Parliamentary debates: Friday, 21 November 2025

Good morning, members. Members, the House is in committee on the Immigration (Fiscal Sustainability and System Integrity) Amendment Bill. We first come to Part 1. This is the debate on clauses 4 to 54, “Amendments relating to system integrity”. The question is that Part 1 stand part.

Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you for inviting me to open the discussions about the bill. I’m happy to have the opportunity to talk with the Chamber today about the proposed changes and how they fit with the Government’s objectives and how they fit into our objectives around ensuring regulatory systems work well in committing to action against migrant exploitation.

We have introduced this amendment bill. It represents a significant step forward in ensuring our immigration system is fit for purpose. The reforms have been shaped by extensive consultation with legal professionals, employers, and immigration experts. More importantly, this bill responds to a couple of very important reviews, the Casey KC review and Michael Herron KC review that were commissioned under the previous Government.

In fact, there are a number of things in this bill that were started under the previous Government. Work was done; it was good, sensible work that we’ve carried on with and has resulted in this bill, which is why I think there is broad support across the Chamber for many of the parts. I look forward to debating the number of points that were raised in second reading speeches yesterday.

Thank you, Madam Chair, and great to see colleagues here all so bright eyed and bushy tailed, at 9 o’clock on Friday morning. We look forward to a very productive committee stage.

As I said last night in the second reading, Labour is supporting this bill for two main reasons. We think it does two important things which are significant at this time. That is, it makes an effort in a number of areas to sort of strengthen and put in place some useful reforms in the immigration system that we think will make the immigration system more effective in dealing with the various challenges that it has. But also, it’s important at this point in time, I think, in maintaining public confidence in the system, giving New Zealanders the assurance that through the democratic process they control our borders, and that the system is fair and reasonable and in tune with public expectations. Secondly, it strengthens, in a number of key areas, our adherence to human rights standards through introducing judicial oversight, and particularly in relation to the detention of asylum seekers and in the introduction of electronic monitoring, which, in the immigration space, is a new thing.

There are nine discrete initiatives in this bill and it’s our intention to address all of them. We want to have a good exchange on all nine of those. They are all discrete policy initiatives, and they all demand proper scrutiny through this committee stage process. It’s our intention to work through sequentially each of those nine initiatives and have a good debate and a good exchange on all of them.

I wanted to start with the question about the definition of “mass arrivals” in clause 5. Clause 5, section 9A amended, new subsection(1A): “A group of people arriving on board a group of aircraft are a mass arrival group under subsection (1)(c) if the aircraft arrive within the same 24-hour time period.” This is one of the key elements of this bill: expanding this initiative. The Minister of Immigration, and officials, told the committee that it was in response to some changing international occurrences where there have been cases of people smugglers, effectively, purchasing seats on commercial aircraft. I don’t think we need to kind of rehash the whole mass arrivals legislation that we have now, but it’s designed to expand that definition which hitherto has basically been based on the idea that people would come on a ship or a boat.

We had quite a bit of discussion about that at the Education and Workforce Committee, and the committee recommended to clarify that people arriving by air on separate services would need to arrive within a period of 24 hours in order to be captured by the definition. That was really to avoid a wide grouping of different, disparate aircraft arriving and somehow that being interpreted to mean a mass arrival.

It is worth, I think, digging in a little bit on this question around the definition of a group of aircraft, and I’d be interested to hear from the Minister about how she interprets that and perhaps the officials’ view. Does that mean a group of aircraft have come from the same point of embarkation, same country? Does it mean a group of aircraft where the same people smuggler has booked seats on different aircraft? What precisely does it mean to say a group of aircraft, or is it a group of aircraft that happen to have come just by definition within this 24-hour time period? I think that’s worth exploring and I’d invite the Minister to respond on that.

Thank you, Madam Chair. We too want to spend a little time on the committee of the whole House stage for this bill because this is quite a technical bill and there are a lot of different parts to it. I want to start with clause 4. I want to first start with the definition of “first available craft”. Now, it is good to see that the Education and Workforce Committee has included a consideration in there for those who have applied for either judicial review or a tribunal determination. I think submitters are right to point out that the previous version, of the person having no further rights—which is paragraph (b)—is problematic, particularly if someone does have those live applications going through, which will be inconsistent with section 27(2) of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act.

What I’m interested to know from the Minister of Immigration is that, in this part, the person has “applied for leave to bring judicial review proceedings within 28 days after being notified”, but, if you look at the website, particularly the Ministry of Justice website, it allows for not only the person being notified but also a representative of the person being notified—because, for example, when you apply for judicial review, particularly in these cases, often it won’t be just simply the person; they could be a representative of the person, a lawyer, an immigration adviser, etc., etc. I’m curious to know why, despite what is on the Ministry of Justice website, the bill itself doesn’t allow for a representative being notified. I do want to ask the Minister to consider my amendment, which also includes that a representative of the person also be allowed to be notified, unless the Minister is able to confirm that in clause 4(1), under (aa)(i), the phrase “after being notified” also implies a representative of the person—in which case, everything is covered, and that’s fine.

I want to now speak to my second amendment—and second point—which is still under the definition of “first available craft”. Now, we’re looking at under paragraph (d), which is “the deportation or turnaround of the person from New Zealand will not contravene section 164” of the principal Act. Section 164, essentially, talks about limitations on deportation. I want to check with the Minister: if section 164 is mentioned, why is section 166 not mentioned, which also has limitations on deportation? In this case, section 166 is a limitation on deportation for diplomats. Does that mean that section 166, for example, will never be, in any instance, captured by this bill or by this definition? Again, if the Minister could clarify, that will help, but I do have an amendment on that, if the Minister wouldn’t mind considering it.

Finally, I now want to discuss the definition of “irregular entry into New Zealand”, and I have another tabled amendment on this. This is paragraph (f), which is “the person has been assisted to enter by smugglers”. Now, I’m hoping that the term “assisted” implies that the person would have been, I guess, smuggled voluntarily, as in they agreed or have agreed to be assisted by the smuggler. That wording is vague and, potentially, could be arguable; so it’s just a very simple amendment, which is that “the person has been assisted to enter by smugglers willingly”, as in it is not involuntary smuggling or human trafficking. Again, I ask if the Minister is able to clarify that. There is an amendment, but if the Minister is able to clarify that it is satisfactory, we can leave that amendment. Those are my three questions to start with.

