Jones Dail: Immigration Amendment Bill (No 2) — First Reading Second Reading 
Jones Dail: Immigration Amendment Bill (No 2) — First Reading Second Reading 
[Volume:609;Page:6757] 
DAIL JONES (NZ First) 
: 
 The Minister has just said he is happy to be part of a Government that introduces sound legislation. There could be no more unsound legislation than the bill before the House. I assume the Government hopes that through its actual effect it will be sound and that the immigration consultants who have wide resources do not inspect it very closely and discover there are loopholes in it. That would be very embarrassing for the Government and would completely destroy the Minister’s statement. But I expect people will be looking at this bill very closely overnight and informing various people as to how sound it is. They may even allow the bill to go through the House so they can then approve it or take some action subsequently. 
But to say that generally speaking this type of legislation could be sound is drawing a very long bow. This is retrospective legislation of the worst possible kind and no Parliament that properly supports the rule of law the Westminster system and all those things that we refer to from time to time should really be supporting this legislation. Governments sometimes have to admit they have made a mistake and did not carry out Government policy properly and that those people who have lodged applications are entitled to have their applications heard and if they do not succeed well the applications do not succeed. We are not suggesting—and no one would suggest—that all the applications that are before the Government would necessarily succeed. But all the Government is doing here is a wiping away of applications that it thinks will help it to reduce about 2 years of a backlog. 
It is the sort of thing one does when the health system has a very long waiting list. One way to end the waiting list is to cut it short or redesign it in some form or another. Or the same thing can be done to the State-house waiting list or suchlike—come up with some scheme whereby it is cut short. Any self-respecting Government would have accepted the High Court decision or would have brought in legislation that as from today would have brought the matter to an end and allowed those people who have lodged their applications to proceed with the applications and see whether they were successful. 
However this minority Labour Government supported by United Future does not want to take that view. All the other parties in this House that have voted tonight have opposed that view. Retrospective legislation is contrary to all our principles. I heard from Dr Cullen—and I did not touch on this—his accusation of judicial activism against Justice Randerson. He was making his speech at 9 o’clock at night and he thought he would take up some sort of line he had perhaps heard on the Supreme Court Bill where a criticism of judicial activism was made. To accuse the judge of judicial activism was quite— 
Hon Richard Prebble 
: It’s just statutory interpretation that’s all. 
DAIL JONES 
: It was very simple statutory interpretation—interpretation probably of an administrative law type of case where Justice Randerson just had to look to see on the facts whether the requirements of administrative law had been carried out. There was no statute to interpret really just the facts to see whether the policy had been carried out. To say that this was judicial activism and then to carry on in the way in which he did about the High Court Justice I thought came very close to a breach of parliamentary privilege in his attack on a member of the High Court of New Zealand. 
 That goes to show how hard the deputy leader of the Labour Party the Leader of the House was trying to draw attention away from the actual bill and to throw attention on to the personality of the judge concerned. If he says that no judge of the High Court is ever going to tell the Labour Party how it will run the country I say that in many respects that is what judges are for. Ultimately they are our last resort and we must never get to a situation in which we say that we will ignore what a judge says or do what we are doing here which is not just ignoring it but repealing everything that the judge has ruled on. Once we go down that path—we had a debate earlier today on the Solomon Islands and we are nowhere near that situation but we do just wonder where that road will take us. 
This legislation is making New Zealand a laughing stock overseas. We have always prided ourselves on the way in which we administer the law here. We are able to go overseas and say to people that if they do a deal with New Zealand on certain specified terms which are known to everybody we will make sure that we honour those arrangements and that they are properly carried out and we will not come down with some judicial type of guillotine and bring the whole process to an end. 
It is hard to understand precisely from this bill how many countries are involved but on page 3 of the explanatory note under the heading “Nature and magnitude of the problem” it states: “There are currently around 20000 general skills category (GSC) residence applications (involving approximately 46000 applicants) on hand waiting to be processed. This equates to around 2 years of potential GSC residence approvals.” In the time that one gets to try to follow this type of legislation that is being rushed through in this way one gets slightly confused about the size and the magnitude of the whole thing but perhaps the next Labour Party speaker can clarify whether there are in fact 46000 people who are involved under this legislation; that is as applicants only. Then one asks oneself whether those applicants have spouses children or other kin who might be coming along with them; and the mind boggles as to just how many people there are—throughout I assume east Asia mainly but also perhaps Africa and Europe—who in one way or another could be affected by the high-handed way the Government has dealt with this legislation. 
New Zealand First has made it clear that we want to reduce the number of immigrants coming to New Zealand who do not have skills and suchlike. Our policy is closer to a target of 10000 skilled immigrants to New Zealand so that we could assimilate those people and they could have a chance to make a good contribution. Is 10000 people right? 
R Doug Woolerton 
: That’s right. 
DAIL JONES 
: Mr Doug Woolerton confirms that it is 10000 people. I must be right. We want to see that number of people coming into New Zealand. We do not want to see the 190000 people that according to the geography department of the University of Waikato came in last year. I am referring to the report by Dr Richard Bedford the Professor of Geography and Deputy Vice-chancellor (Research) at the University of Waikato who convenes the Migration Research Group; Dr Jacquie Lidgard a Research Fellow; and Dr Elsie Ho. Is Dr Jacquie Lidgard a good lady? 
R Doug Woolerton 
: Absolutely. 
DAIL JONES 
: That is right. Doug Woolerton says so so she must be a good lady. Dr Elsie Ho is the Senior Research Fellow and I am sure she would be a “good fellow” as well as far as Mr Doug Woolerton is concerned. She is in the Migration Research Group. Those three people have gone to the trouble of collating all the New Zealand Immigration Service’s statistics to the end of 2002 and they have come up with a figure that floored me. Every time I touch immigration figures I am more and more staggered by the way in which the Labour Government is selling out New Zealand’s heritage. If we say that 6 percent of New Zealand’s immigrants come from east Asia and if we then swung the figures around and took 6 percent of China’s population—which is about 78 million people from 1.3 billion—and said that 78 million Europeans Africans or South Americans were living in Beijing I think that the people of Beijing would be a bit upset to have 78 million foreigners living in Beijing—or the equivalent say in New Delhi. India has a population of about 1.1 billion. If 66 million South Americans or Chinese or Europeans were living in New Delhi there would be hell to pay. There is no way they would tolerate that sort of takeover of their country but here we have this minority Labour Government doing that type of thing to New Zealand in the sense that in the last few years we have had 6 percent of our population coming in from overseas. In 1929 Auckland’s population was 2000000. Now every 10 years Auckland’s population grows by 200000 and the majority seem to be immigrants from east Asia. That is appalling.