Locke Keith: Identity (Citizenship and Travel Documents) Bill — Second Reading Instruction to Committee In Committee 
Locke Keith: Identity (Citizenship and Travel Documents) Bill — Second Reading Instruction to Committee In Committee 
[Volume:625;Page:20115] 
KEITH LOCKE (Green) 
: 
 I would just like to reply to Peter Brown’s comment that some 600 women give birth in New Zealand annually to get citizenship for their babies. In fact the Government Administration Committee had a paper from the Department of Internal Affairs listing babies born to foreign-born parents but those parents were essentially—obviously—people on work visas business visas and student visas. A lot of them were young people. Some of those who come here on student visas or work visas are young people with partners who then have babies. 
Peter Brown 
: How many? 
KEITH LOCKE 
: The figure given was 600 but there are all sorts. These were foreign-born people but they did not come here specifically to have babies. In fact point 21 of the Department of Internal Affairs document states: “The Ministry of Health has advised that it is not possible to provide a breakdown of how many women fall within the categories listed above or to estimate how many of the women have come to New Zealand with the primary purpose of giving birth.” There are simply no statistics on that. So anyone who says that people are coming here for that specific reason does not have the data to back it up. 
This whole bill is based on no information whatsoever. We asked and asked in the select committee and got no answer. That is why this bill is such a nonsense. One case was reported in a newspaper—the Christchurch 
 Press 
 or something—about an American woman who apparently came here on a visitor visa had a baby and went home. That is about as much information as we have. If that baby grows up in Kentucky Las Vegas or wherever and when she is 21 years old decides to use her New Zealand citizenship to come and live in New Zealand to me it would seem quite a tribute to this country if after being brought up in America she wanted to come here. 
Mr Brown says he did not have any trouble when for several years he did not have citizenship or a New Zealand passport. I think that only reinforces Matt Robson’s point. Mr Brown probably had a British passport which gave him entry into countries around the world pretty easily. But if one is on a Bangladeshi passport a Thai passport or an Indonesian passport as many of the spouses of New Zealand citizens in New Zealand are one just cannot get into virtually any OECD country. That is the reality. I think we have to be clear that if we take any sort of anti-migrant stance—and tonight people have been implying that we have to be scared of migrants and stressing all the time that it is a privilege to come here that we do not want them at our doors and that they absolutely have to prove themselves—there is a bit of inconsistency in what we are saying. 
As Mr Brown indicated just about every New Zealand extended family has members who have migrated overseas and they are very lucky that most of the countries they have migrated to have accepted them with open arms—and Australia has been mentioned tonight. So it is inconsistent to say that we are going to protect our shores from migrants and to be hostile and disparaging to migrants in the way New Zealand First is and at the same time ask countries overseas not to put any barriers in the way of New Zealanders going overseas. We have to realise that we are a small nation in the Pacific. We do rely on our children having access to overseas countries. We should protect that and not be anti-immigrant in any sense ourselves. 
I support not only the two amendments to this part that I have put forward but also the amendments of Matt Robson and Pansy Wong which all move in the direction of protecting what we have at the moment and not going down the silly path of extending the residency requirement from 3 years to 5 years denying automatic citizenship to babies born here etc.