Logie Jan: Immigration Amendment Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeLogie Jan: Immigration Amendment Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 30 May 2013. Volume:690;Page:10619. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]JAN LOGIE (Green): There are several points that I would like to make in speaking in the Committee stage of the Immigration Amendment Bill but I will start with some of the overarching points that are held within Part 1 of this bill. I guess the first one is about this being a deterrent to asylum seekers. I want to address that general point of the purpose of this bill and to remind this Committee as I did in my first reading speech that in the initial edition of this bill that we were presented with there was nothing in the content of the bill that actually referred to people-smugglers apart from the declaration that that was the purpose of the bill. Within the content of it there was nothing referencing people-smugglers. Within New Zealand law we have legislation that specifically relates to people-smuggling so you would think that actually if we were wanting to deter people-smugglers our laws would be the place to start looking.I would like to bring to the attention of this Committee how we have been using that law up to this point. From 2004 to 2010 15 people were convicted of people-smuggling within New Zealand and none of these cases to my knowledge involved mass arrivals. That is a key point. The people who were convicted of people-smuggling under section 98 of the Crimes Act have actually been treated pretty leniently in our courts. In fact the harshest penalty in recent years has been 8 months’ home detention. Eight months’ home detention is the harshest penalty for people-smuggling and we have been told in this House that people-smuggling is a heinous crime and that we need to break the consensus in this House on our commitment to the refugee convention because we need to deter these people. And yet that has been the response in our courts to people-smuggling.It really does beg the question whether this piece of legislation actually has anything to do with that point. I would echo the call for the Minister of Immigration to point out in terms of this legislation what evidence he has that this piece of legislation will do anything to address people-smuggling. I note that the more recent Supplementary Order Paper 232 which has come through from the Minister does actually have some relationship with people-smuggling—potentially—around the provision of documents; it refers to those who are seen as aiding and abetting people’s entry into the country and providing false documents.When it comes to this point in reading this I think it also brings us back to some of the complexity around asylum seeking. My strongest association with this takes me back to my childhood when I was immersed in stories of the Second World War. A huge number of those stories would be around the French Resistance and the provision of documents to Jewish people or to soldiers who had landed in places and needed a safe passageway to get out and to get to safety. I was there as a child hearing those stories just egging on the Resistance to provide that to get that false document for that person to get to safety. In some ways that is what we are talking about here.This is about people whose very lives are at risk in completely war-torn countries in crisis. We are supposedly on the international stage intervening and standing up for these people and yet we are introducing legislation into this House that potentially limits their ability to get to safety. I do not understand it. I do not believe that is the New Zealand spirit. When David Bennett the chair of the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee stood up and said that we on this side of the Chamber are scaremongering around this bill and creating fear in migrant communities—because they are never going to use this bill—then I have to remind him of the cause.