McCully Murray: Immigration Amendment Bill — First Reading 
McCully Murray: Immigration Amendment Bill — First Reading 
[Volume:609;Page:6719] 
Hon MURRAY McCULLY (NZ National—East Coast Bays) 
: 
 There are two different categories of legislation that this Government introduces into Parliament. There is the stuff that the Government thinks it has thought through and that it thinks will be popular and one can tell what that looks like because the Government leaks most of the details to the Sunday papers. The Prime Minister basks in the glory of it at her post-Cabinet press conference on a Monday afternoon then the bill is paraded before Parliament with great fanfare on Tuesday and Wednesday. But the Immigration Amendment Bill is not one of those bills. 
The second category of bill is one that the Minister knows is a damage control operation. The Minister knows that he or she has not done the homework that it will not be popular and that he or she does not know the answer to many of the important questions. There is no mention of those sorts of bills in the Sunday papers. There is no mention of them at the Prime Minister’s press conference on Monday and on Tuesday we find that the matter will be dealt with under an urgency motion because the Government knows that it wants to minimise the period of exposure of what will be an unpopular measure. 
The bill that is before us today and the bill that will be introduced tonight are very much part of that second category of legislation. They are introduced by a Minister who is not on top of the game who cannot answer the crucial questions and who does not want to be exposed to a grilling in the normal parliamentary environment. This is a bill that the Prime Minister did not want to talk about at her post-Cabinet press conference yesterday and that speaks volumes. This measure is a measure that the Prime Minister did not want to own at yesterday’s press conference. 
This is a very important measure and I am going to agree with the Minister in some important respects. It is a very important series of changes to immigration policy. I say at the outset that those changes deserve to be thoroughly inspected the select committee should be given the appropriate opportunity to do its job and members should be able to reflect on the importance of changes in relation to a subject that is profoundly important to our future. But let us also remember that in relation to the measures that the House is being invited to deal with tonight under an urgency motion this is the result of a series of ministerial blunders. This measure and its companion measure is the culmination of a series of ministerial stuff-ups. Having failed to address the policy issues that the Minister was told she had to address and having left it far too late to address the setting of criteria prospectively the Minister had to make some decisions retrospectively. She made a hash of it so she got taken to the courts by some of those citizens who were affected by the measure and the courts found against her. 
Mr Justice Randerson of the High Court of New Zealand decided in a judgment that some of the decisions that the Minister made were wrong in law and that she could not make them. So the Government went away into its corner and thought about its position and we saw the Minister responsible produce a press release on 17 June 2003 with great fanfare: “Government to appeal immigration case”. Only a couple of weeks ago we were told that the Minister thought she had grounds for appeal against the decision of Mr Justice Randerson in the High Court. 
The Minister has such confidence in the position she has adopted in relation to that appeal that she is blowing the appeal process out of the water by asking the Parliament to do tonight and tomorrow what she knows the Court of Appeal will not do. She has read page 31 of Justice Randerson’s decision and she now knows that what she did was wrong in law and that there is no hope in hell that the Court of Appeal will come to her rescue. What she was really saying behind all the ministerial political flannel in the speech we have just heard was: “Look I’m desperate. I’ve made a hash of it. I did it too late. I did it retrospectively and the courts found me out. I know the Court of Appeal which I said on 17 June I was going to appeal to is going to blow me out of the water so please Parliament do what the Court of Appeal will not do get me out of a fix. Bail me out.” I am saying to that Minister that she will have to come clean if she wants to be helped out of the hash she has made of things by having this Parliament come to her rescue. She will have to come clean and admit that that is what she is asking us to do. Anybody who listened to the Minister’s speech would be excused for failing to understand that that is the import of the measures she brings to the House tonight. 
I think there are profoundly important questions that lie behind both of these bills and indeed any measure with a retrospective effect deserves to have the tyres kicked very hard by this legislature on the way the way through. It deserves to have a doubly hard tyre-kicking when the Government is asking for it to be done in urgency which is the case in relation to the second part of this package that is before the House tonight. I say to the Minister that if she thinks she is going to get away with the loose and easy explanation she has given to the House tonight about where she is headed then she has got another think coming. 
First of all regarding the process I say that immigration policy and the way in which we make it is profoundly important. How we deal with this measure and with the second measure does matter because it does not just affect people’s lives and it is not just about the fact that people have applied in good faith under the rules as they were at the time expecting to be dealt with under those rules and that they are now being told by the Government that that will not be the case for the vast majority; it is also about the fact that we are sending a signal to everybody else whom we hope is going to consider making some contribution to the future of this country by applying under one of the immigration categories at some stage. It is a signal we send to all those people about how we are going to deal with them. 
I strongly believe that immigration policy should be predictable transparent certain and fair. The manner in which this Minister has dealt with the series of issues that has come before us which now sees her bringing this bill to the House has not been predictable—it has been anything but predictable: it has been completely incoherent. And it certainly has not been transparent. As I have said if it had been a popular well-thought-through measure then there would not have been a press conference and a briefing for parliamentarians at 4 o’clock this afternoon before dealing with the matter under urgency; there would have been a proper process by which to take the Minister’s case to Parliament to ask for its earnest and fair consideration. The process is wrong. It will be destructive of confidence as far as the public is concerned and there will be those whose hopes are dashed by the measure before the House today who deserve us to kick the tyres hard as we see this measure go through. 
Behind all this is the introduction of a new skilled migrant category which as the Minister has said will replace the points system. I say to the Minister that notwithstanding her bad faith in not consulting anyone before this measure was introduced under urgency and notwithstanding the discourtesy of a Minister not even being prepared to make a ministerial statement—as I think Mr Prebble has discussed in the House this afternoon—I will try to give this matter fair and courteous consideration because I think the issues are fair. But I will take some convincing that we should go back to the policy of the 1980s because a policy that involves continuous identification of the skill groups that are required relies on having politicians and bureaucrats who are good at picking those categories of need quickly enough. That was not the experience during the 1980s which was the reason that approach was abandoned. If the Minister is going to tell us that something is going to be different now then she needs to do a better job of that than she did in her introductory speech. There are many important questions and this Parliament will ask all of them of this Minister.