SpeechDr JAMES McDOWALL (ACT): Thank you Madam Speaker. It's a pleasure to rise on behalf of ACT to talk about this bill.At the start of this reading today Rachel Boyack thanked the Governance and Administration Committee for assisting and making it a better bill and the previous speaker Tangi Utikere thanked the committee for suggesting a number of workable changes. All I've got to say to that is You've got to be kidding me! There's nothing left." If you go through the bill it's all gone. It's a totally new bill. We're not actually debating what we did in the first reading; there's nothing left. It should have been sent back to the drafters and dumped at select committee but here we are debating it at the second reading. It's absolutely astonishing. The Government has already done a U-turn this week a fairly significant one. I think it would be quite productive of the Labour Party to do it again with their support of this bill—turn it around and get rid of this thing.It's been fascinating listening to the Labour Party speakers on this this sudden obsession with Immigration New Zealand (INZ) and all this support for migrants which is somewhat surprising. You know the sheer amount of straw man arguments that I've heard today has been pretty disappointing but I will get to that. A few speakers have spoken about how it's important that people with English as a second language are able to access information and the context of Immigration New Zealand was brought in there too. And it's important that they can get the stuff that they need which is probably why Immigration New Zealand releases so much information in foreign languages in other languages—right?—to actually support this. So these sorts of things already happen.But if we get into this a bit more so the bill comes with a requirement to appoint these plain-language officers. It's just an absolute absurdity. And I think though that being said with the workforce shortages normally it's quite difficult to find people to do these bureaucratic roles at the moment. But most certainly after the next election there'll be a horde of ex - Labour backbenchers who might be able to qualify to do these roles. But in any case it doesn't matter because the ACT Party has a policy to reduce the public sector back to 2017 levels and there is fierce competition to decide who's going to go first what roles are going to go first. But I think it might just be these ones. So going further into the bill the commencement—it's actually quite good to see the six months being added in there after Royal assent when this all kicks in. My suggestion is: look to save taxpayer money make it 12 months so that by the time that we're in Government we can just get rid of this and they won't have wasted all these resources and money getting it under way.As I alluded to earlier the supportive comments from—well the support from Labour for migrants is a bit surprising. I'm trying to kind of hold my tongue here a little bit as to what I think of that. So Rachel Boyack spoke about INZ. Look the reality is practically speaking having had a bit to do with the immigration system—yep you're right; the ops manual exists. That has all the complicated instructions for visas and how to process and also all this other stuff requirements; that is not public comms. If you go to the Immigration website they've actually got a pretty good and easy to use website where they condense a lot of that information down. The job's already done. Yes advisers and lawyers usually work through the ops manual which is the same thing that immigration officials work through as well. So you know that's just addressing this piece of the advice that a document prepared by officials from Immigration New Zealand intended for immigration advisers might differ in its wording. Well obviously; that's just reality. But the next thing that I wanted to touch on here was around this English stuff in the context of immigration because I wonder if those that have spoken about this from the Labour Party have actually ever dealt with the immigration system and dealt with visa categories and their requirements. Obviously there are English language requirements in a lot of these visas right? So if they care so much if this is such a problem that migrants are having such difficulty understanding instructions and perhaps their advisers are having difficulty whatever then I'm assuming they're going to drop the English language requirements from visas right? If they really care about this then drop the requirements. But actually what have they done? They've just brought in more and more and more including in the investor categories as well or their new investment visa. So I don't know. I mean I think just walk the talk with this stuff and yeah I'm very careful about my opinion on this because it's actually extraordinarily frustrating. I think it was Rachel Boyack who also spoke about vulnerable migrants—yes that's a very important issue—and specific visas for that. Typically what happens is the community law centre will assist—that's all across the country—and lawyers are expected to do pro bono work and that's often where they work as well. So there are systems in place people in place and organisations in place to assist with this stuff. Moving on from immigration for a bit it talks about tax returns. Look I'd say that the Inland Revenue despite my apprehension about them have made huge improvements for filing tax returns IR3s in particular and IR4s. They are much simpler than they used to be. So again it's the whole—you know what is this? It's a solution looking for a problem in so many ways.The use of te reo Māori in documents—yep sure. It's important that they said that they don't want to discourage that being used in documents and communications and that this Act will not cover that or it won't actually stop them from using te reo Māori. So yep that's fine. I mean in practice it means you can just change as much as you like and make a document completely incomprehensible to the majority of the population and it's still considered plain language. So yeah anyway!The Official Information Act stuff was actually quite a quite a funny note and I thought it actually would have been quite funny if they included that because I'm kind of surprised the Government didn't because not only would it mean they could release documents completely redacted; they could also rewrite them in the process—Hon Michael Woodhouse: And then redact them.Dr JAMES McDOWALL: And then redact them again. So I'm kind of surprised they didn't push on with that one. But look I think as I said the straw man arguments around this—frankly completely fake support of migrants. For a Government that has spent three years just in terms of Government policy absolutely coming down on migrants punishing them and splitting families up to sit there speaker after speaker in the Labour Party and say "Oh this is why we're doing this to support them." is just absolutely absurd. It's fake and we're opposing this stupid bill. Thank you Madam Speaker."