Stanford Erica; Little AndrewERICA STANFORD (National—East Coast Bays): Thank you. I've taken your advice Mr Chair; I've got a number of quick questions but I'll do one at a time and seek the Minister's response. The first question is around his previous answer to my question when he mentioned that it is his expectation that all employers are providing information or declarations and that potentially is where the nub of the issue is. Is it the Minister's understanding that businesses when they apply for accreditation are providing actual documentation to prove that they have been in operation for a year and have good financials or is it his understanding that all they have to do is to sign a declaration to say that yes they have been operating for 12 months and yes they are financially stable?Hon ANDREW LITTLE (Minister of Immigration): The advice I've had is that the employers have to provide a declaration in relation to the standards that they have to meet which includes employment standards and about their business. So if they do that that is then the basis on which any subsequent check or audit is taken. I remind the committee that for franchisees 100 percent of franchisee businesses who are accredited employers are checked each year; 30 percent of high-volume employers of migrant workers are checked each year; across the total cohort of 20000 accredited employers 15 percent are checked. If any of those employers have made declarations that turn out to be incorrect then there are penalties on that employer. So it is not in their interests to be misleading Immigration New Zealand. Where the cases of gross exploitation have been discovered to date accreditation has been removed and enforcement action is in train for those particular employers. That is the system as we have it.ERICA STANFORD (National—East Coast Bays): Thank you Mr Chair. This is a much better way of operating; thank you for your advice.I guess my next question after that is—so what we understand now is that businesses don't actually have to show any evidence by just signing a declaration. So this is a very high-trust model Minister where the businesses just have to sign to say Yep. I'm good. I've been operating for a year and I'm financially viable." and then they will be picked up as I understand it in a post-accreditation check of which we've only done 560 in the first year out of 27000. So you can see I think Minister where we're coming from in that if you are a business who wants to work in cahoots with an overseas agent to make tens of thousands—in fact hundreds of thousands—of dollars by exploiting migrants bringing them into the country pretending you have a job for them and then letting them go and get more in your chance of getting picked up is slim given that you haven't had to have provided any actual documentation to Immigration New Zealand to check you've just signed a declaration then only at the moment—what are we on one-point-something percent; 1.9 percent of businesses have been checked in a year and we know that they don't have to apply for accreditation again for another year. That gives a business who would like to take part in this pretty awful behaviour two years to run at which point they can disestablish their business re-establish as something else and carry on. Can the Minister understand how this system has created a huge hole in our border for those people who wish to exploit migrants and that's exactly why it's happening?Hon ANDREW LITTLE (Minister of Immigration): I reiterate the points that I have already made. Of the 27000 employers who have been accredited they make their declarations—they don't just make their declarations; they have to go through other processes too in order to achieve accreditation. So they also have to demonstrate that they have attempted to employ New Zealanders in the role and if they're able to demonstrate that they've gone through that process and cannot employ anybody they then have to recruit an overseas worker on the basis of the relevant wage which is higher than the minimum wage—the median wage usually; or with sector agreements that can be slightly adjusted. But that's the basis in which that employment takes place. I just remind the committee and indeed that member of her own words only a year ago criticising the Government for not moving fast enough to fill the labour market gaps that we demonstrably had following the opening of the borders and the winding down of the impact of the pandemic. We had a labour market that was in desperate need of many workers but we needed to have an immigration system that had enough checks and balances and safeguards to allow New Zealand employers to employ to fill the gaps to meet the needs to get output going and productivity going but also allow good effective enforcement action. We then further assisted of course by the passage of the worker protection legislation just recently which gives Immigration New Zealand more power to get information from employers to investigate allegations of migrant exploitation. So the system as a whole was set up on the basis that most employers—most employers—try to do the right thing and I say that as a former union official! Most employers try to do the right thing. There are rogue employers. We've always had rogue employers; we had them 10 years ago. I remember the heaviest prosecutions that took place—not many of them unfortunately—prosecutions of hideous conduct that took place where workers had their passports removed from them where they were required to sleep overnight in the place where they worked working seven days a week and we had a very haphazard enforcement system. The system that we've set up now in terms of collecting information getting information about the employers knowing where those workers are going and a system for those workers to make complaints as evidenced by the increase in complaints—nearly half of all complaints now come through a channel that was not in place two years ago. So it tells you that migrant exploitation was real before it's real now you started to get a feel for the real value of it. But that is the nature of Labour Governments because we don't seek to sweep things under the carpet; we actually want to know what's going on and we set up systems to make sure we know what's going on. That is the difference between members in the National Party who shout and scream a lot but don't actually mean it—because they want streamlined processes with no bureaucracy for employers but then they turn up here complaining about migrant exploitation. They want to have it both ways. We want a system that has integrity. We want to have a system that generates the information about what's actually happening and that's what we're getting and that's what we're doing. That's why we now have 300 people dedicated to dealing with claims and allegations of breaches of accredited employer rules or migrant exploitation and the system is working as it is intended."