Clark David: Immigration Amendment Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeClark David: Immigration Amendment Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 11 June 2013. Volume:691;Page:10945. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Dr DAVID CLARK (Labour—Dunedin North):Following that speech—that typically generous speech—from the Minister of Immigration I would like to suggest that perhaps we could send him out as a one-person welcoming committee. If any of these boats turn up I can assure the House that the boat would likely turn round and head for the hills. The Immigration Amendment Bill is a scurrilous bill. It is an outrage it is unnecessary and it introduces into New Zealand law provisions that are designed to distract from the current parlous state of this Government and designed to provide the kind of set-up that exists in Guantanamo Bay. This is an outrage. We do not need this in New Zealand. It is absolutely clear that we do not need this. The people on these boats whom Michael Woodhouse refers to on the tattered boat present no threat to New Zealand.I want to firstly commend the excellent Supplementary Order Paper in the name of my colleague Darien Fenton that seeks to provide a solution to appease the fears of the Minister by encouraging a mass arrival group set-up to be in the facilities that are already existing at the Māngere Refugee Resettlement Centre. Problem solved—problem solved! If this problem which is so big in the Minister’s mind that he spends so many hours every night worrying about such that he cannot get to sleep really exists this excellent Supplementary Order Paper would surely be a sensible solution to this perceived problem. But we in this House all know that this problem does not really exist.The representation of this problem is intended to distract from the scandals in the current Government. We have a Government that is propped up by one man who is appearing in court and by another who has sought to resign from his ministerial posts and we have a Government that has had to release one of its own recently because it just could not cope. So what we have here is a distraction. It is not a bill that is intended to address a real issue. It is a waste in my view of parliamentary time. It is a serious waste of very expensive parliamentary time and that needs to be said. That needs to be put on record. There is over a million dollars in time if you add up all of the contributors to the debate and you add up the time and salaries of the staff here to run this Parliament. You realise that there is a huge cost to passing legislation like this that does nothing for our country.I hope nevertheless that the Minister will give serious consideration to the Supplementary Order Papers in the name of my colleague Darien Fenton because they do provide a humane way of dealing with such a problem if a problem were to ever exist in the future. If we are going to pass this jolly bill and use the time of this Parliament at least we could set up a humane solution that would withstand the test of time so that if this issue became an issue in 150 years’ time we would have a law on our books that dealt with it in a humane way.It is important also to note that this particular distraction in the space of immigration is but one problem in that field. We know that Immigration New Zealand is proposing for example to shut down the very very proficient office in Dunedin North in the electorate that I represent in the electorate that that Minister the Hon Michael Woodhouse seeks to represent each time there is an election. That highly performing office is proposed to be shut down and I think this is an outrage. We know that the staff in Dunedin Public Service offices are very efficient on all measures. The staff in Dunedin tend to be cheaper more loyal hard-working and productive and that is something this Government seems to have no concern for. It seems to have no concern whatsoever for the people in the regions who are losing their jobs for no gain for this Government. In fact if we examine the statistics we see that the performance of Immigration New Zealand is in decline. That is an outrage and I think it is an outrage that this Government and that this Minister in particular is trying to gut Dunedin of jobs that are there in a time when there is so much unemployment. But back to this bill because this is an important issue. This is indeed an important issue—