Thank you, Madam Chair. In the House last night, we had quite a good debate and I think it’s very clear that all sides of the House want to uphold the human rights and liberties of the people who, unfortunately, find themselves as asylum seekers. There was a bit of a divide. Interestingly, National and Labour agreed that this legislation is useful to uphold that, and I think the Greens thought it was a bit of a response to a moral panic situation. But what is very clear is we all want to uphold these human rights. As the previous speaker, Dr Lawrence Xu-Nan, has said, much of the devil will be in how this is interpreted in the courts, because this is, essentially, a system that is put in place to enable, hopefully, quite a streamlined judicial process so that there is fairness and certainty for the people involved. That is why it’s really, really important that we get the wording right and we don’t have unintended consequences.

I think this debate may be longer than the Government might anticipate, not because we don’t agree, but also because there is a 44-page amendment on the Table regarding electronic monitoring. Now, that is a good thing and I’m really pleased to see that the Minister of Immigration has responded to the Education and Workforce Committee, but that will take some analysis because when we’re talking about electronic monitoring or any other form of warrant or detention or judicial review, we’ve got to get the wording right.

I, too, will now turn to Part 1 and raise some other issues that have not been raised. One of them is in terms of section 4(aa)(i), inserted by clause 4(1), where it talks about judicial review. The reading of subparagraphs (i), (ii), and (iii) don’t quite make sense when read altogether. I have not got an amendment on the Table, but I’m wondering whether the Minister would be minded to simply strike out of the subsection, to leave out “(ii) applied for leave to bring judicial review proceedings after the prescribed time;”. It does not seem to add anything and it actually adds confusion to that paragraph.

In terms of the evidence for leave to bring judicial review proceedings, it would be good to know what level of proof is required for that. In section 4(aa)(i) when it says, “or within any further time allowed by the High Court”, that looks like a drafting constraint on the ability to take a judicial review, and I find that concerning. I wonder if the Minister could comment on that. Does she see that as a restriction of the rights available to those who would be affected by this clause? Would she be minded to take that out if it meant there was more certainty for that?

When we look to the next part, section 4(a), the question I have is around the words, “the identity of the person is unknown”. There are questions about whether that is a judiciable and objective test. The reason is it’s not very clear. We don’t know if that’s somebody who’s unable to get documents. What is the threshold of the identity of the person being unknown? Is it an absence of documents? Is it an inconsistency of documents? Is it a failure to be able to get the documents verified by a recognised New Zealand institution such as a District Court judge? How do the words interact with the refugee convention, especially Article 31?

My suggestion—I haven’t had time to do amendments, but I wonder if we could extrapolate that out to something like instead of saying the identity is unknown, just to suggest that there are three elements to that: there are no documents, and/or inconsistent documents, and/or those documents are unable to be verified. It is important because I have had constituents that I’ve dealt with who have been seeking asylum in New Zealand, coming from places like Syria, where there is a real question mark over the veracity of documents. We know that they are authentically seeking asylum, but the documents take a while to catch up. Some clarity around that would be really important.

I’d like to ask the Minister about the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act (BORA) and how any work that she has done—I assume a BORA report was done, but what are her views around how this all interacts with section 27 of the BORA regarding their rights to natural justice? Also, the processes for enabling access to courts and legal counsel, because if there isn’t access to justice then potentially, even though on the face of it this bill might look like it is upholding the BORA rights, it would be restrictive in terms of liberty rights under section 22 of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act and limiting rights on arrest or detention for those seeking asylum under section 23.

I’ll go to questions now, but there are supplementary questions to ones that are raised by the Hon Phil Twyford and that is the meaning of “mass arrival”. It’s a good intention and it is tricky. One of the questions is a legal question about whether individuals can have their right to be treated individually under the rule of law observed if they are deemed to be in a mass arrival. That raises issues of legal, procedural fairness, such as whether they can get individual legal advice, independent advice, and interpreter services when necessary. What are the safeguards around that?

I do wonder if an easy and elegant way out of that—again, I don’t have an amendment; I’d be prepared to write one—is to simply add a bit of a mens rea element into section 9A(1A), inserted by clause 5, so that there is a common purpose. If a common purpose is attributed into that clause, I think, then, we don’t have to get into the granular kind of input evaluation of which flights they were on and when they caught them and so on. The very fact that there is a common purpose would capture the mens rea and would enable our officials to be able to do their job for the intended purposes of this bill.

When we’re looking at a group arriving on an aircraft, it would avoid making assumptions about things like mixed airlines, mixed routes, connecting flights, whether it’s from the time they boarded the aircraft, whether it’s the time that the aircraft took off, what happens if there are delays—all of those are really prescriptive and tricky. It would just be much better to have a deemed mens rea element in there. There could be a reasonable element or whatever; I’m sure the drafters would know the best way to do that.

The other thing I question is just the fairness about whether planes or boats are going to be treated differently, and, if so, how does that then interact with the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act in section 19, the non-discrimination of asylum seekers? We are now making a discriminatory reference of those who arrive by air versus those who arrive by boat. Has there been some analysis done to make sure that is in accordance with the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act?

There are some operational things, I think, too—I’m nearly done, Madam Chair—which are just around families being separated. We’ve got this magic number of 31, and I wonder what unintended consequences there might be if families are trying to separate themselves across different means of transport in order to circumvent the law, if that would be something that we would want to disincentivise because they’re already in a traumatic situation. The idea of children and parents coming in separately worries me. I also worry whether it will discourage people from seeking asylum.

Finally, just questions about the operational capacity at our airports. Has any work been done? It’s all very well having the legislation here—and I do think it’s a good piece of legislation. Do we have confidence that our airports and our staff at airports and our systems at airports will be able to deal with a large number of people coming in? We haven’t had to do that before in the circumstances, as far as I’m aware. We had the Tongan case, but I think that those people had already been processed and then were not able to leave, so that’s quite different. What impact would there be on airports? Those are my questions just for those first clauses, clauses 4 and 5.

I’m just going to take a couple of those. Some of the amendments have only just been handed to me and have only just been printed, so I’ll deal with those later. But in relation to the definition of a group of flights—and it’s pretty clear in the bill that it’s just flights arriving within a 24-hour period—there’s really no other definition that you need. “Have they arrived in the last 24 hours?” is the definition in the bill—it doesn’t matter where they came from—and “Are there 31 people?”

