Stanford EricaERICA STANFORD (National—East Coast Bays): Thank you Madam Speaker. I would like to start by acknowledging the people in the gallery who came here today. Can I acknowledge the speaker who just sat down—the chair of the committee that the Labour MPs sat on that rejected your calls for an inquiry into split migrant families and into effects on migrants of the border closures.ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jenny Salesa): I remind the member not to bring me into her speech.ERICA STANFORD: You would—sorry. Those members in the gallery wouldn't need to be here today if we had that inquiry. They would have been able to come to the select committee and tell us about their struggles. That was the vehicle. They didn't need to be here today but here we are back again having to go through the same steps day after day. Iresha Wijetunga went on the news last night crying over the children she hasn't seen in a year because she's a construction worker—watching 300 more construction workers come in with their families over the next six months. It's the migrant nurse anomaly all over again. The member who just took her seat talks about the achievements of this Government in reuniting split migrant families. Well that announcement a month ago as I expected it would be was a very small proportion of the total of those migrant families. They lauded it as some wonderful policy—that they'd done their job. But in fact most of those migrant families are still sitting waiting for a road map for reunification for their families. They continue to wait. We have been calling on this Government for months and months for a road map for reunification for every single split migrant family so that they have some light at the end of the tunnel. As my other colleagues on this side of the House have said no one has said that they want to see their family tomorrow. They all understand that there will be delays. They just want to know that it will happen. There are 1800 rooms right now in managed isolation and quarantine—and have been for the last few weeks—empty. We could have reunited 1700 split migrant families in the last two weeks and we did nothing. That is atrocious. Why are we here? We are here because there were so many petitions that were lodged about this broken immigration system that we had to have our very first special debate triggered by this new Petitions Committee on immigration. We have it because we've got a Minister who spent the good part of a year failing to act to reunite split migrant families; Labour MPs shutting down a select committee inquiry; and a Government who through their own policy settings have caused the longest residency queue in our nation's history. That started well before COVID ever hit. We have highly skilled migrants who are sitting in a queue that at best will take two years for them and at worst is going absolutely nowhere and is completely frozen. If their children turn 18 they can't work they can't study—they can't even go out and volunteer at their local hospital otherwise they won't be dependent and they won't get residency with their family's application. We have been calling on the Government to at least let those children study. Some of them are going back and doing year 13 again. Can anyone in this House imagine how bad that is for the mental health of a young person? There is no fair-minded Kiwi in this nation that thinks it's OK to leave an 18-year-old to rot for two three four years wasting their potential because of the residency queues caused by poor Government policy.These skilled migrants are highly stressed highly anxious. They're living in limbo with no certainty no surety that the country they moved to and made their home the country that they work hard for will still be their home at the end of what is a traumatic immigration experience. While it's terrible for those migrants who are sitting up there in the gallery it's terrible for us because we need them here. They are our teachers. They are our nurses. They are our doctors our IT workers. We need them here.I just want to finish by saying that on the weekend was Mother's Day and I didn't post about Mother's Day because I couldn't. The day before Mother's Day on Saturday I went to Christchurch. I did a public meeting and I spoke to women afterwards who stood there crying with me—at me—because they hadn't seen their children in a year. How could I in good conscience post about Mother's Day and how wonderful it is to be with my children when these women haven't seen their children in a year because of this Government's utter incompetence? It is not good enough and they have to do something about it.