Stanford EricaERICA STANFORD (National—East Coast Bays): Thank you Mr Speaker. This Government has made a very conscious decision to constrain the space in managed isolation and quarantine (MIQ) thereby having to juggle returning Kiwis emergency returnees critical workers and split migrant families but it is has been their absolute inability to manage these competing interests that has seen film stars' nannies bands and children's entertainers manage to jump ahead of the queue that everyone else is having to wait in and that's causing so many problems. This logjam at the border is further exacerbated by the glacial pace that this Government has taken on opening up the trans-Tasman border that would see 40 percent of our rooms in MIQ opened up—that's 1800 rooms that could be used and all we've had from the Prime Minister is a tease: Oh we're opening it we're not. We're opening it we're not." All we want to do is what Australia has done and just get on with it.All of these issues at MIQ are significant because we have a crisis that is unfolding in New Zealand in our own backyard. Migrants who have given up absolutely everything to be here have been separated from their partners and their children for a year due to the border closure and the plagued MIQ system. They are here because we need them. They are our skilled maths teachers they are our nurses our engineers our tech experts and our construction workers. And we invited them to come here. In 2019 this Government spent $600000 marketing to them to say "Hey come to New Zealand because we need you." But the message now is all very different despite our Prime Minister stating in May last year that she would make it a priority to get these split migrant families back with their families. Nothing has been said and nothing has been done. The Government's deafening silence rings so very loudly in these migrants' ears. It says "We do not want you; we do not value you. Go home." That's what this Government is saying to them.The Minister of Immigration Kris Faafoi had the perfect opportunity to start this process of reunification in June last year. We know this because he was briefed multiple times by his officials on the heart-breaking anomaly where our migrant nurses who came to New Zealand just prior to lockdown were unable to bring their families to join them whereas the 500 nurses who have come in since the borders closed have been able to bring their loved ones here. So for nine months he has wilfully ignored the desperate pleas of these nurses who have not been able to hold their babies for up to 15 months in some cases.And while this is an unbearable situation for those nurses this is not a great situation for New Zealand either. We are critically short of nurses. In fact my colleague Simon Watts tells me in the annual review today for the Counties Manukau District Health Board they said they are 150 nurses short. That's just one DHB; that's not the entire aged care sector as well. We are hundreds and hundreds if not thousands of nurses short in this country and we are also on top of that about to head into the largest vaccination programme in our nation's history which we will be likely to have to repeat year on year. Now more than ever we need a strong health workforce. If these migrant workers leave which they are starting to do we will have to replace them with more migrant nurses who can bring their families and who will be out of action for 12 weeks while they complete their registration course. It makes sense to keep the migrant nurses in New Zealand. Reunite them with their families. Not only is it good for New Zealand it's the right thing to do. And the Minister knows all of this. He's chosen to ignore the problem and it's not until pressure from the media—and the Prime Minister embarrassingly having to step in over the top of him and direct him to find a solution—that he does anything. And my guess is true to form this Government will do the very least that they possibly can. They will select a very small subgroup of nurses the smallest one they can find grant them and their families some visas to travel and then proclaim that as some job well done by our kind and generous Prime Minister. But anything less than a solution for all of the migrant nurses trapped in this horrific situation will be a failure.Migrant workers in New Zealand who are torn apart from their families have been waiting patiently on this Government on Ardern's promise for a year but in the last 12 months there has been nothing. There is no plan for the next 12 months and while that maths teacher from the Hutt stands in front of his students this week he will be thinking of his own two boys that he has not seen in a year. The migrant nurse who works in NICU for the Waikato DHB who cares for our prem babies goes home each night and cries for her two children aged three and five—or two and four when she left. The Prime Minister regularly calls out other countries for their treatment of migrants. She cares desperately for the child of a terrorist. But for those migrants who are here contributing in New Zealand whose children are suffering she does and says nothing. As it turns out kindness doesn't extend to everybody."