In relation to Ingrid Leary’s questions, some of them are a little bit out of scope. The definition of a “mass arrival” is not part of this bill—the overall definition. But the only change is “arriving on a flight”, and the question about the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act and whether it is discriminatory with them coming on a flight rather than on a vessel or a boat, is an odd question. It doesn’t matter how they arrive. I don’t think it’s got anything to do with the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act, which way they arrive.

Just in relation to the identity threshold: essentially, if we don’t know who they are, then we don’t know who they are, and it doesn’t matter if it is because the documents are fake or because they don’t have documents, or for any other reason. Once you start prescribing those things in the legislation, the unintended consequences are that it is too descriptive and we get ourselves all caught up. If we don’t know who they are, that is the definition of it that we’re using, and I don’t think it’s a good idea to start defining in law the types of conditions around whether or not we believe their documents or that they don’t have documents, or anything else. There’ll be unintended consequences around that.

Acknowledging that this is my first call and, as the immigration spokesperson for the Green Party, I just wanted to first note that one of the things that this bill does is that it does broaden who is liable for deportation, right? That’s also really important to make—even so, there are some components that we can, critically, get behind. It’s important to note that this bill isn’t about manaaki-ing people who are fleeing horrible conditions, but it also contains some contested components.

I wanted to focus on clause 4, on the definition of “first available craft”, which has a new point that hasn’t been addressed yet. Now, if I look at the principal Act, we do have a definition for “craft”, and that is “any form of aircraft, ship, or other vehicle or vessel capable of being or intended to be used to transport any person to or from New Zealand from or to any country outside New Zealand”. Now, the reason why this definition is important, in the context of clause 4, is because, effectively, it creates a set of conditions for when the person is liable for deportation, that they are able to be put on that first available craft.

Now, because “craft” captures such a broad range of vehicles, I did want to ask the Minister of Immigration as to why she didn’t choose to use the language “aircraft”; and that is because we’ve heard a lot of the terms of preparation under this bill. Is the Minister preparing to use other types of vehicles? Currently, for all the constituents that I have dealt with, aircrafts are the primary vehicle in which people end up being deported by; but the language that is used here—“first available craft”—captures boats, for example. Is the Minister intending to prepare to utilise other forms of vehicles to, effectively, deport people; if so, what work is she doing to prepare for that? Or does the system already have capacity to deport people in other forms of crafts other than aircrafts?

I recognise that, when it comes to the definition of “mass arrivals” in clause 5, like, we have captured aircrafts as a form of arrival. I know that in the other debates we have had in relationship to the Immigration (Mass Arrivals) Amendment Act, basically, we did mostly assume that people will be arriving by boat. But we haven’t really interrogated whether the Government has any resources to deport people in any form of craft that is not an aircraft, or whether that is even the intention of the Minister, because we have used a lot of language in relationship to preparation.

I do have some questions more broadly on clause 8, and then one of my colleagues will want to unpack some stuff in clause 5 as well, and potentially clause 6. But in the interest of being able to scrutinise the bill adequately on clause 8—this is the amendments to section 52, and I look at new subsection (4A): “The Minister may, by special direction in relation to a class or classes of persons holding temporary entry class visas,—(a) impose further conditions on the visas,”. Now, I know that there’s a set of requirements that the Minister may need to consider when making those decisions around imposing further conditions. Would the Minister be able to elucidate for the House as to in what incidents would she see the need to impose additional conditions—potentially restrictions—on a group of people? We have been told this is about preparation, but I don’t think we’ve received clarity as to the scenarios in which you would need to impose additional conditions on a group of people.

I think that would be particularly important for the Minister to clarify, because I know that, for other components of the bill, which will be scrutinised later, the Minister and other members of Parliament have referenced the horrific attack that happened in New Lynn as a justification for some provisions in other parts of the bill. But I don’t think a specific example has been used to justify the potential need to impose further conditions on visas for a group of people, and so I am interested to hear the Minister’s justification for that specific clause—that’s clause 8, specifically new subsection(4A).

I’m not so much seeking debate on the set of criteria the Minister needs to consider, but more about the potential scenarios in which that specific clause would be utilised, and whether there’s precedent in which the Minister would have liked to have a provision that allowed her to impose further conditions on visas and a group of people that created the need to build in this specific clause. To recap, I’m interested to know about whether the Minister has other types of vehicles and—

We don’t need the recap. The Hon Phil Twyford—oh, sorry, we’ll come back to you.

I just want to get these out of the way, if I can—one by one, if I’m able to. In terms of the previous speaker’s questions around “craft”, there’s a long-held definition in the Immigration Act, and—

Minister, could you speak up a bit?

Sorry. There’s a long-held definition in the Immigration Act of “craft”. Of course, we usually put people on the most direct, humane, fastest, and first available craft, which is usually an aircraft. But you could imagine that if somebody lived on a Pacific Island who needed an airline and then a boat, we would want to do that, and so it allows those options. It’s relatively well-used terminology that allows us to do the thing that we need to do to get the person home.

In terms of his second question, there are a couple of things that the member was mixing up, I believe, but, essentially, the ability for the Minister to be able to grant either visas or conditions on visas is around special circumstances. I’ll note that when the powers were available under COVID, it was used about 50 times, and since then, we’ve had situations arise like when Vanuatu airlines got into trouble. We had recognised seasonal employer workers who were stranded here, and we had to individually go and either grant or change conditions on people’s visas. Look, if something similar like that happened in the future and we wanted to be able to allow people to stay here, we might have to change the conditions of their visa to allow them to work or to study.

It has to be for their benefit, which is the main part of this bill, which is very important. It limits the powers of the Minister. It has to be in the favour, or not to the detriment of the group of people, but allowing conditions to be altered means that we are able to allow people to do things like go and work if something overseas has happened and they can’t get home.

The other issue I think he might have been potentially mixing up was the actual person like Samsudeen. What this bill is talking about is that there is a condition where, with those people, we can cancel their residence class visa when they are a threat to national security. So those two things are separate. I’m not sure if that’s something the member was getting confused about or not, but the important part of this section around the protections and the limited power of the Minister is always to make sure that whatever are the changes made, conditions imposed, or visas granted, they are in the favour of the people who are being affected.

Madam Chair, thank you. I do want to ask some questions about Subpart 2, but before I do, I just wanted to go back to clause 5, amended section 9A on the definition of mass arrivals. I want to just be absolutely clear or try to get absolutely clear that a group of aircraft—group, in this context, if I heard the Minister of Immigration right—means only that this is more than one aircraft to arrive within the 24-hour period.

Yes.

