McCully Murray: Immigration Amendment Bill (No 2) — First Reading Second Reading 
McCully Murray: Immigration Amendment Bill (No 2) — First Reading Second Reading 
[Volume:609;Page:6754] 
Hon MURRAY McCULLY (NZ National—East Coast Bays) 
: 
 The Minister who has just resumed her seat tells us that this bill is about better settlement outcomes for migrants to New Zealand. I want to invite members of the House this evening to reflect on precisely what the measure that we have before us would look like if indeed the Minister’s assertion were correct. If this bill were being promoted by a Minister who had spent 4 long years in office thinking about how the immigration policies of the previous decade could be improved is this the bill that the Minister would come to the House with tonight and would the Minister come along demanding that the House should pass it under urgency? 
It is self-evident that this is not a measure being promoted by a Minister with a determination to improve those settlement outcomes. Because the first thing that one would do if one were determined to improve settlement outcomes would be to ask oneself a very basic question about the immigration programme published by the Government that says that 60 percent of the migrants coming to New Zealand in the next 12 months will be in the skills or business category—that is the policy of the Government this year and it was last year. If we were determined to get people who were going to contribute to our economy and participate in our workforce would we have a figure as low as 60 percent identified alongside skills and business? If we were unashamedly in the market for providing net benefit to New Zealand as an objective of our immigration policy by having good settlement outcomes would we have a figure as low as 60 percent? 
I am on the record as saying that the figure should be 70 percent or higher. The Minister in the House tonight actually agreed that that might well be right. How is it that the Minister of Immigration who has spent 4 long years giving careful and earnest consideration to how we might get better settlement outcomes has not made up her mind whether the figure for business and skills in the Government’s published programme should be 60 percent 70 percent or higher? It is absolutely fundamental if that is the sort of objective one brings to this review that one would at least know the answer to that question and the Minister does not know. She concedes I might be right but she does not know. 
One of the other things that a Government and a Minister might do if they were intent on improving the settlement outcomes for new migrants in New Zealand is give some passing thought to the fact that there are three different agencies involved in this area. There is the Immigration Service which hangs over to one side with the Department of Labour; there is the Office of Ethnic Affairs which is supposed to be involved in settlement programmes; and there is the citizenship function which sits in the Department of Internal Affairs. I ask the House tonight how much sense does that make? 
Members opposite can make as much as they want of the fact that some of these structural deficiencies might have been around for some time. It does not make them right and it does not make it right that the Minister can come to the House with a so-called visionary piece of policy designed to improve settlement outcomes and not give even a passing thought to whether we might get better settlement outcomes by having the citizenship function the ethnic affairs resettlement function and the immigration function all parked in one place where maybe some people who talk to each other could actually make some decisions about these things. 
I would have thought that that was not rocket science. I have been promoting this as a policy initiative for a little while. If the Minister has not thought about it herself and if her officials were not smart enough to think about it she has certainly been quick to pounce on one or two other things that I might have said in this area. I want to know why she has not thought about that sort of structural change. It seems obvious to me that if we were to have an unashamed attempt to improve settlement outcomes then the resettlement machinery of the Government contained in the Office of Ethnic Affairs would be the first place one would look to see how we could improve the structure the governance and the service. It does not seem to have crossed the Minister’s mind that that might be the sort of thing that the House might want to include in legislation that purports to look at such a lofty and laudable objective as improved settlement outcomes for New Zealand’s migrants. 
I also ask the House to consider this. If the Government and the Minister did have firmly fixed in their minds an objective of improving settlement outcomes why have we been asked to pass this bill under urgency? Why was this measure not featured in the Prime Minister’s press conference yesterday afternoon? Why was word not carefully leaked out by the spin doctors from the ninth floor so that the media could get a foretaste of the wonderful policy that was about to be unveiled by the Minister this week? 
The answer to those questions is that the Government does not take any pride in this measure. The Government does not seriously believe for one minute that this is about improving settlement outcomes. This is not part of some bold new visionary policy—the result of a concerted and structured review over the 4 years the Government has had to give its attention to this matter. This is a tawdry piece of legislation to cut some people who have entitlements under the current law off the list because the Minister was too lazy and too incompetent to do a job in due time and because since she had messed it up with a retrospective component in what she did do because she waited too long to get around to it the High Court rolled her and she knows that the Court of Appeal will roll her as well. 
I say to the Minister that if that is the case—if indeed she is asking this Parliament to tidy up her mess—then she will have to show better grace than she has shown tonight. She will have to come along and tell the truth to this House about the nature of the High Court decision made by Justice Randerson. She will have to tell us what her officials have told her will happen when she gets along to the Court of Appeal. She was so keen to assert on 17 June that she was off to the court because that would be the way in which these minor technical difficulties would be overcome. [ 
Interruption 
] Mr Carter asks what became of that initiative. I say to the Minister tonight that she cannot seriously expect the House to spend its time under urgency giving attention to this matter when she cannot even tell us what happened to the appeal. What has happened to the appeal? 
John Carter 
: Did they have one? 
Hon MURRAY McCULLY 
: Well I ask the Associate Minister Mr O’Connor who is in the House tonight whether he would like to tell us what happened to the appeal that the Government announced on 17 June that it would lodge. The Government was so confident that Justice Randerson had got it wrong in the High Court decision. Does Mr O’Connor have an answer to that question? Does Mr O’Connor know about the High Court decision and about the decision of the Government to appeal? 
Rt Hon Winston Peters 
: No. 
Hon MURRAY McCULLY 
: Apparently not. I say to the Associate Minister that we will put up some more people to speak on the subject and to keep things moving while he is out the back with the officials and they tell him about the High Court decision—which found that his Minister acted unlawfully—and about the prospects that the Government has if it goes to the Court of Appeal. Then the Associate Minister can come back into the Chamber and do what the Minister did not do—which is to tell us the truth about this measure. Here tonight we are carving a whole bunch of people off a list on which they currently have some entitlements and by which unless the Court of Appeal decided to do something to uphold the Minister they would retain some entitlements. But we are cutting them off the list. Whether those people should be considered for residence in New Zealand is not really the point. The point is the way we do business. We tell people what our expectations are we invite them to put their hands up and then we deal with them fairly predictably and with certainty—except that this Government does not want to do that because the Minister got some things profoundly and fundamentally wrong. She dressed them up in not a very convincing fashion with some arguments which do not hold any water about improving settlement outcomes.