Roche Denise: Annual Review Debate — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeRoche Denise: Annual Review Debate — In Committee[Sitting date: 13 April 2016. Volume:713;Page:10500. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]DENISE ROCHE (Green): I rise to take a call on the Economic Development and Infrastructure Sector in the annual review debate. I am going to restrict my comments to the whole area around the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment.It is a rather interesting process that we go through to scrutinise the performance of what is essentially the Public Service as part of our democratic process. I applaud the work done by the Public Service and I also think that we need to recognise the pressure that our public servants are under with this National Government coping with the expectations of having to do more with less which is a consequence of National’s persistent underfunding of public services in order to give more and more to those who have too much already. Unfortunately it is not only the public servants who bear the brunt but also the most vulnerable people in New Zealand—people like our exploited workers and new migrants who deal with the reality of having a Public Service that has to do too much with too little and cannot service them properly.I would like to talk about two areas specifically and they are immigration and employment where because of the lack of resources our public services are falling short of delivering the core services that they are supposed to. Nearly one in five investigations into suspected breaches of minimum employment standards has not been completed within 6 months of the initial notification by the labour inspectorate and that is the natural consequence of having a stretched labour inspectorate. Australia has one labour inspector for 19000 Australians. Here in New Zealand we have one labour inspector for 58658 New Zealand workers.With limited compliance checks bad employers like Nelson’s Taste of Egypt restaurant or Masala are able to exploit their workers paying them less than the minimum wage. In Taste of Egypt’s case it was paying them for 30 hours a week when they were actually working 70 and the employer continued to intimidate and exploit these workers even after a labour inspector had visited them.Having an underfunded labour inspectorate and an imbalanced industrial relations climate allows these gross breaches to happen. Essentially it favours employers and National’s donor class over ordinary working New Zealanders. If the labour inspectorate cannot adequately fulfil the target set out for it which is a 90 percent completion rate of investigations of suspected breaches within 6 months then clearly we need more labour inspectors.Immigration New Zealand is also feeling the consequence of underfunding with nearly one in five audited visa decisions being rated as not accurate. As with the labour inspectorate we cannot keep expecting the Public Service to do more with less. Overworked public servants are under pressure to meet high targets for processing applications but they are only human and are liable to make mistakes. The persistent underfunding of this crucial public service has led to an explosion in the growth of an immigration advisory industry and some of them are dodgy. Looking at the data nearly 40 percent of cases of complaints about immigration advisers had still not been resolved more than 5 months after the first complaint was made and it is clear that the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment is having issues in regulating this industry.It makes it more perplexing when you consider that the immigration levy has been underspent. In the year 2014-15 the migrant levy collected amounted to $9979000. This is money that is supposed to be allocated to support new migrants to settle here but only $9190000 of that was allocated last year leaving more than half a million dollars unallocated. When so many of the wonderful migrant centres and multicultural associations around New Zealand are struggling for funding and are providing useful support why is the Government continuing to penny-pinch the money that migrants actually pay to this country to provide the services for them? It is clear from the annual review process that our public services are struggling from the strain of having to do more for less.