So they don’t need to have any other connection in terms of the people-smugglers that might have booked the tickets or the place where they came from? It simply means aircraft that arrived within the 24-hour period.

Yes.

The Minister’s nodding that’s the case. OK. As a lay person, I would say that is pretty confusing drafting to refer to them as a group of aircraft. They are simply aircraft that arrived within the time period. But, anyway, we’ll leave that to the courts once this becomes law.

I wanted to just really comment and ask some questions around these new flexible powers that arose out of the COVID experience. Labour supports these provisions and it’s clear that a lot of thought’s been put into putting some protections and some guardrails around the use of them: the reporting back to Parliament transparency provisions, the requirement that they must only benefit and not disadvantage the people they apply to, and so on. I’m interested in, though—this is a significant power to be conferred on the Minister and the Government. One of the most important guardrails is the definition of the circumstances in which these powers might be used. The use of the word “unusual” in clause 7, amended section 50(4B)(a).

Now, it’s kind of a paradox, because if you make it really broad, then you’ve got maximum flexibility. The more you define what “unusual” might mean, the more you limit the potential application of these and therefore defeat the intent. But I would say that in clause 7, amended section 50(4D)(a)(iii), this becomes almost comical, where one of the circumstances where these special directions could apply is “any circumstance that is outside the Department’s control:”. Now, the department is very powerful and controls many things, but to say “any circumstance that is outside the Department’s control:” pretty much means any circumstance that the universe might offer up. The effect of that is that there is no limit on the circumstances under which these powers could be used.

I would invite the Minister to share with the committee the kinds of—we know some of the historical examples where these powers were used, but what future kinds of situations does the Minister anticipate these powers would be used under and how does she interpret the words “any unusual circumstance” in clause 7, amended section 50(4B)(a) and (4D)(a)?

Thank you, Madam Chair. I really appreciate the call, and I wanted to follow on from the Hon Phil Twyford in terms of Subpart 2 and the amendments. The reason why I ask the questions of the Minister of Immigration is to really understand the whole component around human rights, and also the applications that I have seen come through not just in my office but in the Auckland region, where there are many Pacific communities.

Minister, following on from the Hon Phil Twyford, I really wanted to understand, firstly, the advice that you have received from officials with regards to your flexible powers. One of the reasons I ask, Minister, is because, in my office in Māngere, which has a high population of Pacific, we have a range of families and communities who come and talk about their immigration circumstances. What I wanted to understand, Minister, was around the word “exceptions”; the test that will be used or the advice that you have received particularly around safeguards. Sometimes there have been scenarios where there have been specific events beyond New Zealand’s control, we have had individuals, like with the volcanic eruption in Tonga, but also some of the Recognised Seasonal Employer scheme workers. Then we have had a scenario where Pacific families have been through the immigration system and they have been successful getting visas but the temporary visa time has run out, and, in some scenarios, there is no person back in that Pacific country. They’ve gone to Immigration New Zealand to get the tests and what is required to satisfy and justify the request.

I am asking in terms of the advice that the department has given you, because sometimes when my office or I have sought advice from immigration officials or the department—it’s not that it’s conflicting, but it’s different and varying. For people who may not have a background in tertiary study, for the terms that are used by immigration officials, sometimes there’s different understandings. It would be really helpful, Minister, if you could explain that. Thank you.

Right, those questions are all very similar around the types of situations that we expect to happen. Let me run through some examples that were given to me in the advice that I was given: situations where New Zealanders overseas wish to repatriate their families quickly in response to a conflict, like in Ukraine; the collapse of Air Vanuatu, which we’ve already talked about, which stranded Recognised Seasonal Employer scheme workers here; education institutes folding; a large labour-hire firm going into receivership with serious implications for migrant workers; and, of course, the volcanic eruption in Tonga.

I think the member made a great point in her previous question around the fact that it is very difficult when we have to individually deal with people who then have to go and get information and put visa applications together, especially if they’re running out quite quickly. We don’t want people to be here not on a valid visa. The ability for us—like the previous Government did under COVID—to be able to quickly and swiftly deal with those situations to make sure that those people have valid visas, whether or not we have to extend conditions, change conditions, or grant new visas is what this bill is asking this House to approve.

Now, there are a number of safeguards, and that was the other question asked by both members. As I’ve already said, it has to be to the benefit of the people who we are dealing with, but the use of powers would be subject to many safeguards including the overarching safeguard that they can only be used to their benefit, or at least not to their disadvantage.

With regard to the class of special directions, the Minister would be required to certify that they consider that it’s reasonably necessary to exercise the relevant power or powers, and that they have consulted appropriately. The class of special directions are time limited, they must be published, they can be challenged by the Regulations Review Committee, and their use must be reported to Parliament each year in the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment annual report.

There will be a report back to Cabinet no more than three years after the powers come into effect, to identify whether or not there have been any unintended consequences, and, if so, what further legislative adjustments should be made. There are a number of safeguards in this to limit the power of the Minister, but, as you can see, there are a number of—as the member rightly pointed out—situations where we need to act swiftly to the benefit of those people, to make sure that they are here on valid visas or conditions that are suitable for them.

Thank you so much, Madam Chair. I just wanted to follow up on an answer that the Minister of Immigration gave me, and I appreciate the engagement on that specific question in relation to “craft”. She used a very specific example of using a plane and then a boat, but then the boat wouldn’t be the first craft; it would be the second craft.

I genuinely ask this because the first available craft would be so broad that I generally just want to ask: have there been cases in which the first available craft has been anything else other than an aircraft—as in, the first vehicle that people are being put in?

My colleague and I worked on an amendment that we’ve just tabled, too, and this is why I wanted to just go back to it, because we just wanted to put an amendment to make sure that the first available craft—so if people need to be put in a boat or a vehicle afterwards, kei te pai—isn’t anything other than an aircraft. I think, to me, that is really important to clarify in legislation so that if the Minister genuinely intends to say the most humane craft available, that it is an aircraft and not, say, a boat that may not adequately protect the wellbeing of people or may not contain humane conditions.

Now, going back to—

Could I just ask the member to clarify the reason for that question, because—

Because we just tabled an amendment to strengthen that.

—there could be a wide range of circumstances. Could you just flesh that out a little bit as to why?

Why aircraft? Because as far as I’m aware—and this is why I’m seeking the Minister’s elucidation—that is currently the only form of vehicle that is currently being used. If the Minister is able to provide examples in which the first point of leaving is being made by anything other than an aircraft, that would be useful. We’re happy to rescind our amendment if the Minister can explain why the first point of exit could be made or has been made in the recent past by anything else other than an aircraft.

