Lee MelissaMELISSA LEE (National): Thank you Madam Speaker. It's a pleasure to rise to contribute in the debate on this bill but as my colleague Erica Stanford has actually signalled the National Party will not be supporting this bill. And I have to say I'm disappointed that we had to get to that position because there are aspects of the bill that we do actually agree with in the sense that nobody—I don't think anyone in this House—wants to see migrant workers being exploited. And it is something that we need to do something about.As Erica Stanford has actually mentioned it is really disheartening to find out that out of more than a thousand reports relating to allegations of migrant exploitation only about 108 were investigated by Immigration New Zealand and the inspectorate. And that's sort of I guess—who's good at maths?—less than 10 percent. But instead of actually investigating these complaints where migrant workers have actually laid those complaints to the authorities we now get to a point where the Government is actually legislating for a law which basically wants Immigration New Zealand to—without necessarily any cause—dig into the financials of a company to find out if there is actually abuse in the system; whether there is in fact exploitation of migrant workers. As I said to start I don't think anyone in this Chamber agrees to actually have migrant workers or any workers being exploited because I find it really abhorrent.We do also have a process where we have minimum wage settings we also have when people are applying for visas they have to meet a certain wage criterion for them to be granted visas. But one of the problems that a lot of migrants have—migrant workers actually have—is that when they're tied to a particular workplace they can't often alter or change jobs easily. I mean that is an aspect of the immigration rules that the Government should perhaps make more flexible so that migrant workers could easily move from let's say an abusive or an exploitative employer to another job that may not be exploiting them or is actually treating them better or paying them better rates but instead they are tied to an employer. The bill basically removes the requirement of the desk-based officer to have reasonable grounds for suspecting there is a compliance issue essentially meaning that they can go on a fishing expedition. There are three infringement offences that workplaces can be charged with: if an employer employs a migrant they are not authorised to employ or if the migrant the employer's authorised to employ isn't working in a way in which their visa states they must. And some of the examples that Erica Stanford actually talked about I have come face to face with some of these issues with constituents migrant workers who have actually complained that they would like to increase the hours of work because they wanted to sort of do more study and actually learn about the industry that they're in and learn the New Zealand way of practices and they are not entitled to even change the dates that they have because they were given a particular visa for certain days that they actually worked and they couldn't even change that. And if the employer doesn't supply requested documents within 10 days. So those are three factors that will actually get the employer pinged and potentially fined up to $100000 or even jail time for serious offences. The thing that really sort of bothers me is that—I wasn't actually part of the select committee but to read that Zespri New Zealand kiwifruit growers also actually had serious concern about the bill. The line I'm particularly concerned about in their submission was that This [bill] is contrary to the principles of natural justice and will permit enforcement bodies to make arbitrary requests." I think that should be something we should be concerned about.The other one is Business New Zealand who actually said that "Duplicating the functional roles of the Labour Inspectorate and Immigration NZ without sufficient assurance of resourcing and consistent service delivery from both Departments" is actually worrying. When recently I had a constituent who rang my office to assist them because their temporary work visa was expiring they had had a job offer for a full-time job in a highly paying managerial position and they had in fact gone through an immigration agent. The company needed to become an accredited employer which took some time and they had to do job check. It's been months. It's been months and they still haven't got their work visa.The issue is that Immigration New Zealand does not actually have the capacity to even process visas where current workers who are already here working cannot get a work visa to continue working and here they are on a fishing expedition to ping employers who are having difficulty finding workers. This is a bill that could have actually worked in terms of—you know in select committee there are things that different parties would actually agree to if they had perhaps worked together better. Perhaps it's a bill that maybe we could've supported but it did not quite fit that threshold where we can actually support it. I oppose this bill."