Cunliffe David: Immigration Bill — In Committee 
Cunliffe David: Immigration Bill — In Committee 
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Hon DAVID CUNLIFFE (Labour—New Lynn) 
: 
 Thank you very much for the opportunity to take a call in the Committee stage debate of the Immigration Bill. I join the Hon Pete Hodgson in thanking the Minister of Immigration the Hon Dr Jonathan Coleman both for his courtesies in his remarks and also for making available the officials’ time to brief us on Supplementary Order Paper 320. I guess this is one of those processes that the public does not see often enough where there is active cooperation between the parties right around the Chamber. There is a once in a generation nature to this rewrite of the Immigration Bill—let us hope it is only once in a generation. It has passed through the hands of if I can count at least five Ministers. It has had the same officials but five Ministers. So I guess we can fairly say that a great deal of the credit—or the discredit depending on how it all works out in the end—will be attached to the loyal officials who have worked on it all the way through. It is really humbling for Ministers to realise that we are but a blink in the imagination of the officials who serve us before they move on to train the next one. 
With due humility let us record that Labour supports this bill. There is one part of the Government’s Supplementary Order Paper in respect of refugee and protection provisions that we will be opposing. In respect of all other provisions including the Government’s Supplementary Order Paper we will be rendering support. That reflects the long process of consideration that this bill has had. To give some due credit to my colleagues the bill had its gestation right back in about 2003 or 2004 when the Hon Lianne Dalziel put together some ideas for the consideration of the then Minister Paul Swain and officials were working from that point on a range of ideas. 
Also about that time to be fair we should record that there were a number of celebrated cases or at least celebrated by the Rt Hon Winston Peters of individuals like a member of Saddam Hussein’s Cabinet who ended up sunning himself on a beach in Tauranga or somewhere. We decided it would be a good idea if we made the border a bit more impregnable. So some of the early drafting around the reform programme put a higher degree of emphasis on the security side of things and on ensuring that officials and agencies of the State had what they need to do their job on behalf of the public. 
It is also probably fair to say that by the time some early versions of the bill had passed through Minister Swain’s hands to my own there was a need to rebalance it in favour of the protection of civil liberties and human rights to ensure that we had a clean New Zealand Bill of Rights Act vet and that we had the general support of the Privacy Commission. All of those things were achieved which is a credit to the long hours that were put in by officials and office staff; we recognise all of the above today. 
It is also timely to recognise the extensive work that was done under my successor Clayton Cosgrove by the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee chaired by Vui Mark Gosche. My colleague Darien Fenton is one the alumni of that illustrious committee. The bill as it is presented to the House has a 33-page intensively written committee report which I think adds great value to the bill. It has continued the process of rebalancing from the early focus on ensuring the rigour of the border and that officialdom had the appropriate powers to ensure that private protections were in place. 
I will also contextualise the legislation within the broader context of the way that the process of immigration management is changing. A word of warning to Government members: it follows from the fact that immigration Ministers come and go rather like pass the parcel in a Belfast pub. There is no point in playing politics with the Immigration Service. If we do that it is a bit like playing politics with the police force; it makes it hard for the officers appointed to defend the interests of the public to do their job and in the end we all lose. So we will not be playing politics with this bill or with the state of the Immigration Service which I know ain’t perfect. It was not perfect before I saw it it was not perfect when I had it and it ain’t perfect now. But it is filled by and large with people who get up every day to go and serve the public interest and do their very best. As politicians we ought not to be taking out on them our frustrations about the complexities of the modern world. That is not to say that if there are particular instances of malpractice we should not draw that to the public attention. 
In that regard the Immigration Bill before us today was part of a broader immigration change programme that had three layers and I imagine the Minister is still addressing himself to all three. To quickly recall those layers they are the policy and strategy layer the legislative layer and the operational layer. There have been some surprises at the operational end of things that we do not need to dwell on today but I say to the Minister that there is also a fair degree of bipartisan support for the ongoing improvement to both the policy and the operations that provide the context for this bill in the area for example of the services information technology systems and its processing operations. 
That is enough of a quick walk down memory lane. The key changes we will be discussing in the Committee stage relate to the purpose of the bill. It is to provide a stronger more flexible and enduring foundation for a modern immigration system. It aims to facilitate the entry of the people we want and to ensure that we can keep out the people we really do not want. It is the sovereign right of any nation to make that choice. Immigration is not a right; it is a gift that is bestowed on the person seeking to enter a country and it is the responsibility of the Crown to offer that gift appropriately with good process with appropriate protections for human rights but with the national interest in mind. Whatever side of the Chamber we are on it means that there will be people we say no to. We will say no to them because they do not meet the standards we require in terms of raising the average because they do not fall into a designated humanitarian category or because they carry with them risks to our international reputation or God forbid security. It is the sovereign right of any nation to turn people away and to welcome them in. If we do welcome them in we carry with us the responsibility to ensure that they are properly integrated into our society that there is room in our schools for their children even if sometimes—I will put in a particular plug for the Pacific community—the immigration status of their parents is in question; we ought not to block the access of those children to school. It is not their fault that there may be a question about their parents’ immigration status. I will be bringing that up again later. 
There is a valid purpose for this bill to provide both the safeguards that the State needs to carry out those roles and the protections that must continue to ensure that they are not abused. In any complex organisation in any Government agency there is the potential as my Green colleague has said for mistakes etc. For that reason we have updates to technology-driven matters like biometric processing; access and management of classified information; a more transparent and equitable deportation system that will also be faster but more balanced; better detention and monitoring; and more appropriate incentives for third parties to comply. We will have time to discuss each of those issues as we go through the debate. These are contextual comments. I thank the Minister again for the opportunity to contribute to the discussion.