Anyway, going back to clause 8, amended section 52(4D)(b)(ii). This is in relationship to the one that says “(b) the Minister considers that the exercise of the power to make the special direction in the particular situation will (ii) not disadvantage the class or classes of persons to whom it applies;”. Now, I know that the Minister said that the intent isn’t to disadvantage groups of peoples when these now new powers are being made. I know that the Minister used the example of the Recognised Seasonal Scheme workers during COVID-19, but can I just confirm with the Minister, in relationship to how this is drafted, the language so far says “considers”, but you could, in theory, just consider it and then, none the less, move ahead with it.

What safeguards are put in place so that it’s not just a matter of thinking about it, considering it, as opposed to requiring, but it does not disadvantage the class or classes of persons to whom it applies? I could see that perhaps not this current Minister but a future Minister could use the language as written to say, “Well, I have considered it. I have taken that into consideration and, none the less, I’m varying the conditions of a group of people or visas to potentially limit, for example, who they can work for, where they can live, how many times they can come back and forth into the country.” I wanted to ask about the specificity of the language of “consider” versus, for example, that those powers must not be used to disadvantage someone. That’s quite a different line of consideration that the Minister would then have to make.

Why did the Minister go ahead with “consider”, as opposed to “these powers must not disadvantage the class or classes of persons to whom it applies”? Again, as much as I want to believe in good faith that the intent isn’t to, can the Minister just clarify how will a future Minister who would seek to restrict or disadvantage groups of migrants can’t simply just consider it and then go ahead with it and use those powers anyway, since this doesn’t necessarily bind the Minister to not disadvantage a group of migrants?

Look, in relation to that last part, the member is really grasping at straws. It’s very clear it has to be to the benefit of the group of migrants. I’ve been very clear that there are a number of checks and balances. There is a disallowable instrument. In fact, it has to go through the Regulations Review Committee and can be struck out if there’s anything that is not according to the regulations. I don’t think there’s anything more to say on that.

Going back to the issue of a craft—again, very minor point. We’ve not been able to think of any time—that’s not to say there isn’t, but my officials can’t ever remember a time—that the first available craft was not a plane. Especially out of New Zealand, because we can’t put people on a train out of New Zealand or anything. But we don’t want to limit ourselves in the case of something that we can’t think of right now, but there’s some kind of emergency where we need to use a helicopter, for example. We don’t want to limit ourselves. But as far as we can see, the first available craft has always been an aircraft. But it would be very limiting if we were to use just the aircraft, and then if some other situation came up and we needed to humanely get someone on a craft and that craft was not an aircraft, then that would be very limiting.

Thank you, Madam Chair. I just want to check—unless I haven’t heard it—the Minister of Immigration hasn’t responded to my earlier questions regarding my amendments, particularly for the definition of “first available craft”. But I’m going to move on and just—

The number of the amendment?

Oh, sorry the definition is the part which says “apply—

No, the number on your amendment.

Oh, the number of my amendment?

Yes.

OK. It is—let me just check—the amendment that was tabled at 8.40.03.

Thank you.

Yeah. Thank you. Apologies, Madam Chair. I just want to clarify with you clause 7, 8, 9, and 10 pertains to four different types of visa circumstances, but the drafting itself is largely comparable, so I will be drawing from different clauses from each one because I have an amendment for each of those clauses. So, for example, to start with, I want to talk to my amendment which is around clause 7, amended section 50(4E); clause 8, amended section 52(4E); clause 9, amended section 43(4E); and clause 10, amended section 57(6), because for all of those four clauses, the drafting is identical, so my amendment is the same but they are four different visa classes, if that makes sense. So bear with me. For all four, it talks about the type of special direction.

Now, I want to just check with the Minister because I do think that the issue my colleague Ricardo Menéndez March raised is a good one, because, for example, in new subsection(4D) in any of those clauses 7, 8, and 9, you would see that the Minister “must” certify, not that the Minister certifies. Therefore, if you look at new subsection (4D)(b) that my colleague mentioned where the Minister “considers”, it doesn’t have the requirement of “must”, so it doesn’t have that totality.

Moving on to my amendment, one of the issues that was brought up is with clause 7, amended section 50(4E); clause 8, amended section 52(4E); clause 9, amended section 43(4E); and clause 10, amended section 57(6)—

Which amendment number, sorry?

Oh, OK. Let me—oh, sorry, this is going to take a little while. It’s the amendments tabled at 8.40.09; 8.40.15; 8.40.21; and 8.40.26.

In here, the recommendation is—because any decision to issue a special direction under the proposed amendment would be at the absolute discretion of the Minister and would lack the degree of transparency that’s normally expected of legislation that will affect a large number of individuals, but also the proposed power, effectively, to allow the Minister to vary otherwise applicable provisions of the Immigration Act itself. My amendments for these four sections, essentially, have a commencement date of no less than 28 days after the direction is made. Now, rather than saying that commence in accordance with section 378(3), which is, in fact, immediately, if it’s not published, I think a default 28-day intro period would ensure there’s adequate notice of any special direction given. I do agree with the Minister that there’s a lot of really good safeguards in here, but I just wanted to add a little bit more because of the fact that the regulatory-making power the Minister has under this bill for these two separate visa classes can be quite substantial and affects a substantial number of people.

Now, the second thing I want to mention is my tabled amendments tabled at 8.40.10; 8.40.16; 8.40.22; and 8.40.27. These are also for clause 7, amended section 50(4E)(c); clause 8, amended section 52(4E)(c); clause 9, amended section 53(4E)(c); and clause 10, amended section 57(6)(c). The reason I put in this amendment is that I understand when, with (b), you can commence—I will finish this call; sorry, Madam Chair—even if it’s not yet published; however, (c) says it must be published together with an explanation of the effect of this special direction. But what isn’t there is when that needs to be published. So, for example, in any of these, like clause 7, inserting new section 50(4E)(d), it says “must specify—(i) its duration, which can be no longer than 6 months”. I did like the fact that there is a sunset clause; I think that’s a really good safeguard. But, for example, does that mean without a specific timing for publication, that the Minister could, in fact, publish after the duration or after the special direction is no longer in effect?

My amendments for these four clauses are just to ensure that while the Minister may consider commencing immediately and delay the publication, the publication should still take place within 14 days. Those two are my two groups of amendments—so I have eight in total.

