STANFORD (National—East Coast Bays): Thank you Mr Speaker I'm pleased to take a call in this debate. I want to talk specifically to Part 2 of the order and my colleague Chris Bishop earlier alluded to some of the things I want to speak about. But I find it interesting looking at this order where it says that it gives specific responsibility to the chief executive (CE) for ensuring that the system does not allocate more confirmed spaces in managed isolation and quarantine (MIQ) than the system's capacity. At the face of it when you read that you think That sounds great" except for the fact that we have had thousands and thousands of rooms over the last few months completely empty that the taxpayer has been paying for. While it's all very well to make sure that we're not over-allocating rooms the real question is what are we doing about the underutilisation of these rooms.For a very long time I have been standing in this House talking about the inability of us to manage the competing demands of different groups on managed isolation. Now we find ourselves in a situation where for weeks on end we had 1800 rooms a night free. In fact over a two-week period we could have reunited 1800 split families and yet we chose not to. It's a joke that in this order there's nothing talking about underutilisation because that is actually the problem that we have at the moment. People like Cam Conradie who is split from his family every day has a look at how many rooms are completely underutilised. He makes graphs that he puts up on Twitter and shares with everybody—us included—and shows the heartbreak of all of these people who can't see their families and yet here we are with thousands of rooms every day that we pay for that are not being allocated.The Minister of Immigration spoke a while back about allocating some rooms to split migrant families like he'd solved the problem. But what we find has actually happened is that hardly any split migrant families met the criteria the very careful criteria that he set out. So migrant nurses were one group that were a winner. A lot of those migrant nurses' split families are in India. They can't actually travel at this time. They have a light at the end of the tunnel and that's all very well and good. The second group of people were people who had visas to travel before the borders closed a very small amount of people. So using these managed isolation rooms is just a few people. There are thousands more people whose visas were in train or they hadn't actually applied yet. None of those people have been able to apply for visas to travel and yet here we have a massive underutilisation of rooms.We saw recently on the Sunday programme Mr Henco de Beer who hadn't seen his four-day-old baby in a year. Now that was an extremely sad situation. I've met him a few times. He was on Sunday. The very good news a few days ago was that he got visas to travel for his family to come in through MIQ. Great ending to a great story and I think those of us who knew him and had spoken to him online and some of his family members were very moved by that. But that is a very very very tiny proportion of the full scale of the problem. Here we have this ridiculous order—I mean on the face of it like I say it sounds great "We don't want to overuse the capacity" but we're underutilising it by thousands and thousands of rooms. So while it's really good for Henco all of those other thousands of people those thousands of split migrant families are missing out. It's not only the ones who had their visas in train. The highly skilled migrants were the third group of people that the Minister had a category for but every single person who applies gets put through the wringer and very few of those people from Immigration New Zealand are actually allowed to come in and use these spaces. So no wonder there's a massive underutilisation of these spaces because at every turn Immigration New Zealand are using all of their powers possible to say no. Highly skilled people earning over $150000 in some cases are being turned away and Immigration New Zealand are saying "Oh well your skills aren't unique". There's a much higher threshold for them than the other people that we're letting in. The 300 construction workers who we're allowing to come in and use MIQ spaces have to pass a much lower bar than the people who are already here who are being turned away from being reunited with their split families and that is not right. Here this order is going on about well make sure we don't use more spaces than we have. That is not the problem. The problem is underutilisation. So those split migrant families who hadn't yet applied for their visas or those highly skilled people who keep getting turned away because their skills aren't unique and that bar is so much higher have no chance of getting in.It's not only split migrant families; it's New Zealand citizens and permanent residents who cannot get their partners in because of the again very very strict interpretation by Immigration New Zealand. I had a message today from Catherine a New Zealand citizen who said "Today Labour you have broken us. He's English he's vaccinated he can't get in. We will have to go our separate ways and hope to find what we had in our own countries. Jacinda I hope you can sleep at night." That's what she put on Facebook on the split migrant group. Yet here we have 1800 rooms every day completely unused. But we're standing here today talking about over-utilisation. It's not the problem the problem is underutilisation and our complete inability to manage competing demands and take these groups of people who haven't seen their families in over a year who are highly skilled people who in most cases are earning more than double the median wage who still can't get in. And you've got Kiwis who can't see their partners as well.I had another woman her name is Jacquie. She went back to South Africa. She was a highly skilled mental health worker—who we desperately need in this country—working for the Massey counselling department. She had to go back to South Africa because her husband and son missed out on this very tight criteria that the Minister had set. And yet 1800 rooms every night—underutilisation. I've been travelling around the country talking to businesses as well and they are crying out because they can't get staff and the staff that they do have are split migrant families who can't get their families into MIQ even though there is all this space available. They're losing them. So not only can they not find staff they're losing the highly skilled staff that they already have who are migrants who can't see their families because they can't get them in through MIQ. And yet we have 1800 rooms every night. I was talking to a hydraulics company in Gisborne just the other day. They've got staff who are looking to leave—highly highly skilled staff who are looking to leave. It doesn't matter where you go. In my electorate a plastics company lost a South African even though he was the only guy who could work that piece of machinery. David Parker knows well because we lobbied him. Even he couldn't lobby his colleagues to let that guy's family in. And yet 1800 rooms every night underutilised. I'll go on to the second part of this order where it talks about I guess being more open and transparent and having the Minister actually dictate what those special criteria are for the CE of Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment allowing people coming through MIQ not using the booking system which is a great thing because what we've seen in the past is a very murky and not very transparent situation where people are coming in through MIQ and nobody knows how they got in—this is back in the day when MIQ was very full. There was complete murkiness and lack of transparency around how those people got in. Then we have people like Trevor Ponting. You will all remember him the man who had terminal brain cancer who wanted to get back in who applied under these special criteria to get in and was declined and had to go through the media to get a spot. So I'm really hoping that in the second part of this order where we talk about being more open and transparent and having the Minister set the criteria for allocating these spaces in MIQ and the chief executive having to apply these criteria they will be somewhere that we can all see them so that there is openness and transparency around this process. Because what we've seen over the last year is completely the opposite of that: deserving people who are coming in to see their family for the last time being declined and yet other people seemingly waved through and no one knows how they got those spots in MIQ. So while we're supporting this I think the focus really needs to be on how we better manage the underutilisation of MIQ how we reunite split migrant families how we widen the criteria so more of them can see their families again because as I suspected the Minister would do he chose the very smallest part of the pie that he possibly could and said "Look I've done my job." There are thousands more people out there who are desperate who are skilled who are leaving and we have treated them appallingly. That has to change Madam Speaker.Motion agreed to."