Fenton Darien: Immigration Amendment Bill — Second ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeFenton Darien: Immigration Amendment Bill — Second Reading[Sitting date: 16 April 2013. Volume:689;Page:9394. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]DARIEN FENTON (Labour): That was a nice bit of soft-soaping from the Minister of Immigration about what is a bill that has caused enormous alarm in the refugee community and the United Nations community. In fact they were outside Parliament today expressing that concern. They have written to the Minister outlining once again their concerns about this bill the Immigration Amendment Bill the damage it will do to our very good international reputation and the fact that it will do nothing to achieve its purpose which is to deter people-smugglers. Well that was how it was originally positioned when it first came to Parliament. The bill is really about ghost ships—or polar bears I suppose—the ghost ships of boat people who will probably never arrive on our shores. They are ghost ships that the Government has used as a big stick to justify what is really a very reactionary and unnecessary bill. They are ghost ships of boat people whom this Government seeks to demonise through this bill and to make New Zealanders fear them in the same way that we have seen Australia do in a very divisive policy that it has been unable to move away from through several Governments. It is a brutal policy that is proposed in this bill of locking away indefinitely ghost asylum seekers numbering what will be 30 or more as a group in mandatory detention.The justifications for this bill are almost as silly as the Prime Minister’s claims that hackers are targeting this country for information to help create weapons of mass destruction. That is how silly some of the claims particularly from John Key have become. Last week John Key told us that the arrival of 60 Sri Lankans on a rickety fishing boat in Western Australia flying a New Zealand flag and saying they wanted to come to New Zealand vindicated him and we should be apologising for daring to criticise this disgusting bill. He said it vindicated his stance along with his agreement with Julia Gillard to take 150 refugees directly from Australia as part of our precious quota of 750. As part of that deal with Australia John Key claimed that there was an agreement that asylum seekers if they ever arrived here could be sent to Australia for processing.Putting aside the horror of New Zealand being responsible for sending asylum seekers to those places—those camps in Australia in Nauru and in Manus Island that are so reviled and internationally condemned where men women and children spend years of their lives waiting and where some are so desperate that they sew their lips together. There is a hunger strike going on right now in a detention camp in Melbourne where desperate people do not know what else to do. Or they commit suicide. Putting aside all of that I wanted to know what advice the Prime Minister had received on whether Australia would allow asylum seekers who arrived here to be processed in Australian camps. So I asked the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment under the Official Information Act to provide me with information on any advice it had given to the Prime Minister regarding an agreement with the Australian Government to send asylum seekers who arrive in New Zealand to mass detention centres in Australia. Funnily enough it came back and said it could not supply that information because it did not exist—it did not exist. So John Key made that one up on the spot just as he has made up the weapons of mass destruction threat that we have heard today.John Key told us that he reckoned it was a pretty good deal when he was referring to the deal he had made with Julia Gillard. He got done. He went to Queenstown to do a deal he thought he could do something about and he failed. He got done. It is not a good deal to trade our international reputation for a cheap trade in human lives and that is what John Key is guilty of in trading 150 of our refugee places—our precious refugee places—in a political deal to appease the Australians. What we got was an effective reduction in New Zealand’s longstanding international promise to take 750 UN refugees; it is reduced down to 600. It is precious because we have always had a policy of taking those in most desperate need—the women and the children. This policy that John Key signed up to means that what we got out of it was a chance to join Australia in one of the most appalling offshore refugee policies in the Western World and what we get with this bill is no better.Sitting suspended from 6 p.m. to 7.30 p.m.DARIEN FENTON: I was very much enjoying talking about ghost ships and ghost asylum seekers and thinking about it I have been trying to understand the motivation behind this bill. If you go right back to the beginning of the bill in the first reading in the regulatory impact statement that underpinned the proposed bill was an assumption that 500 people could arrive in a mass arrival all from the same country and all claiming asylum when they got here. Apparently that was based on the arrival in Canada of a steel-hulled vessel with 500 Tamils on board. The Minister has talked about this and various Ministers have talked about this—John Key and others—but let us be clear about that particular incident. Those Tamils went to Canada because it has a well-established population of over 200000 Tamils principally around Toronto and it has for years been a major source of fund-raising for the Tamil people. But in the bill wewere talking about 500 people one minute then we went down to 11—there is a bit of difference there—and it is now proposed that there will be a Supplementary Order Paper that the definition be increased to “30 or more”. From Labour’s point of view this does not change a thing about this bill. It does not change the fact that mandatory detention is not only internationally unlawful and inhumane but also completely unnecessary. We do not need this bill.I cannot help but think that John Key and his Ministers have got a bit carried away when they have been meeting with the big boys and girls in the so-called five white countries of the US the UK Australia and Canada. I have even heard theories that John Key has done a deal about cyber-security and national security biodata sharing—and I mean that might explain it because this bill would be quid pro quo for the cost of joining that partnership. Of course we will never know because John Key will not reveal anything—Hon Ruth Dyson: He won’t remember.DARIEN FENTON: Apart from not remembering he will not reveal anything. He falls back on the defence of it being likely to prejudice—Dr Rajen Prasad: He’s clueless.DARIEN FENTON: —the security or defence of New Zealand not to mention that he is clueless. That is right. I do want to express my disappointment about this bill though. The Government has failed once again to listen—to listen to the 33 submitters 32 of whom were opposed to this bill from many respected organisations both nationally and internationally who all warned the Government that this bill represents a turning point in our international relationships and will have consequences for our reputation as we align ourselves with the failed detention policies of the Australian Government.But we tried to be constructive about this. During the select committee process I approached the then Minister of Immigration Nathan Guy on behalf of Labour to offer a multiparty non-confrontational pro-convention approach to the possibility of a mass arrival of asylum seekers as an alternative to this bill. Guess what! Guess what!Hon Ruth Dyson: What?DARIEN FENTON: That offer was rejected. The Government was not interested because it wants to play politics with this bill.I also know that others tried to help. I want to acknowledge here former National Party immigration Minister Aussie Malcolm. Let me be clear: he is no bleeding heart. He is no bleeding heart. I agree when he says that those who seek to engage in illegal activity to broach our borders deserve no comfort or special treatment. But Aussie Malcolm’s advice to the Government was this: apply the rules of the convention that we have signed up to. The rules work if they are applied properly. Do not make up your own rules. But that is what we are doing.According to John Key we face an imminent threat of mass arrival. He wants us to be fearful that a leaky boat will turn up on our shores any day. Of course we know that is pretty well impossible but John Key does not even seem to understand the basics of the convention. The basics of the convention are that a person who is seeking asylum must seek asylum at the earliest opportunity. It is impossible to arrive in Australia as that boat did last week and then say to the Australians that you want asylum in New Zealand. So this bill is unnecessary. It is an overreaction. We are not dealing with the real issues around migration and immigration. New Zealand is better than that.