Prasad Rajen: Estimates Debate — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumePrasad Rajen: Estimates Debate — In Committee[Sitting date: 02 July 2014. Volume:700;Page:19191. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Dr RAJEN PRASAD (Labour):Thanks for the opportunity to take a call on Vote Immigration. I ask the question: is our immigration system working well? I ask whether the system is working well in the case of Sanil Kumar. Sanil Kumar was a young man from Fiji who came here on a work permit. He was diagnosed as having end-stage renal failure was given dialysis and was waiting for a kidney transplant. He was forced to leave and go to Fiji and he died within a very short time of returning there.The Associate Minister of Immigration has conveniently refused to answer questions in this House on this particular case. What she has been citing is that she did not have a privacy waiver and therefore she could not possibly talk about this case at all. But she knows very well that a privacy waiver does not apply to a deceased natural person. That is excluded from the Privacy Act. In any case if the Associate Minister and the immigration system in New Zealand had done their work diligently they would have reached a different decision given the facts as any Labour Minister of Immigration would have done. A Labour Minister of Immigration would have reached a compassionate decision on this particular case and this young man would be alive today—but he is not.So why is the system under this particular Minister working in such a flawed way? Let us look at the facts. The facts are that this young man as I said was working here he had end-stage kidney failure and he started receiving dialysis. His family—two first cousins—began the process of being donors the family began raising the funds and they raised the $130000 required to receive—The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch): Order! Dr Prasad this is an estimates debate on immigration. The member must tie that back to the estimates on immigration. It is not a debate about a medical condition or what has happened to a person. You must tie it back to immigration.Dr RAJEN PRASAD: Well there is something happening in the funding of the immigration system that does not allow it to actually make the kinds of decisions it should be making. The Minister is hiding behind the privacy waiver. In this particular case were the agencies funded well enough to provide her with the right kind of advice? The Minister is hiding behind this fake notion that she wrote to me to talk about the funding of this particular case. She says that she took the unusual step in this case of writing to me and saying that I was making inaccurate statements.The Minister did not write to me. The Minister cannot produce any evidence. However the Minister did send me a copy of a letter that she had sent to David Cunliffe which says that there was a $36000 debt that Mr Sanil Kumar had for the dialysis treatment he was receiving. So I guess the funding of health and immigration is so bad that $36000 is the price of a life for this particular Government. The Minister did not write to me about that. In fact what I did say about the funding in this particular case was that there was no cost to the immigration system.I knew that this family had come to a payment agreement and had said they would pay the debt. Indeed they started paying this debt. The uncle had taken over this debt—a New Zealand citizen with a good job a good family and a good home in west Auckland. That family would have paid this particular debt but indeed the Minister still made the decision on the basis of that. That was the first basis for the decision. Yet the statement about there being no cost to the State was absolutely true in this particular case.This particular immigration decision was made based on a report that was received by immigration about dialysis being available in Fiji. Well that report is also worth considering in its detail. What is it about the funding of the immigration system that it does not give this Minister enough resources to actually work out the risk that is in her own report—a report provided to her by experts in health about an immigration decision she has made? The report writes very clearly about dialysis available in Fiji. It says that—The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch): Order!Dr RAJEN PRASAD: Yes it is about the costing about the funding of immigration and the decisions about this—The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch): We are not interested in actual procedures in Fiji.Dr RAJEN PRASAD: Well I am trying to bring it within this particular area. I am certainly suggesting that the funding of immigration is not good enough. It is not adequate to allow this Minister to make these decisions. That particular report made it very clear that this young man risked death if he went to Fiji. Three months would be funded. Then he would find a donor. If he did not find a donor in 3 months he would be taken off dialysis. It says here that he would have a few weeks to prepare for his death. This Minister did not have the expertise did not take the time to have a look at the decision and did not analyse the risks and yet she made the decision that this young man had to return. The decision was made on two bases. One was the amount of resources the funding this was going to take—that it would cost our system too much—and the other was that dialysis was available in Fiji.The cost was being met by the family in New Zealand and that is a fact. They had signed up to it. As far as dialysis in Fiji was concerned there was no analysis of where it was available or how he would get it and yet the decision was made. So here is this young man who went to Fiji. The last thing he said to me as he was leaving the airport—and it is reported on television—was: “I believe this is a death sentence.” This was a 30-year-old man who was in all other aspects fine—a kidney transplant would have fixed him. He could have returned to Fiji and lived with his family but this Minister made this particular decision for reasons that are unknown. Now the Minister is saying she does not have a privacy waiver—she is hiding behind that.Well a privacy waiver is on its way to the Minister. It will be available and I want to see what else the Minister will bring out for this particular case. The privacy waiver is on its way. There is nothing else to be released. This decision was made on the basis of $36000 worth of debt which was being paid for and on the basis that dialysis was available in Fiji. All the risks were mentioned in the report but the Minister refused to consider that.Where was the harm? Where would have been the harm to New Zealand if we had allowed this young person to stay if our system had been generous enough to let him stay? There is blood on the hands of those who made this decision and they ought to actually come out and explain at least to the family. So far they have hidden. They have hidden under this notion that we do not have a privacy waiver. Well a young man need not have died. At least we would have given him a fair crack at it with a kidney transplant in New Zealand. Believing that there was a kidney transplant available in Fiji or that Fijians might send him to India was such a long shot and the Minister knew that. It was absolutely a long shot.Even the report produced by the Ministry of Health was a report based on a paper somebody gave at a conference. They did not even speak to anybody about what was available. It was a paper somebody had given at a conference some months ago. There are so many holes in this particular decision made by this Minister that the Minister ought to explain. It is typical of the kinds of problems there are in the immigration system today.People tell me that the system is aimless. Decisions are not being made consistently in the immigration system. Two people applying with exactly the same background and even having gone to the same school for the same kinds of job offers are receiving very different decisions. There are many many cases now of the immigration system being so culturally idiotic that they will go and do interviews of families of partners trying to come to New Zealand—this is New Zealanders going overseas marrying coming back and their partners applying—and such a monocultural approach is being taken to assess them that they are being denied access to New Zealand.Decisions in the immigration system are being made by people who are driven on the basis of numbers—the numbers of decisions they have to make. This system is broken. This system needs fixing and this Minister ought to take responsibility for this case and for the system and indeed try to redress many of the problems that are there. Thank you.