Fenton Darien: Immigration Amendment Bill (No 2) — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeFenton Darien: Immigration Amendment Bill (No 2) — First Reading[Sitting date: 19 November 2013. Volume:695;Page:15081. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]DARIEN FENTON (Labour): Take a point of order Winston. Take a point of order.Rt Hon Winston Peters: I raise a point of order Mr Speaker. I am sure I could indulge my colleague from the Labour Party and say look seeing as I was the subject of that very unwarranted attack—Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER: Order! That is not a point of order. The member will get a call in due course to deal with those matters.DARIEN FENTON: I am pleased to support this Immigration Amendment Bill (No 2) at the first reading for it to go the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee. I am also pleased to see the actions of the Government attempting to deal with the growing issue of migrant worker abuse. I am yet to be convinced that the bill does everything that it needs. I will talk to that a little bit more.We are seeing things in New Zealand that we have never seen before with migrant worker abuse particularly where I live in Auckland. Many MPs will have had migrants come to see them to talk about what has happened to them. I was an MP who had the workers from the Indian restaurant chain Masala come to see me. Their stories were horrific. They were being required to live on the premises. They basically had their jobs sold to them for something like $10000. It turned out they were being paid something like $4 an hour a minimal wage. I am pleased to say I went to see the Minister—it was not the Minister of Immigration; it was Simon Bridges Minister of Labour. I reported that fact to him as the Minister of Labour and then there was an investigation. I have also had an update from the labour inspectors in Auckland on that particular case. What they tell me—and I know they are working hard on it—is that it is really really hard to get the information to get the prosecution happening.Although it sounds straightforward it can be very complicated. It goes to the records that the business is keeping whether they are accurate or not or whether they arephoney as that can happen. It also goes to having migrants who are prepared to speak out. On the one hand I agree with the Minister of Immigration that we need migrants to stand up and speak out when they are being exploited in this way but on the other hand I think it has to go hand in hand with really good inspection powers both of Immigration New Zealand and of the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment. I have repeatedly said that I do not believe that there are enough labour inspectors. There are not enough to deal with the health and safety issues we have got let alone the issue of migrant worker abuse. What it really needs is a team of people who go from place to place and inspect the wage and time records like they used to—labour inspectors used to do that—and talk to the people on the ground and just dig out these cases rather than waiting for poor migrants to stand up and say: “I am being exploited.” because the difficulties that they face are enormous.Job selling is something that we have never seen in New Zealand until recently. It is an abhorrent and disgusting practice where people who are desperate for work because their visas depend on it they want to stay here and they also want to support and feed their families are absolutely exploited by people who sell them their jobs. So they are told: “I will get you a job and if you pay $10000 or $20000 you can have this job. But you do not get paid.” Actually they pay for their own job. We have seen a lot of that. We have seen it. I think my colleague Rajen Prasad talked about the student visa issue. There are issues with students who are able to work 20 hours a week. There are also issues with the graduate visa programme where if people want to use the graduate visa programme to work towards residency they have to have a management job. So we have got managers in Burger King in—Dr Rajen Prasad: Shift workers. Shift supervisors.DARIEN FENTON: Shift supervisors? No they are managers. They are managers cleaning motels but they are called managers so that they meet the visa requirements in terms of working towards residency and that is just simply another form of exploitation.I want to emphasise that one of the questions that we will be asking a lot about during the select committee consideration on this bill is resourcing. I am looking forward to hearing from migrant groups. I think it will be very instructive for the select committee to hear from migrants themselves. Sometimes they will be represented by migrant organisations. So I suspect the Migrant Action Trust will have a lot to say and also Dennis Maga’s organisation Migrante Aotearoa New Zealand which is called something else now is it not—Union Network of Migrants. He is a really good advocate for migrants in New Zealand. He is constantly speaking out and can speak not only from his own experience but also from the experience of the people whom he has represented.I think there are some issues around employment law and when I spoke to Simon Bridges about the Masala situation he indicated to me that there was going to be a package. The Minister of Immigration Michael Woodhouse said just before that this is a package of measures. I have no idea what the other parts of the package are and it would be good to have some indication of that as we go through this. What it does need is some changes to labour law. It needs strengthening around that. Unfortunately—I have to say it—we are not seeing changes to labour law going in the right way to provide protection and make it easier for migrant workers. The changes are going backwards. It was very pleasing to hear the Minister of Labour today assure me that he is listening and taking into consideration submissions around proposed changes to Part 6A of the Employment Relations Act because in fact it is mainly migrant workers who end up in low-paid cleaners jobs. Those are the ones who are most vulnerable to exploitation. It is another form of exploitation if their jobs can be sold to the lowestbidder and they are dumped on the scrap heap with no redundancy pay and nowhere to go. A package would include actually not changing the Employment Relations Act in the way that the Minister is proposing. It would include actually strengthening it and making it easier for migrant workers to access their rights and would also look at things like the Wages Protection Act and prosecutions.One of the things that I have been told by migrant advocates is that it is very hard. The Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment can prosecute and it is hard enough for it but migrant advocates have migrant workers who come to them who have clearly been exploited and the employer has clearly broken the law and trying to take that through a court case is incredibly difficult particularly where the employers themselves are new migrants and have set up a business. There are all sorts of veils—corporate veils and other things—that cannot be unravelled. So although migrant workers often win a court case that exposes the breaches of employment law that they have been subjected to they cannot get any enforcement. The remedies are just simply impossible to obtain because the business disappears it does not have any money or it is hidden somewhere. There needs to be some consideration I think given to the Wages Protection Act whereby we are able to prosecute not just employers but individuals. I think again we will hear from lawyers who represent migrant workers in their situations and I know that they are quite strong on that.We do need to take this very seriously with the Christchurch rebuild as well. We have heard stories of course already and the last thing I heard was that the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment was investigating 12 breaches in respect of migrant workers who have come to New Zealand and Christchurch. Again I do not think that it is resourced to do the job that needs to be done given that we are going to have 17000 migrants in the Christchurch rebuild and about four inspectors and have immigration offices that are actually not going to have people in them. They are going to be an online presence rather than enforcement. I think we do have to consider very seriously how we make this happen. If we are serious about stopping migrant worker abuse we have to think about how we help make it happen rather than simply sitting back and expecting migrants to come forward. I look forward to the discussion on that.The only other thing that I would say about this bill is that there are some things in it that seem to have come from the 2009 Act. They seem to have been left over and were maybe rejected at the time. We will be looking very closely at those and I am sure that we will have as much interest in those issues as we did in the Immigration Act 2009 when it was passed actually under Labour and when we went through a very extensive select committee process. But as I said I am pleased to support this bill. We will closely scrutinise it. It is good that the Government has taken some steps to deal with this very serious issue which could get completely out of control if we do not do something soon.