Little Andrew: Immigration Amendment Bill — Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeLittle Andrew: Immigration Amendment Bill — Third Reading[Sitting date: 13 June 2013. Volume:691;Page:11156. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]ANDREW LITTLE (Labour):Once upon a time I would have said that when you do not have an argument you resort to ad hominem attacks you avoid the issues you do not talk about a bill you talk around it you shout you carry on and you abuse everybody. Now I have synthesised that into a new argument especially for this National Government. When you do not have an argument you put David Bennett up to speak because he has never made a constructive contribution on a piece of legislation in the admittedly comparatively short time that I have been in this House. That last speech was frankly a shocker. The people of Hamilton East—or west north or south in fact—will be dreadfully embarrassed those who are tuned in this afternoon anxiously sitting over their wireless sets wondering what their highly paid local member is saying in their name and on their behalf. They will be sitting there with their stomachs turning their noses turning up and their lips dripping with even greater anxiety and concern than ever before. That is the disappointing thing about it.This Immigration Amendment Bill has its genesis in the chartering on commercial terms of a ship a seagoing vessel from Sri Lanka to Canada. It was a rather nice ship and well laid out. It carried about 500 Sri Lankans who felt as if they were being harassed in their own country and who wanted to get out. The Sri Lankan diaspora in Canada had chartered a vessel to convey them from one side of the Pacific to the other and they washed up or at least turned up—via tug no doubt—on the west coast of the great North America. On that basis this Government because of a representative in Canada was frightened into believing that there was this mass market of citizens in other countries who were feeling harassed and put upon and were trying to flee their country and that they would come to New Zealand. In fact that has never happened. It has never happened here and it did not succeed in Canada either.So this is a piece of legislation that has no basis at all. There is no evidence and in the time I sat on the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee which considered this bill we heard no credible evidence from anybody saying that there was even an iota of risk that this mass arrival as contemplated by this bill would happen. That is why we are so opposed to it because it assumes the possibility of something that is virtually impossible and then it grants extraordinary powers to immigration officials and to the courts to treat those people in a less than humane way. Here is what Tracey Barnett who is a well-known columnist for theNew Zealand Herald and also a board member of the Auckland Refugee Council wrote about this and the approach under this bill in a recent New Zealand edition of the Amnesty International newsletter: “Detention will bemore expensive damage our international humanitarian reputation and punish the world’s most desperate while doing absolutely nothing to deter traffickers. Not to mention one tiny confounding detail; New Zealand has never had a boat arrival of asylum seekers in modern history.” And that is the reality of it. This bill is not about remedying a known problem; it is about making something up and pushing political buttons in the Waikato hinterland in the chance that it might attract a few more votes.Here is the reality of this—here is the reality. If 30 or more people turn up at an airport or indeed on a boat and they do not have proper documentation then an immigration official can go off to the District Court and apply for this mass arrival or mass detention warrant. Here is the thing. Here is why it fails the test of due process. The immigration official and the immigration official alone can swear the detail needed for the warrant. They can assert that it is needed to manage the group of people and a variety of other things. When it comes to the judge the judge’s hands are tied. The judge has very few choices because under clause 12 new section 317B as it will be in the amended Act the judge must if satisfied that matters specified—which I will talk about shortly—are there in the application grant the warrant. There is no discretion. And here is the more horrifying thing about it. The matters about which the judge must be satisfied are nothing to do with the substance of the claim that they are asylum seekers that they are seeking refuge from a country that they no longer wish to be part of. The judge simply has to be satisfied that the application is made on oath—well that is easy enough—and it must include the number of persons to whom the application applies—well that is a matter entirely dependent on what the immigration official says. Each person must be identifiable—they do not have to have identification documents just that the immigration official can specify the number. And each person must specify the particulars of the craft they came in on—was it a flight was it a seagoing vessel—and have a description of the circumstances in which they have arrived. Then the immigration official must state one of the reasons why they consider that the warrant is necessary and that is a matter of mere assertion. No evidence has to be supplied; it is a matter of mere assertion. Then the application must state how those bland criteria apply to each person.Once the judge is satisfied that that is all in the application without making any inquiry into the substance without any verification sought by way of evidence without any scope for challenge by any of the people who are the subject of the warrant—because they will be in no position to seek counsel and instruct them or to make their own application or to make a counter-application and the judge is dependent entirely on what an immigration official says—then the judge must grant the warrant. The judge must grant the warrant. The scope for review and appeal is hugely limited. Upon the granting of the warrant we know exactly what will happen. Those people will be bundled up and they will be shipped down to Waiōuru or up to Waiōuru depending on where they have landed. They will be shipped to Waiōuru. How do we know this? Because we saw in the Customs Service newsletter last year that it has run an exercise. It has trialled this. It knows exactly what it wants to do. It wants to bundle them up ship them off and plant them in Waiōuru one of the most inhospitable parts of New Zealand—that is why we train our hardiest and our best military personnel there—under who knows what conditions until the system is ready to deal with them. They can be there for up to 6 months. In fact it might be longer because the warrants are renewable simply on restating and repeating the earlier application again without evidence and again on the basis of mere assertion by an official. That is the basis on which this system will operate.It is a disgrace for New Zealand to now have this on our statute book. This will be an international embarrassment. The Minister of Labour who is shortly to go to aninternational forum—next week—will understand what it means to be internationally embarrassed. He might take a little visit while he is at the Palais des Nations in Geneva to have a look at the committee room where they do the human rights appeals and applications. It is a highly secure facility. He will see the people who are represented there. They are the dispossessed and the poor and the bedraggled those who are degraded and those who feel stateless because they are. This is the environment in which we are now playing. We are passing this law and we want to hold our hand up in international forums to which we belong including the ILO next week. We will wave our hand and say that we are a progressive socially progressive liberal democracy. This bill lends the lie to that. This is a disgrace for us and members in this House will hang their heads in shame as the Minister of Immigration is doing right now. He cannot look up. He has to look down as indeed is the Minister of Labour and as is the chief Government whip. They are all looking down because they know that this is wrong. This is bad law this is a bad statute and it will go when a progressive Labour-led Government takes the Treasury benches again.