Logie Jan: Immigration Amendment Bill — First Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Logie Jan: Immigration Amendment Bill — First Reading 
[Sitting date: 03 May 2012. Volume:679;Page:1959. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
JAN LOGIE (Green) 
: 
 The stated purpose of this bill the Immigration Amendment Bill is to amend the Immigration Act to enhance New Zealand’s ability to deter people-smuggling to New Zealand. The Green Party will be opposing this bill as its purpose is opaque and it seems to contravene international and domestic human rights obligations. I would like to initially look at what we know about people-smuggling in New Zealand and at some of the principles that seem to be behind the thinking of this bill before getting into the details of the proposal.  
From 2004 to 2010 15 people were convicted of people-smuggling within New Zealand and none of those cases to my knowledge involved mass arrivals. The people convicted of people-smuggling under section 98 of the Crimes Act have been treated pretty leniently by our courts actually with the harshest penalty in recent years being 8 months’ home detention. So that is a sign of how seriously our country takes people-smuggling—8 months’ home detention is the strongest response. Surely if people-smuggling was an issue in this country or even if we thought it might become one then the most appropriate response would be to look at our identification of smugglers and our response to them not to penalise the victims of that smuggling. It seems the bizarrest response imaginable to me. The way this is framed to me is a little bit like trying to deter burglars by promising to punish the people whose houses get burgled. It does not make sense. It seems to me we cannot really consider this as an intervention or a deterrent against people-smuggling because it has got nothing to do with the smugglers. 
So let us then consider some of the Minister of Immigration’s comments when he announced the legislation to see whether there are other clues to the purpose. When announcing it he said: “The recent events in Darwin show that New Zealand is a target for dangerous and illegal mass arrivals by boat. We need to be prepared.” He has also made mention of a freighter with 500 people that made it to Canada a few years ago. Yet the Government itself stated there was no intelligence at the moment that would suggest a group of boat people is on its way. There has never been a landing of illegal immigrants in New Zealand by boat with the journey being considered too dangerous for people-smuggling operations to attempt. Also I would like to draw attention too to the cost of fuel. If we are talking about this dystopian future where things are going to get worse and more people are going to be coming to New Zealand we also need to factor in the increasing price of oil which is going to make that option of getting this far that much more difficult. Within that cost the refugees have to factor in the cost of the boat which would be confiscated on arrival. So it would require a big freighter like in the Canadian case to get this far and they would have to be able to afford that. It is not likely. Immigration figures a decade ago showed that about 2500 asylum seekers were arriving in New Zealand every year mostly by plane. Almost all of them were refused residency and the numbers have plummeted and have since flat-lined at around 250 per annum. These have been further reduced by advanced processing. The Government is not just exaggerating the risk of mass invasion by boat people; this Government is creating the idea of a risk.  
I would like now to talk just a little bit more about the reality of refugees in the world because they are ultimately the ones whom we are talking about. The world’s largest sources of refugees include countries like Afghanistan Iraq and Sierra Leone and some of the countries hosting the most refugees include countries like Pakistan Syria Jordan Iran and Guinea. Approximately 70 percent of the world refugee population is in Africa and the Middle East and these people are escaping war persecution torture and things that most of us cannot even imagine and here we are drumming up a sense of them being a threat to us. It is a joke and it is an offensive joke. Imagine yourself alone or with your family fleeing for your life and then being treated as a threat and a danger to the citizens of the country you had made it to. To make it to New Zealand by a boat would be an epic feat and in fact I would go so far as to say that a few years ago in earlier times someone capable of such a feat would have been the subject of great books and poems. Their bravery would have given us all inspiration because of the lesson in the tenacity of the human spirit and our ability to cope through extreme hardship. Yet this Government is choosing to demonise these people and treat them as a threat? Worldwide there are about 11 million to 12 million recognised refugees but less than 1 percent are offered resettlement to a third country. Desperation is a natural response to that reality.  
I would also just like to address the issue of the term “illegal migrants” which has been used by the Government. This term is problematic for several reasons. Firstly it criminalises the person rather than the act of entering a country illegally but also it just shows a complete misunderstanding around the reality of refugees because international law recognises that refugees may need to enter a country without official documents or authorisation. That is part of the reality of being a refugee. Similarly a person without status may have been coerced by traffickers and should be recognised as a victim of crime not treated as a wrongdoer which is what this legislation is seeking to do. Refugees and asylum seekers and people wanting to come to New Zealand are not queue-jumpers and they are not illegal migrants. If the Government truly wanted to address the issue of refugee desperation then surely the most compassionate and definitely most sensible approach would be to improve processing of refugees to seek to get more places for refugees to be resettled in and to reduce the levels of war that we have in the world so that there is less need for people to escape their countries.  
Now to talk quickly about some of the specific changes in this bill where it seeks mass detention and processing of arrivals. According to the Minister this will enable Immigration New Zealand to be able to focus on managing the immediate risks rather than being tied up in paperwork and clogging up the courts. You know efficiency is good but group detention is contrary to the fundamental concepts of law and fairness and already Joris de Bres from the Human Rights Commission has noted that “Mandatory detention on the basis of group warrants raises issues of reasonableness and ultimately could amount to an arbitrary detention breaching section 22 of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act.” According to Professor Max Abbott the director of Auckland University of Technology Centre for Migrant and Refugee Research this is also probably a breach in international humanitarian laws and conventions.  
So this is what this Government is about. It is about solutions for problems that do not exist and a complete denial of the importance and the validity of fundamental human rights. Shame. Shame on this Government.