Goldsmith PaulHon PAUL GOLDSMITH (National): Thank you Madam Chair and it's my pleasure to speak in this debate. So this legislation that's been introduced in this House in a hurried fashion like most of the legislation by this Government in recent times is wanting to extend for two years extraordinary powers given to the Minister of Immigration to deal with immigration matters made more complicated by the crisis that we face with COVID-19 and the point of this Opposition is to say that yes we agree that those powers are necessary at this time but we do not agree that it needs to be for two years before we come back and revisit this. We think that one year is sufficient time for those powers to be extended and that the Minister should trouble himself and his ministry should trouble itself to come back to Parliament in a timely fashion to allow the people of New Zealand to consider this properly and to have a normal submission process. Now the Minister regards this as an intolerable inconvenience. He doesn't want to do this he doesn't want his ministry to be troubled with this and he doesn't want to be troubled with it himself. In fact he regards in an incredibly arrogant way—Tim van de Molen: Pesky. Hon PAUL GOLDSMITH: —that this is a pesky requirement from the Opposition and that we shouldn't be annoying him. The point that I want to make to the Minister is that he should remember that he is serving the people of New Zealand and he is accountable to this Parliament. If he wants to have extraordinary powers extended to him in a time of crisis he should be accountable for those powers and we should come back on a regular basis to this Parliament and give New Zealanders an opportunity to talk about it properly. Now what we saw was it was rammed through urgency originally during the crisis and we can all understand that. What we're not so impressed by was the complete lack of organisation on his part and the part of his officials to get this legislation into the House early enough so that it could be properly considered by New Zealanders. Because of their incompetence and their slowness and their slackness it was introduced rather late in the piece and we haven't had much time to deal with it. The submitters haven't had the normal time in order to be able to make their submissions on it—but we're dealing with it in a timely fashion in this House nevertheless—and he has the temerity to turn up and say I demand another two years." Apparently all the word is that he was expecting to have even longer three years maybe and at least his Cabinet colleagues pushed back against that and said "No no you need to come back within two years." We're saying that it is actually important that New Zealanders have a chance to have a say about this. Why? Because the powers in this legislation are extraordinary. This is an area where it is an incredibly fraught area of Government policy: how to handle with the rules around immigration. People's lives are affected by these decisions in an enormous way and all New Zealanders are aware—and everybody in this Parliament is aware—of the lives that have been put on hold by the situation that we face with COVID and the extraordinary pressures on many families. So how we handle these issues is incredibly delicate and it is important that New Zealanders feel absolutely confident that the decision making is made in a way that is defendable robust and predictable. So the situation that we have with the extraordinary powers handed into the hands of the Minister is like I say something that we accept as a reality that is required. But the question I have to the Minister is: why does he have to react in such an arrogant way when we as the Opposition are asking what I think is a reasonable request to ensure that on an annual basis he takes the time and effort to come back to this Parliament and we ask ourselves with a situation that is moving so rapidly where there is so much change around the world and we can't predict what the situation will be within nine months' time or eight months' time and the consequences thereof—we believe that it is important that Parliament reconsiders this in a timely fashion."