Little AndrewHon ANDREW LITTLE (Minister of Immigration): What I struggle to take seriously is that member Erica Stanford's hyperbole and exaggeration and she has a strong track record of saying things that just turn out not to be factually correct. She did it last week and she's doing again. This Government takes very seriously the need for an immigration policy that achieves a number of critical objectives. One is to meet the labour market gaps that we have. A year ago that member was haranguing the Government for not moving fast enough to get more workers in the country to fill the gaps; indeed her colleagues were doing the same. They did not care. They did not care about processes that were about checking and auditing and her claims about wanting streamlined processes with no bureaucracy are just cant—that is all they are. It is meaningless waffle from people who do not understand and do not care about exploited workers. So we focus on systems that give us the best chance of giving us not only good information but the processes to respond effectively to it. The other thing that member is doing is conflating two things. She's conflating the exploitative and horrific behaviour of the dreadful parasitic people offshore who entice tens of thousands of dollars out of people to get work in New Zealand with what happens in New Zealand. We don't get to control what happens offshore with those exploitative parasitic agents who are doing that sort of thing. Now you know we could work with good information and work through authorities here to work with countermand authorities in other countries but we don't get to regulate what happens there. What we do is we regulate what happens here and what we do for those who do suffer the ignominy and the horror of exploitative behaviour from employers here is have means to respond including for those accredited employers who behave in that way removing their accreditation and striking them off. The member again comes back to We must have streamlined processes but not cause any inconvenience to employers." So we have an auditing process because out of 27000 accredited employers not every employer is exploitative. There are some pretty darned good employers who follow the system and follow the rules including public sector employers and plenty of private sector employers too. The biggest complaint I get—and I heard a very wealthy immigration consultant on Newstalk ZB last week saying "What is the matter? Doesn't the Government want migrant workers to come here?" because he also was very ignorant about what's happening too but Newstalk ZB doesn't care about that necessarily. So we're dealing with a whole bunch of people making wild extravagant claims about the system when actually the system is responding. We have a system that gathers complaints and it is gathering those complaints. We have a number of Immigration New Zealand personnel whose job is to make sure that accredited employers comply with the rules that those who don't have their accreditation taken off them and that those who are the victims of that exploitation get visas to stay in the country and they're assisted to get other work. So these big powerful lawyers that the member talks about—I've heard what they've been saying publicly. But it's not what she's saying and I'm confident that the teams that we have in place in Immigration New Zealand not just to respond to complaints but to do the checking of accredited employers are doing that work and doing it effectively."