Fenton Darien: Immigration Advisers Licensing Bill — Second Reading 
Fenton Darien: Immigration Advisers Licensing Bill — Second Reading 
[Volume:638;Page:8380] 
DARIEN FENTON (Labour) 
: 
 I am pleased to take a call on the second reading of the Immigration Advisers Licensing Bill. The first thing I want to say is that although I really respect our colleagues from the Maori Party and their contributions I strongly refute that this Government designs its immigration policies around endeavouring to defeat the Treaty or for that matter enrolment on the Maori roll. It was a pleasure to serve on the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee under the excellent leadership of Mark Gosche and I congratulate the committee. 
I have been an MP for only 18 months but like all MPs I have come across some pretty awful examples of what has been going on in the community without the regulation of immigration advisers or consultants. We have all dealt with what seems to me to be a disproportionate number of immigration cases involving immigration consultants or advisers where we have been left to clean up the mess. Most MPs will have come across cases of immigration consultants overcharging and giving inappropriate advice that ends up costing both the taxpayer and the applicants; and in some cases legal documents including passports have gone missing or they have been held unlawfully. In some cases there has been outright fraud. 
I acknowledge that there are many responsible immigration advisers who provide a professional and very necessary service but the fact is that some have been exploiting people at a time when they are most vulnerable. One example that came to my attention was of a man who took on an ever-increasing number of cases completely beyond his competence to deal with and who lied to those people relying on his advice about what he was doing. Eventually this caused those people to move into an unlawful immigration status. To cap it all off large numbers of passports went missing and for all anyone knows they have ended up on the black market somewhere in the world. 
In some of the worst cases I have heard of unscrupulous consultants have resorted to threatening the people involved that if they complain they will have them arrested and removed from the country and their families blacklisted or jailed. These victims have handed over their hard-earned savings to these so-called consultants and they lose not only their money and funds from family members but also their chance to gain residence. 
In other cases migrants are given false hope through misinformation or poor advice for outrageously high fees. Some potential business migrants have been very badly ripped off. All kinds of scams have been uncovered over the years including dodgy offers of employment. I came across someone who had been charged $35000 for bad advice where only three or four letters had been written and the application never filed. 
Immigration consultants or advisers are often the first point of contact for intending migrants and when they have bad experiences it reflects badly on New Zealand. If the first contact reveals unprofessional or unconscionable behaviour then we all suffer. Stories of unscrupulous immigration advice can hit the headlines in other countries. This impacts on New Zealand’s reputation overseas and our ability to attract people in a very competitive world market for skilled migrants. These stories also resonate throughout migrant communities that are already settled in New Zealand and our reputation for fairness is eroded. 
The fact is that it has just been too easy for people to set themselves up as immigration experts to take money from unsuspecting people to give them inappropriate advice and in some cases to abscond with people’s money leaving ruined lives behind them. In other cases inexperience or incompetence from well-meaning people has led to cases being mishandled and it has caused an overload of a system that actually works very well. 
The Labour-led Government has refocused New Zealand’s immigration programme to facilitate the entry of those migrants who are best placed to contribute to the New Zealand economy. While doing this we also need to meet our obligations as a good international citizen of course without compromising our country’s security. We have also moved to ensure that new migrants have the support they need to settle effectively in New Zealand. 
I acknowledge the former Minister of Immigration Lianne Dalziel and of course the current Minister of Immigration David Cunliffe. Lianne began the process of this legislation as soon as she became Minister of Immigration. Although some will say this has taken too long there has been a very robust process to bring us to where we are today and doing things well does take time. 
During the select committee process the parties worked together to generally improve the bill. It is gratifying that all parties on the select committee now agree on the need for regulation within this industry. 
I hate to say it but National did have a chance to fix this in 1999 following years of intensive lobbying from the responsible immigration practitioners and from Labour and immigration officials. But National voted against the legislation in 1999. Bill Birch and Max Bradford—do members remember them—Ministers of Immigration in the former National Government insisted that the free market was the best mechanism for immigration consultancy. So the problems continued to worsen throughout the 1990s. However times do move on and so does the National Party it seems or at least in some things. It seems to be adopting more and more of our good ideas. 
The select committee process was a very interesting and constructive one with many concerns expressed by submitters being taken on board and the bill amended accordingly. I will mention some of the amendments that the select committee is recommending. They have been rehearsed by other speakers but these are ones that particularly resonated with me. The first is around exemptions from licensing. In addition to MPs it is vitally important that our electorate staff are exempt because they are the front-line representatives of MPs and deal with a large amount of immigration casework. I take the opportunity here to acknowledge those front-line staff out in the community who work for all of us. They do a huge amount of work and have been dealing with some very difficult issues in immigration in particular. 
The committee also felt that the exemption for other public servants was way too broad so we are recommending an amendment to limit exemptions to public servants who provide immigration advice within the scope of their employment agreement. As mentioned before there was a lot of debate about whether lawyers should continue to be exempt as intended by the original bill. I was one of those in the select committee who was sceptical about this—with all due respect to my lawyer colleagues on the other side of the House. That is because lawyers have been among those who have provided poor immigration service or advice. There was also a view that having a different system of complaints for lawyers could cause a perception that they are subject to a lesser or less accessible standard. However we were assured that the complaints and disciplinary process under the Lawyers and Conveyancers Act will be an improvement on the previous system under the Law Practitioners Act. I guess this is a question of watch this space and see whether it works. 
Another area of amendment I want to mention is in regard to the not-for-profit sector which is not exempt from the original licensing requirements of the bill. I join Mark Gosche in congratulating the Citizens Advice Bureaux and the community law centres that put forward a very strong case to be exempted. I think we all accepted that they have a very high standard of service and properly trained employees and volunteers and that they are an essential service to the community and therefore should be exempt from the licensing requirements of the bill. The core of this bill is the requirement for people who provide immigration advice — 
Simon Power 
: Speak from the heart; throw the notes away. 
DARIEN FENTON 
: Oh! How about that? —to be able to prove competency and to be fit to practise. That is the core of the bill. This I believe along with the other parts and amendments to the bill will ensure the regulation of immigration advisers and will help put an end to some of the problems that intending migrants have encountered over the years. Good immigration consultants have been crying out for this regulation in what is actually a highly specialised area of expertise in which advice can easily be wrong. They want to see the industry cleaned up. 
Simon Power 
: Throw the notes away; speak from the heart. 
DARIEN FENTON 
: I am. They want to see the industry cleaned up and become an industry that is valued and recognised as contributing to our society and to our international reputation. This Labour-led Government understands that a sustainable well-managed immigration programme is key to New Zealand’s economic transformation. This bill is part of that.