Stanford EricaERICA STANFORD (National—East Coast Bays): OK. Thank you. Thank you Mr Speaker. I rise to speak in opposition to this Budget 2021 and I don't think anyone will be surprised about the fact that I'm going to talk about immigration because when you add it up all the money that they've bailed them out with and the money that they've given them it totals about half a billion dollars. The single overarching purpose of this appropriation—and this is the funny part—is to provide efficient immigration services that generate positive economic and social outcomes for New Zealand. Now anyone listening to this debate to me speaking today who is either an immigration agent an immigration lawyer or anyone who has to actually interact with the immigration service will be laughing or crying or a combination of both because they know how broken our immigration system is.Let's firstly just take a look at those words: efficient immigration service". We've got residence queues that are the longest we've had in history. We've got an immigration department that are on a go-slow producing one outcome in residency a week where they used to do 1.2 decisions a day. We've got an expression-of-interest (EOI) queue being frozen since March last year. We've got secret priority queues split migrant families. All of this is not because of COVID; this started as far back as 2018—they are not allowed to use that as an excuse. Poor Minister Stuart Nash had to get up on behalf of Kris Faafoi the other day and talk about the immigration reset where we're going to you know have highly skilled migrants. Well if you google "how to do immigration" that is pretty much what it tells you on any immigration search. There wasn't anything new in that speech and yet everyone flew to Wellington for it thinking that it was going to be some great announcement and poor Stuart Nash had to deliver the bad news: there was nothing in it apart from more anxiety and stress for migrants.If we take a look the most important thing about our immigration system is to encourage highly skilled migrants here. If we take a look at the expression-of-interest pool that is now reaching 10000 people that has been frozen since March last year: 235 doctors are sitting in there 900 nurses 543 teachers—one of them at my local high school Rangitoto College is a great maths teacher and she also coaches my daughter at netball; stuck in an EOI queue thinking about leaving—150 plumbers and electricians. Those are just the registered occupations. If we want to have the very best people the most highly skilled people come to New Zealand to help us claw our way out of our economic decline that COVID has caused then we need to do the best—Hon Carmel Sepuloni: Take a breath. ERICA STANFORD: —and we don't have the best—I've only got four minutes Carmel Sepuloni and you know that well; no time for a breath.If we want the best we have to be the best and we are currently one of the worst. People think that people want to come to New Zealand to live and work. Right now they don't. In fact the good people we have here the highly skilled people that Stuart Nash is talking about trying to invite are already here: they work for our local businesses they are our teachers our nurses our doctors our IT workers and they are all looking to leave because they can't get residency because they are stuck in a queue that is going nowhere or it is going to take two years or they are split from their families for over 500 days and can't see their children. Why would they stay here? They are all looking to leave—our doctors our nurses our teachers these good people these skilled people that Stuart Nash and Kris Faafoi want here in New Zealand. They are already here but they don't want to be here any more because we treat them so appallingly.A man I spoke to today who owns a company whose staff are looking to leave a Kiwi he said to me "I am embarrassed about the way we treat our migrants." We all should be embarrassed about the way we treat them. It is appalling. The immigration system is broken and here we are spending half a billion dollars on an immigration system that is supposed to be efficient and have good positive economic and social outcomes but actually when it boils down to it is delivering the exact opposite. We will be watching every single dollar that is spent—SPEAKER: Order! The member's time has expired."