Prebble Richard: Immigration Amendment Bill — Instructions to CommitteeCWH In Committee 
Prebble Richard: Immigration Amendment Bill — Instructions to CommitteeCWH In Committee 
[Volume:611;Page:8283] 
Hon RICHARD PREBBLE (Leader—ACT NZ) 
: 
 I rise to speak to Part 2 which is the guts of the bill I guess. I make a couple of comments to Mr Dail Jones of the New Zealand First party. What he is really saying to the Committee—and I guess there is some truth to this—is that if we had New Zealand First as the Government this country would not be very attractive for people to come to. If we look further at this issue we see that under New Zealand First some of our best and brightest fled this country and I have no doubt that if Mr Peters was in charge they would be tempted to flee again. 
Jill Pettis 
: I don’t often agree with the member but he’s absolutely right. 
Hon RICHARD PREBBLE 
: Thank you. It does not happen often that the member agrees with me. The problem I have with this part is that on the one hand the Minister says we are going to have a points system and on the other hand she says we are not. When we look at the points system we see some of the dilemmas the Government has. It has a large number of migrants coming into New Zealand so it has raised the points required. The result is people get more and more points—for example for having higher and higher academic qualifications—and we discover that only nuclear scientists can qualify. The trouble is we are not very strong on nuclear physics in this country. I am exaggerating only slightly. We then discover as we go around the country and talk—as ACT of course does—to business people that there are critical shortages in that sector. I say to the Minster that interestingly enough—given she says the Government is going to move in that respect—we have a critical shortage of truck drivers. 
Jill Pettis 
: We need 4000 truck drivers. 
Hon RICHARD PREBBLE 
: The member is agreeing with me again. That is a bit of a worry! She has just said we need 4000 truck drivers. When I look at this bill I start to wonder about the arguments the Minster is putting forward. Does that mean we will have 4000 truck drivers arriving? If a person is a nuclear scientist should that person put down “truck driver” as his or her desired occupation? Should the person come forward with a job offer from say “Bay of Plenty Trucking”—if there is such a company—and say under the Minister’s theory: “Here I am. I’ve got high points. I’ve got a job offer which I got while I was overseas to be a truck driver.”? That is part of the problem. 
The second part of the problem—and I think this point illustrates it—is that Parliament moved away from this sort of system for the reason that consultants whom the Minister so dislikes will reshape their policies to fit whatever the Minister does. So if she suddenly says that people need a job offer the consultants will produce job offers. If she says that people will have to live in Invercargill they will suddenly claim they are going to live in Invercargill. What are we going to do then? Are we going to deport them if they decide that Invercargill winters are too cold? Those sorts of policies completely discredited the previous immigration system. I realise there are now very few members left in the House who were actually here when we had that previous discredited method. But that point illustrates the nature of human beings. 
When the witnesses appeared before the Foreign Affairs Defence and Trade Committee—and my party was not a member so I am relying just on the report back—it appears that those who know about these things said to the Government: “If you’re worried about the integrity of the present system”—and New Zealand First clearly is—“it’s nothing compared with the concerns you’re going to have when you have wide discretions available in an area like immigration.” I think that all members of the House accept there are possibilities and ways in which our present immigration system can be improved and I guess that if we are frank about it we will say that immigration by its nature is always going to be arbitrary. When MPs meet people coming into this country we see they are hard-working and diligent. Some migrants want to come and clearly they would make good citizens but we may find they are one point short. The next person who comes in to see us might be asking for permission to double dip the social welfare system—but that person is a New Zealand citizen. The idea that all New Zealand citizens are wonderful and that everybody wanting to immigrate to this country is a plague is nonsense. One sees those instances in one’s own electorate clinics. 
What I do not see in this bill though is a system that looks as though it will be robust enough so that we know it will be a fair system and that people who apply to New Zealand will have fair rules applied to them. What I do see though is a panic reaction to the sorts of speeches that New Zealand First members make on this subject. What I think we are seeing is a method whereby the Minister of Immigration can do exactly what Mr Dail Jones seems to be advocating—that is every time there is an election year depending on which way the polls are going one decreases or increases the immigration numbers only to ignore them completely afterwards. Surely we should be seeking as a Parliament to find out what rules we want and what guidelines we want.