Pugh Maureen; Menéndez March Ricardo; Penk ChrisIMMIGRATION (MASS ARRIVALS) AMENDMENT BILLIn CommitteeDebate resumed from 21 May.Part 1 Applications for visas and entry permissionCHAIRPERSON (Maureen Pugh): Members when the committee suspended last night we were debating Part 1 of the Immigration (Mass Arrivals) Amendment Bill. Part 1 is the debate on clauses 4 to 6 Applications for visas and entry permission". The question is that Part 1 stand part.RICARDO MENÉNDEZ MARCH (Green): It's a pleasure to resume the debate on this rights-diminishing bill. I just wanted to pick up on where we left last night. I want to pick up on the fact that the only thing offensive here is the fact that multiple—and including every human rights organisation and organisation that works with migrants and refugees doesn't support this bill. They may have constructive amendments to propose but at the end of the day this is around harm minimisation. By no means should one actually pretend that this is about those organisations suggesting that mass arrivals are needed.One of the things that we were asking last night around this two-tiered way of treating people arriving by sea versus air was the creation of discrimination. One of the things around that discrimination that I wanted to pick up—and I use the word discrimination because it was—Hon Shane Jones: Say something original.RICARDO MENÉNDEZ MARCH: —raised by the person in the chair. I look forward to Shane Jones taking a call on this debate and saying anything actually of use.Hon Member: Impossible.RICARDO MENÉNDEZ MARCH: Impossible indeed. But I did want to ask whether the Minister had for example done any consultation around the health needs of people arriving by sea that actually could be quite different from perhaps those arriving via the airport—people with disabilities or people who may have health conditions—and whether he actually sought any advice around the potential impacts of how that could be addressed.Hon Shane Jones: Relevance—relevance.RICARDO MENÉNDEZ MARCH: Clearly Shane Jones who's heckling seems to not have read the bill because if he had any knowledge around how the immigration system works he would understand that actually under the current regime asylum seekers and any migrant but including I assume asylum seekers has to meet the acceptable standards of health conditions. We actually do effectively test the health of those applying for asylum at least for residency. But at the same time there are public health considerations. So I wonder whether the Minister in this creation of this categorisation had done any work around any public health issues or anything relating to the wellbeing or disabilities of those arriving by sea.Hon CHRIS PENK (Associate Minister of Immigration): Thank you and thank you to those who have contributed to the debate—the first part thereof the first part of the first part so to speak.Yesterday we traversed much of the ground that the member has mentioned—happy to address the specific question at the tail end of that contribution and look forward of course in Part 2 where there are more substantive operative provisions whereas Part 1 is very much more in the nature of providing definitions of "passengers" "arrivals" and "mass arrivals" indeed.So in response to the particular question regarding the health needs of those who've spent a long period of time at sea the first point is that a mass arrival by definition involves a large number of human beings. There's a complexity in that fact and the resource constraints that would be placed all at once on an immigration or refugee-processing system—that is otherwise not geared up for that degree of complexity and volume of cases needing to be processed at once—in itself suggests that a regime like this is required in the perhaps unlikely but not impossible scenario that that there should be a mass arrival on our shores.As for the particular health needs of people who've spent a long period of time at sea the advice has been helpful in noting the complexity that's likely to arise in such situations. Of course we can't anticipate the nature of exactly what that would be in any individual case. I'm not a medical expert by any degree myself—there are some actually in the Chamber who are—but I have spent a bit of time at sea and I know that it's possible for particular ailments to be compounded by reason of the fact of a person being away from shore for a long period of time. One doesn't need too much imagination to conclude that in the case of a mass arrival by sea on these shores there would be complex health needs such that while they must of course be treated as a medical matter on an individual basis from an immigration- and or refugee-processing perspective it's appropriate to consider those as one or at least potentially together—not least of all because the confined conditions which one invariably spends at sea with many others would increase the likelihood of communication of an ailment of a contagious nature."