Lees-Galloway Iain: Immigration Amendment Bill — Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeLees-Galloway Iain: Immigration Amendment Bill — Third Reading[Sitting date: 13 June 2013. Volume:691;Page:11163. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]IAIN LEES-GALLOWAY (Labour—Palmerston North):At 5 minutes in length Mr Auchinvole’s speech was quite a lengthy one for the kinds of contributions he normally makes to the House. I wonder whether he is preparing himself for life in Opposition in the near future.I have struggled to find much that is positive about this legislation the Immigration Amendment Bill but in the last 20 minutes or so I have discovered something that is positive about it and that is that it is not ruthless enough to meet New Zealand First’s particular prescription for immigration and asylum seeker policy. So there you go. There is one redeeming feature about this legislation: it is not tough enough for Winston.I actually think that this legislation represents two of the most odious characteristics of politics anywhere in the world really. There are things that politicians like to dabble in that are utterly disgraceful. The first is fearmongering and the second is targeting vulnerable populations. This piece of legislation does both of those things. It really is nothing more than a distraction from the series of scandals that the Government has faced. There is no better way to distract the public than to raise the fear that there are going to be boatloads of people appearing on our shores and causing havoc in our nation that we will not be able to deal with them that we will not know what to do with them and I do not know that they will take our jobs and our houses and everything else. So there is this raising of the fear level but also really creating quite a draconian situation for these incredibly vulnerable people who if they did actually manage to find their way all the way to New Zealand do not need to be locked up in a detention centre. They will be in need of pretty high-level and acute medical attention I should think and a serious amount of care. That is the principle that we should be adopting if considering any legislation to deal with asylum seekers.It has been said a number of times that it is incredibly unlikely that people will arrive en masse by sea in particular but that in and of itself is not necessarily a reason to oppose this legislation. It is a reason to point out that it is nothing more than a distraction that it is probably unnecessary and that it should not be one of the Government’s priorities. There are a whole lot of other things that the Government could have been doing rather than wasting its time on this legislation but it is not really the reason to oppose it.The reason to oppose it is that it simply will not work. The experience from overseas particularly our closest neighbours Australia is that draconian legislation the threat of being locked away in detention centres the threat of having your human rights eroded and the threat of a long and arduous process once you actually land in the country that you are wishing to seek asylum in actually does absolutely nothing to stop either the asylum seekers or the loathsome people-smugglers whom I have heard members opposite speak at length about because they do not care about the legislative framework in the country that they are seeking asylum in. The people-smugglers certainly do not. All they care about is extracting money from the people who wish to make that journey. It really does not matter what we put in place at this end; it will not stop those people. The fact is that the situations that true asylum seekers are trying to escape are far more terrible than anything that this legislation could put in front of them. They will still try to get away from those situations and seek asylum in other countries.Really this does nothing other than put up costs for the New Zealand taxpayer because it is estimated that in Australia the cost of detention is $137317 per person. That is more than it costs us to keep people in prisons each year. If we really are anticipating huge numbers of people coming to New Zealand and washing up on our shores who will then be processed and sent to Waiōuru to be kept in a detention centre built by Serco then it is going to cost the New Zealand taxpayer in the order of $140000 a year to do so.What has been proven in Australia and in other countries is that processing people in a community-based arrangement is 90 percent cheaper and frankly it is just a better way of doing things. It is the New Zealand way of doing things not the Australian way the American way the British way or any other way or anybody else’s way whom the Prime Minister is trying to impress with this legislation. We should be doing things the New Zealand way. The New Zealand way is to be a good neighbour to the other nations in our region and around the world. We have an excellent international reputation for being peacekeepers a peace-loving nation and a friendly safe and secure nation. This approach of putting up metaphorical barbed wire fences around our country and tryingto act like the big bullies that do exist around the world is going to do us no favours on the international stage and does our reputation no favours whatsoever. And it will not work. It will not actually achieve the outcomes that the proponents of this bill say it will.We have tried to work with the Government. Darien Fenton tried to sit down and actually reach a cross-party consensus around how we would deal with asylum seekers. Darien Fenton and other members of the Opposition—Jan Logie—have put up amendments that would soften some of the harder edges of this legislation and actually make it a little bit more sensible such as making it a requirement that the Māngere Refugee Resettlement Centre be the place in which in the first instance asylum seekers would be kept because their needs are quite different from other people whom we detain. They are quite different from people who end up in police cells or people who end up in prisons. There are always enormous mental health issues that need to be dealt with. We know before people arrive from the situations that they have escaped from and the harrowing journeys that they have embarked upon that psychological illness trauma depression and anxiety are all acutely manifest in those groups. And of course detention serves only to exacerbate all of those problems. They are also likely to have other physical emotional and psychological problems and the Māngere Refugee Resettlement Centre is actually the one place that is ideally set up to deal with all of those issues.The Minister of Immigration himself actually said that he thought that that was what was likely to happen but he was not prepared to codify that in law. In other words the Government wants the ability to be able to ship people off to a place like Waiōuru put them up in a military detention centre and hide them away from the general public as though sending them to Waiōuru means the problem is no longer there. So if that was not the Minister’s intention he would have supported Darien Fenton’s amendment and we would have been able to improve the bill in that way.Darien Fenton’s other amendment would have required individual assessment to meet our obligations to use detention only where necessary. So we could have had some asylum seekers who might have been determined to be of higher risk put in detention whereas most others could have been put into a community-based approach to processing. All of these things—plus Jan Logie’s amendments—would have improved this bill. But improving this bill getting good legislation and getting a good framework around how we process asylum seekers and how we deal with the question of who is a genuine asylum seeker was not the aim of this bill. The aim of this bill was to pick on some of the most vulnerable people in the world—let alone in our community and in our country—and to provide a distraction from the failings of this Government and all the scandals and problems that have confronted this Government over the last 12 to 18 months. So Mr Deputy Speaker it should come as no surprise to you or anybody else out there listening that Labour is fundamentally opposed to this legislation.