Right—I’ll speak to two of Lawrence’s amendments just to say we won’t be supporting them. The amendment at 8.40.03 a.m. we will not be supporting because it’s inherent that “the person” includes their agent or their representative, and that is clear in the legislation. In terms of the amendment at 8.40.05 a.m., you talked about the difference between the diplomatic pathway and not. You can imagine that taking steps to deport diplomats is a very complicated process with lots of concerns, so we have to deal with those separately, and we won’t be supporting that one either.

Going back to Ingrid Leary’s comments from earlier about whether airports would have the capacity to manage a mass arrival: mass arrival group provisions are explicitly to enable people to have access to interpreters and lawyers, and the framework is to ensure the system can manage—that’s the whole point of the mass arrivals legislation. If we didn’t have that, then we wouldn’t be able to cope, and officials have operational planning in place to respond to a mass arrival by air or by sea.

Ingrid Leary asked, “What is irregular entry?” This language is used in the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) guidelines on detention of asylum seekers and is really clear—

Point of order, Madam Chair. I’m really appreciating that the Minister is answering the questions, but it’s really difficult because of the speed and quietness. For a back and forth, I want to be able to digest what she’s saying, but it’s so fast and so quiet. Could we just have it a little bit slower, please? It may bring more into the debate—I’m not sure—but this is an appreciation that she is answering the questions, and we need to be able to hear the answers.

OK, so “irregular entry” is language used in the UNHCR guidelines on the detention of asylum seekers, so it’s very clear. She asked: is the bill consistent with the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act? Yes, the Ministry of Justice gave a clean vet to the bill, and, as I’ve already said, it’s not a prohibited form of discrimination to distinguish between modes of transport. I already made that clear, but officials have confirmed that as well.

Thanks, Madam Chair. Now, I do just want to jump forward a little bit in the bill. Just recognising that there are probably clauses that I’ll be skipping past that other colleagues are going to want to interrogate, but this is a particular piece I’m quite interested in asking the Minister of Immigration about. So that’s clause 13, which inserts new section 75A, which is the cancellation of a residence class visa of a person threatening security. So what I note is that this bill does create a power for the Minister to cancel the residence class visas of individuals who pose a threat or risk to security but who cannot currently be deported. So, for example, there could be substantial grounds for believing that that person would be at risk of persecution, and it then requires the Minister to grant them a temporary visa. This provision arose out of work that was done by the Labour Government after the terror attack in a West Auckland supermarket, which happened in September 2021. That was Ahamed Samsudeen. He had refugee status and residence, but he had been identified as an extremist and a risk and he couldn’t be deported because of his protected refugee status. What it did is it exposed the lack of tools that a Government has in dealing with somebody who is a risk but also can’t be deported because of their protected status under international law.

I have some questions for the Minister on the basis of this, because it does call into question a few, I think, technical challenges, and challenges around how this operates in practice. The first is that it is a significant new power being given to the Minister; my question is why are there not some more accountabilities around it, for example, an appeal right for that person? The affected individual also has no meaningful opportunity to test this information or to appeal against that decision on the basis of the facts or on humanitarian grounds. There’s also a question around, given the seriousness of this, whether it might be wiser to have a judicial warrant, as opposed to a decision by the Minister.

There’s also the situations where someone may be deemed a risk to national security but also has children. They have their residence visa cancelled, but they have children. This presents challenges when Government really should also be considering what is in the best rights of the children and other family members. Has the Minister considered the best interests of the child in terms of this particular decision?

One of the questions I’ve got, though, which I think is a really interesting one for the Minister, is that the time frame on this—could a person, essentially, end up in a state where they were having a continued rollover of a temporary visa and what rights does that grant them? Then what does the Government actually do about the security risk component? So you could envisage a scenario where somebody has their residence class visa cancelled, they continue for the remainder of their life to have a risk of persecution which means they’re not able to be returned to their original country. That could be 20, 30, 40, 50 years of a person having a continued rollover of a temporary visa, but then there’s also the challenges to New Zealand’s security, which are genuine, because we now have somebody on a temporary visa who doesn’t have the rights of a resident to potentially access things like healthcare support that might actually be the type of intervention that’s needed to support this person to no longer be a security risk.

I can absolutely appreciate, and we can appreciate as the Labour Party, when somebody—and this particular scenario was an example where real harm was caused and further harm could have been caused. We’re not denying that there is a risk posed by this person that they’ve been deemed to be a security risk, but likewise there’s a genuine situation for that person’s ability to not be persecuted and potentially killed on return to their home country. It puts a real conundrum around the situation. Those are my questions for the Minister.

Just recapping them: why is there no appeal right? Why not consider a judicial warrant, given the significant legal things to consider? What is the scenario when someone has children? What is the scenario when someone has a temporary visa continually rolled over? Then, what does that mean for both monitoring that person, and provision of support so that they can actually have some potential behavioural change? Thank you.

Look, in relation to those questions, there is the ability of the person to have a judicial review and that is the process. In terms of where I will get a judicial warrant to do this, that is not the case with Immigration New Zealand at all. It always is the executive power of the Minister in all of these cases. This is not an unusual situation to have people rolling over on visas. The Hon Phil Twyford will remember, probably, as his time as the Minister, signing off many rolling visas of people that are protected, people that we can’t return that we will not give residence to. It’s sort of a parallel example, but we do that relatively regularly with people that we don’t want to give residence to but we can’t return home because they’re protected people.

This is slightly different in that we are revoking their residence and putting them on rolling visas, but the point is that unless the situation changes in their home country, they will be here with their children and with their family on rolling visas. It is not an unusual situation for us to be doing this. Immigration Ministers have been doing it for a long time in that very unenviable situation where we have somebody that has either committed a crime in New Zealand that we do not want to give residence to but we can’t return home, or in this new instance where we are revoking someone’s residence because they are a threat to security but keeping them rolling over on visas. That has always been the power of the executive and the Minister and it’s not been considered to be required to get a judicial warrant. That would be outside of anything that we’ve ever done in any similar situations and we won’t be doing that.

Just going back to Lawrence’s questions around the Minister’s powers to grant visas or to change conditions of visas. As secondary legislation, there’s already publication requirements in the Legislation (Publication) Regulations. That already exists. Also, section 378 of the Immigration Act enables the Minister to revoke any special direction if it’s no longer needed. Given this is to the benefit of the people who are affected, it will be known to them and we will be publishing it. We have to; it’s a statutory requirement.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Further to the Minister of Immigration’s responses to the questions from my colleague Rachel Boyack, there are three points I wanted to touch on further with this.

