SpeechHon MICHAEL WOOD (Minister of Immigration): I thought I would just take the opportunity to quickly respond to a few of the questions asked by Ricardo Menéndez March just before the dinner break interrupted us. Specifically he asked about some of the events of the last week where it has been widely reported that an immigration operation arrived at a person's house pretty early in the morning to find that person and to proceed with a deportation process due to their status as being illegally within New Zealand. I won't go into the details of that particular case as it is still being worked through and is subject to a request for intervention to the Associate Minister.I just want to address the issues that the member raised. This remains a practice—that is out-of-hours visits to people who might be liable for deportation—that is exercised on a very small number of occasions. A total of 3 percent of visits occur at what is called outside of hours" at a time either earlier or later than effectively non-business hours. Since this event and in recognition in particular of the Dawn Raids apology I have written directly to Immigration New Zealand to set out my expectations and the Government's expectations firstly that events such as this should only occur on extremely rare occasions where there is a strongly justified case based on for example it being the only safe way of conducting an operation. It is the job of Immigration New Zealand to enforce the law and sometimes that does mean to find people and to start deportation proceedings. It is not a nice part of Immigration New Zealand's job but it is a part of enforcing immigration laws that they are charged with. We want them to exercise that as reasonably and as proportionately as possibly and in this particular case to give particular consideration to the traumatic history of the Dawn Raids for our Pacific communities. Specifically as well in order to give effect to that I have acquired a deputy secretary who is the head of Immigration New Zealand effectively as the person who will have to sign off any out-of-hours operations. So the Government has taken steps to make sure that as I said before the spirit and the intent of the Dawn Raids policy is given effect in respect of how Immigration New Zealand proceeds in this area.The member asked a question which is effectively to the extent of: is there a disproportionate focus on some communities when it comes to deportation operations? Based on the information that I have seen that is not the case. Deportation activity occurs broadly speaking in proportion to the number of people from particular source countries who are illegally within New Zealand.The member also asked about potential future residency pathways for people who have taken advantage of the Special Ukraine Policy for which we have approved around about 1300 people to arrive in New Zealand; around about 600 or so have arrived in New Zealand so far. We have undertaken within the next period probably the next few months to commence work into what the future of that policy should be given that sadly the conflict in Ukraine does continue due to Russia's brutal and unjustified invasion. I do believe it will be necessary to give consideration to future next steps but we will just work through that process and we will consult with the effected communities.Finally the member had a question around the Government's decision around the granting of an additional special one-year visa for people who lost their post-study work rights because they were effectively overseas at the time that the borders closed. The member really was asking: is the Government considering a similar provision for other people who might have been offshore at that time? The answer to that is no and we have communicated that clearly to communities. We believe that there was a special place in respect of post-study work rights in that people had effectively come to New Zealand had studied and had—to use a loose term—earned the right to then have work rights at the end of that study and it was particularly unfair that due to border closures those people lost that opportunity. That distinguishes that category a little bit from other areas. I do note that in other areas particularly when it comes to temporary work visas all of our systems are now opening. There is a need for labour in New Zealand. I encourage people in those situations to consider applying under existing pathways."