Gosche Mark: Immigration Advisers Licensing Bill — Third Reading 
Gosche Mark: Immigration Advisers Licensing Bill — Third Reading 
[Volume:638;Page:8778] 
Hon MARK GOSCHE (Labour—Maungakiekie) 
: 
 It is a pleasure to be finally debating the third reading of this bill as it has had a long gestation period. It is very much needed by many in our community as a protection against the things the Minister mentioned in his speech which have happened to many migrants to New Zealand and have led to much discussion with the industry over a period of time by previous Ministers as to whether this should be dealt with by a voluntary regime or through legislation. It is clear—it has the total support of Parliament as I understand it—that everybody in this place agrees that a law is required. That follows a similar pattern in other countries such as Australia and Britain. It brings us largely into line with the regimes in other countries although there are some differences around issues like how lawyers are treated. But I think it is important that we do look to other jurisdictions as we make our own legislation and that has been helpful.  
I thank Pansy Wong and other members of the Transport and Industrial Relation Committee. I thank Pansy for her kind comments. I think the work that was undertaken by the committee was very productive. Most of us deal with immigration matters as electorate or list MPs on a fairly regular basis and sadly we and our staff spend far too much of our time in our electorate offices dealing with the bad outcomes of shonky operators. That is not to say that all the people out there are like that but there are too many to leave it to chance.  
Certainly a great many people have missed out on being able to stay in New Zealand legitimately because of poor advice from both lawyers and immigration consultants and many have gone to great expense and through great personal agony trying to get their immigration status established largely because of the unregulated nature of the business. In fact virtually anybody could and did set up as an immigration consultant up and down the country so the ethical and competent services were brought down by those less ethical and less competent services. Thus the need for this legislation.  
I think that the good thing about the bill we are now voting on is that it has been improved and that again is down to the officials who serviced the committee the people who sat on the committee and the members of the public with their various interests who came before the committee and made submissions. I want to make a comment about some of the changes that were made. Certainly we all agreed that the time frame was too long and we have brought that down. That is useful because it coincides with the actions going on under the Lawyers and Conveyancers Act which will regulate lawyers who provide immigration advice. Again in this speech before the House I want to send a signal to the legal profession that we are looking to it to pick up the challenge and to do that job properly. It is important that we can rely on the legal profession having proper standards competencies and disciplinary procedures because it is not just the immigration consultants who are not lawyers who were causing strife out there. Many who were lawyers came to my attention. I suppose a future Parliament will look at this law in several years’ time and look at what the lawyers have done to deserve their exemption from the Immigration Advisers Licensing Bill and it may have to look at it again if that challenge is not met properly.  
The law obviously describes who can be an immigration adviser and it does that by I suppose saying who cannot be because there are certain criteria that one has to meet. I think that is important because we do not want to make it too tight but we do not want people with serious convictions and other things in their lives doing this work. As I said we have exempted practising lawyers. We have also looked at the not-for-profit sector which made considerable submissions on this bill. Again I want to pay tribute to the people from the citizens advice bureaus who made a very good case as to why they should be exempted. They are unique in that they do train all their volunteers and they usually have legal people to seek advice from. If in fact we had not exempted them I think that a great service provided to the community by citizens advice bureaus could have gone missing altogether and that could have created significant difficulties for other people particularly MPs and their electorate offices.  
It was also important to exempt MPs and their staff because we do a great deal of work of this nature. It is expected of us by our constituents and in some parts of the country it probably accounts for 60 to 70 percent of electorate work. It is a service that the public should be able to expect from their MPs and their offices without fear or favour. So all of us on the select committee agreed that MPs’ offices citizens advice bureaus and community law centres should be exempt. Obviously we have made that provision for lawyers as well with a watching brief on that one for the future.  
We toyed with the idea of the student visas. I think we all felt some discomfort with that but we do have a very competitive world out there in terms of offshore education and it probably would have severely affected that industry if we had moved on this. Again I think it is one of those things that future Parliaments will have to keep an eye on as this law gets put into place and settles down and we are able to look at whether that exemption is wrongly used—in a way that we hope it will not be—by having people who are exempt then moving into territory they should not be in.  
The select committee looked at the Government administration if you like of this and made sensible changes so that there is definitely a clear distinction about where the various roles are played out. That took care of the fears that the part of the Department of Labour that deals with immigration would be I suppose the watchdog over the industry. I think all of us on the select committee felt that that change about the location of the Government part of it was very necessary.  
I think the standards the code and the behaviour—all of those things yet to be worked out—are things that we all look forward to in the future. We all look forward to a greater standard of behaviour competency and honesty in an industry that has had a chequered history to date—that has I suppose had such a chequered history that this Parliament feels unanimously that it needs to pass a law of this nature.  
I am very pleased as chair of the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee and as somebody who has a great deal to do with immigration at a local electorate level that we are finally moving to put into place proper standards. I think all members of Parliament would support that sentiment because of their own personal experiences. We all have tales to tell about the bad cases but I suppose it is like everything: we forget to also focus on some of the positives that happen out there. There are a great many people who work in the field of immigration whom we place faith in in terms of heading those organisations. They will make sure that the standards are kept. Some of them wanted us to be even harder if you like than we perhaps have been in this law. Certainly those lawyers who do not operate as lawyers but as immigration consultants and who also have law degrees did want the coverage—as the Australians have—of lawyers under this regime. It is the one question mark that still hangs over it from my perspective. But it is a question that will be answered over time and it is an opportunity for the legal profession to actually do its own housekeeping and put its own standards in place. We look forward to that happening.  
There are a number of things in the bill around enforcement and the ability to look at records and all of those things will have to be tested over the next few years to see that we have got it right but I am pretty sure that we have this bill in very good shape. I reiterate the thanks of those of us who sat on the select committee to the officials who advised us my thanks to the other members of the committee and thanks to the members of the public who made very good and sound submissions.  
Finally to answer Pansy Wong’s point about the restraint of trade I say that this was something that the ethnic community representatives particularly noted. They were worried about former immigration staff advertising the fact that they were former immigration staff in order to give the impression that they had an advantage. That is one of the main reasons why we listened to that public submission and put that restraint of trade in. Again it is up to a future Parliament to see whether that is a law that stays there forever or whether there might be a minor amendment at some time. I commend this bill to the House. It is long overdue for many people but we got there in the end and that is a good thing.