Under the provisions of this bill, having revoked the resident visa of someone who is deemed to be a threat to national security, the Minister is required then to issue a temporary visa. Now, if the Minister was, in that circumstance, to issue a visitor visa, the person in question would not have access to paid employment or the kind of income support that they otherwise would be able to get from the State if they were on a work visa—or at least not to the same level. The reason I raise this is that I think that if the Minister were to do that—to deny the person the potential to have a livelihood and to feed themselves and their family—we would be in serious breach of our international human rights obligations, and yet that scenario, I believe, is open to the Minister under these provisions. I would ask the Minister to comment on that. What sort of guard rails are there if the Minister does issue a temporary visa, and what obligation is there on the Minister to ensure that the person in question can sustain a livelihood while they’re in New Zealand?

Secondly, I wanted to say something about the point that Rachel Boyack raised about how this is a sweeping executive power. Giving the Minister the right—I think it’s under section 163 of the Immigration Act—to certify that someone is a threat to national security: if you go and look at section 163, you’ll see it is a very broad provision. I’m not questioning that it’s inappropriate, because I think New Zealanders would expect a Minister, in this case, and the Government of the day to be vigilant in protecting the national security of New Zealanders. From my perspective, that’s accepted—that’s a given—but it is important that in exercising this sweeping power, there are some safeguards and controls.

I wanted to ask the Minister whether she got advice and whether she considered—well, I know she told Rachel Boyack that she didn’t accept or consider the need for a judicial process. The reason that I think that is worth considering—and my intention is to table an amendment on that in the course of this debate; requiring a judicial process—is because I asked the House to cast its minds back to the Ahmed Zaoui case. Ahmed Zaoui had his immigration status revoked; he ended up languishing in a New Zealand prison for a considerable length of time on the basis of advice from our police and security agencies that was, for a long time, not tested in court. He was not given the opportunity to address and respond to the evidence that was used as the basis of the Government’s intervention—

Which is now widely discredited.

That evidence was subsequently discredited. I think that the Ahmed Zaoui case is a pretty powerful story of why we should think very carefully about enshrining this sweeping power for the Minister of the day to simply certify—through secondary legislation—that a person is deemed to be a risk to our national security.

I have a third point that I wanted to make that may take a little bit of time, Madam Chair. This goes to the heart of what this provision is trying to achieve. Everyone, I think, can see that when someone is assessed as a threat to national security, they’re a protected person under international law, so they cannot be deported. If they weren’t protected, and they were a threat to national security or they had committed a crime, they would be deported. In this case, it puts the Government of the day in a very difficult situation, as the Samsudeen—[End of five-minute call]

Madam Chair?

Madam Chair? I haven’t finished, Madam Chair; I’m in the middle of my point.

Madam Chair?

Calm down—calm down! The Hon Phil Twyford, you did give me notice that you were going to run out of time, so I was prepared to roll this over.

Thank you. The effect of this bill is that it gives the Minister the opportunity to strip someone of their resident status. The question is: is that intended to be punitive and some kind of deterrent so that it will deter the person in question from staying in New Zealand, for example, because it’s harder for them to live because they don’t have access to social services and so on? If they then face the possibility that if conditions in their country improve—say, like Syria has, for example—does it mean that they could face being returned to their country of origin, and that acts as a deterrent? Does the Minister see this as, essentially, punitive, and has the Minister considered whether or not this is a way of the Government of the day having some leverage to sit down with the person in question and work out some sort of deal?

The reason I raise this—and I wanted to share an experience that I had as the Associate Minister of Immigration when immigration officials came to me one day and said, “There’s a person here who is about to be released from prison. They have protected person status, they cannot be deported, they have mental health and addiction issues, they have been in prison for several years, and they were in prison because they committed some pretty serious violent offences against their family members.” This was a really difficult conundrum. This person is about to be released into the community—there was no way to keep them incarcerated—and so we had to consider what to do.

After some head-scratching and working together, we were able to put together, effectively, a deal where this person got a temporary visa that enabled them to access income support and social support in return for residential reporting requirements. They had to check in with their local police station regularly; they had to enrol for rehabilitation services and English language training and deal with their mental health issues. It was a pretty concerted effort to try to get this person to rehabilitate themselves.

Now, that was a very unusual sort of situation, and I’m glad to report that a year later, that person turned up at my electorate office to tell me that they had rehabilitated and reconciled with their family members. I know from subsequent contact that person has done remarkably well and is living happily in the community with their family and is in paid employment and is now speaking English quite well. The reason I raise that is that I’m interested to know whether or not the Minister and her officials see that sort of facilitated community engagement strategy as a possibility, or do they simply see this provision as being punitive and designed to deter someone who’s seen as a threat to national security and encourage them to leave the country as soon as possible.

I think it’s just worth remembering the types of people that we’re talking about. The case that kicked off, under the previous Government, the work they did was the Samsudeen, where there was a threat to national security; the person was under 24/7 surveillance because of the serious threats of harm to New Zealanders. It places us in a very difficult position when people are protected and we can’t return them home. But what we can do, and I think what the Opposition agrees with, is that we can revoke their residency status. The point of that is so that if things change and their situation changes in their home country and at some point they can be returned, we can then deport them. We would obviously have to go through a system where we would need to remove their protected person status, but remember these people are a threat to national security. Let’s remember what happened in the Samsudeen case. There is always the option for a judicial review, but this is a practical and pragmatic thing that we can do so if things change; we are able to remove people from this country.

Now, the previous Minister also talked about the Ahmed Zaoui case. I just want to make very clear, that was very, very separate. It was dealt with at the time. There was a raft of changes that were made to the Immigration Act at the time around that case, to put guard rails in place; special provisions around the use of classified information. That is out of the scope of this bill, but that was dealt with then, so those things are not relevant to this case. This is simply about making sure that someone who is a risk to national security—someone like Samsudeen—if the situation in their home country is to change, then we have the ability to remove them from New Zealand.

I move, That debate on this question now close.

Not quite there yet.

Thank you, Madam Chair. I want to be very specific in my contribution. I want to speak to, I think, 11 of my amendments. I want to start by first going to the amendment that is tabled—let me just find it again—8.40.13 and 8.40.19. Now, the reason I raise these two—and this is clause 8, amended section 52(4A)(a), and clause 9, amended section 53(4A)(a)—is that these impose further conditions. I’m recommending that if the Minister of Immigration wouldn’t mind considering from “impose further conditions” to “vary conditions”. The reason I say that is the Minister has rightly before said that a Minister will consider the exercise of power that benefits a class and not disadvantage. But I can’t think of an instance where imposing further conditions will actually benefit.

