Stanford Erica; Simpson Scott; Radhakrishnan PriyancaERICA STANFORD (National—East Coast Bays): Thank you Mr Chair. Well it was interesting listening to the Minister's explanation there because well she basically said that once a desk-based officer had asked for documentation and looked at that documentation and suspected something else was going on—well I guess the point is they wouldn't suspect something else was going on because they wouldn't know because they weren't able to have access to any documentation. So yes while I understand they can then go and visit the business as we all know that doesn't happen very often at all—we know that from the statistics. So if the Minister was trying to create a bill that gave her powers to be able to identify where people were not abiding by the conditions of their visa well this bill doesn't do that. I guess the question for the Minister is: how would the desk-based officers have any hunch that something else was going on if they weren't able to ask for that documentation? But I'll move on and the Minister can answer that later on. I'll move on to a different point. I guess the question for the Minister is: is she aware of an existing power that Immigration New Zealand already have to ask for wage time and contracts from employers? Does she know that that's something that Immigration are already able to do and under what circumstances could they do that is the question.Hon SCOTT SIMPSON (National—Coromandel): Well I'd like to go back to this question of how an infringement notice is going to be served on an employer because I don't think the Minister's answer was remotely satisfactory. Just providing in the statute a list of potential options might be well and good but the question surely should be: are those options going to be effective? Is the infringement notice actually going to get to the person that it's intended to give effect to? I'm not remotely convinced that any of these options so far that I've mentioned will provide the kind of certainty or surety that a court would look to when potentially prosecuting under this legislation because I think a court's going to say Well look you know just turning up to the parliamentary precinct and handing over a document to the security guy and asking him—he or she—to deliver that to somebody else that's pretty random." But it gets better. So I went through four or three of the options that the statute's going to provide but replacement section 365B(2)(e) in clause 9 says simply "sending it to an electronic address of the person in any case where the person does not have a known place of residence or business in New Zealand". Now that's even surely more random—some kind of just fictitious imaginary made up email address. Or will it be a Facebook page? Will it be a TikTok address? Will it be an Instagram thing? What on earth does that mean to be "an electronic address of the person in any case where the person does not have a known place of residence or business in New Zealand"? And I think the question I have for the Minister is: what does that mean in practical terms? What's going to be the practical impact of the wording of a piece of black-letter law that says something as vague and as uncertain as that and what are our judicial friends going to interpret that to mean?ERICA STANFORD (National—East Coast Bays): Thank you Mr Chair. I'll carry on from my last line of questioning. My question was: is the Minister aware of any powers of Immigration that they already have to ask for these documents that are being signalled in this bill?The reason I ask that is that Immigration New Zealand currently have a power to ask for this documentation when they are accrediting businesses under the employer accreditation process so they can ask for it at that stage. They can also ask for it—and they have been just recently asking for it again or asking for it for the first time potentially—when they are doing a check on those accredited businesses like they are doing now at Immigration New Zealand. So a year ago we accredited a whole lot of businesses and now a year down the track Immigration New Zealand are doing checks on these accredited businesses and asking for employment documentation like wage records like contracts. So that is already happening. So I guess the question for the Minister is why is it that we are creating a bill allowing this to happen when Immigration New Zealand are currently already doing it? They're doing it when a business becomes accredited they're doing it in an accreditation check and in the case of certain businesses like franchisees who have to become accredited every single year because they are in a high-risk industry then they can potentially be asked for that documentation every single year. That is one of the listed types of businesses that may be targeted under this law.So I guess the question for the Minister is if I was an employer and I was asked for this documentation when I became accredited when the accreditation check happened and then every single year when I became accredited what is the need for this bill if that's already happening? Are we just creating something (a) that is not needed and (b) is overkill because this information can and is already being asked for?Hon PRIYANCA RADHAKRISHNAN (Associate Minister for Workplace Relations and Safety): So a couple of things. Firstly immigration officers don't act based on hunches and to the point that was made earlier in terms of how they might then find out that they have reasonable cause to suspect that there's other forms of exploitation potentially taking place there are other ways in which they can get that information not necessarily through these changes that we are proposing because the whole point of these changes is to check compliance and to nip low-level offending in the bud as I've said a few times already.Section 277 as I mentioned earlier does allow immigration officers search powers. Again I said this twice already in the House. They do allow immigration officers powers to search various employment documents and things like that but the threshold is much higher and it is a much more obtrusive power because they are physically going into employers' spaces and checking compliance. This is to allow desk-based—certain deskbased—immigration officers the power to request specific documentation that employers who employ migrant workers should already or are required already under the law to hold. So it's really just checking compliance there and that's what these new powers will enable them to do because they don't currently have those powers. Going back to the member's question and great interest in infringement offences and how they're served this is standard drafting for how infringements are already served. So there you go."