I can give you one.

Oh. In that case, I will stop there and the Minister may be able to respond to that.

My next group of amendments is amendment tabled 8.40.12; 8.40.13; 8.40.17; 8.40.18; 8.40.23; 8.40.24; 8.40.28; and 8.40.29. Now, these are groups. Again, the Minister would, no doubt, be aware that I have a special interest when it comes to regulatory-making powers and potentially some of the checks and balances that are involved when it comes to regulatory-making powers. For both of these two clusters there are, essentially, two main recommendations I want the Minister to consider. I want to thank the Minister as well for clarifying in terms of the publication requirements; that’s very helpful.

What my proposal is—the first one is around that section 378 of the Immigration Act is not applicable to the special direction under various subsections (4)(a) and also (3) of section 57, amended by clause 10. Now, the reason for that is because the absolute discretion that is granted in section 378(8) of the principal Act should not be applied to these special directions. This will actually help the transparency and accountability of the decisions made using these new powers and enable those decisions to be more easily reviewed.

The second one is to put in a review clause with any regulatory-making power. Again, I understand there’s a sunset clause, which is fantastic, but I’m seeking the Minister’s support on new subsections for each of these: a new subsection (4)(f) and subsection (7) of section 57, amended by clause 10. This, basically, is just making sure the Minister may review the effectiveness of the special directions under clause 10, amended section 57(4)(a), at any time and must review it no later than three years after commencement date.

Now, the reason for that is any decisions to issue special direction under the proposed amendment would be at the absolute discretion—and, also, like the transparency, the proposed power also allows the Minister to vary otherwise applicable provisions. But having this provision in place would just mean that we’re able to have some review on that. I’m noting—I note this is a different section—that later on we do see in the new section 399AC, inserted by clause 56, that there is a review clause on secondary legislation under regulatory-making power. Even within this one amendment bill, we have seen my amendment being adopted.

I want to move on now to clause 18—

Which we haven’t touched on.

—which we haven’t touched on. This is a really significant section, because clause 18, amended section 161(1AA)(1), is something that many submitters, including legal experts, have raised to be a serious concern. This is where we’re now changing the wording from “convicted” to “are convicted or found guilty of, or plead guilty to”. Now, this broadens the scope of this particular bill, especially for those who have pleaded guilty but not been convicted—i.e., those who have pleaded guilty or even been found guilty but are acquitted by a judge are now going to be considered under this clause, which is really, really broad. I just seek a tiny bit more time from you, Madam Chair, just for me to finish this one.

We don’t really agree that maintaining the status quo undermines the integrity of the immigration system. The court already has the ability to consider—Madam Chair, I’ll just finish this amendment—whether deportation liability should be an appropriate consequence of the offending. The current framework has, to date, struck an appropriate balance between the interests of the affected person, the public interest, and the integrity of the immigration system by enabling the court to address low-level criminal offending, where appropriate under a well-established sentencing structure. But also noting that if a person is acquitted under this, they’re still considered found guilty, which means they’re captured under this new clause. The safeguard is provided under the section 206 test of the Immigration Act. A person who is in that situation would be unlikely to meet the section 206 test of the Immigration Act.

My proposal and my amendment here—that is amendment tabled 8.40.30—is making a recommendation that we keep the status quo of keeping it to “convicted”, and delete the mentioning of “found guilty or plead guilty”, just so we don’t get ourselves into a situation where there is a gap between section 206 of the Immigration Act and what we already allow people, by their right, under the Sentencing Act of acquittal.

OK. There’s a few things there. Firstly, imposing conditions—you asked for an example. If you had a group of people here who are here on visitor visas, and their flight or their airline collapsed or something happened in their home country like a volcanic eruption, we would impose a condition that they would be able to work. We’ve been over this a number of times now and I’ve already made that clear, but one more time I’ll make it clear.

There is already a review period, as I’ve already mentioned, built into this. There will be a report back to Cabinet no more than three years after the powers come into effect, to identify whether there have been any unintended consequences, and, if so, whether we need to make further legislative adjustments. Something is already built in to make sure that we are—again, I’ve mentioned that already.

I want to talk, though, about this next part of the bill that the member raised, around ensuring that the decisions around deportation stay with Immigration. We have a process in Immigration whereby if you do something that makes you liable for deportation, there is a process that you go through. It goes to a delegated decision-maker, it may end up with the Immigration and Protection Tribunal, but there is a process. Circumnavigating that process is what’s happening at the moment, where judges will discharge without conviction to avoid people having to potentially be deported—not actually deported. Just because someone is liable for deportation doesn’t necessarily mean they are deported, and, in many cases—

But that’s the discretion of the judiciary.

—just have a listen—they are not deported, because of the process. Many times, if it is a first offence and it is minor and they are liable for deportation, it will go to a delegated decision-maker at Immigration New Zealand and they make the decision, on many occasions, not to deport. But if they do make the decision to allow deportation to happen, then there are still other avenues for those people to go down, including the Immigration and Protection Tribunal and, of course, the Minister. There is an established system that already exists.

But what we are finding that is happening in the courts is that—and there’s an argument being made that “Oh, well, look, this poor person may be deported, not actually will be, but might be.”, and now that process is being circumnavigated. Now, the first thing is that is not something that is open to a Kiwi. If a Kiwi was to go before the courts, they don’t have the same ability to say “I need a discharge without conviction because I might be deported.”—so not available to a New Zealander.

Secondly, I just want to give the member—and I mentioned this in the Education and Workforce Committee: the types of cases that we are seeing are things like, and I’ll give you an example of one, the person had two counts of assault on a person in a family relationship; he punched his pregnant wife in the stomach, the outcome was that the convictions and the sentence of 220 hours community service was set aside, discharged without conviction. Now, there is already an established process to work out whether or not someone should be liable for deportation. It sits under the Immigration Act, it always has, it’s being circumnavigated, it should sit there. We are being very clear in this instance that if you are guilty or found guilty or you plead guilty, then the deportation liability still exists. What it does is put that process back where it belongs, which is in the established process in Immigration, through a delegated decision-maker, through the Immigration and Protection Tribunal, or through the Minister.

But it’s in our view—in the Government’s view, which is why we brought this amendment—that it should run through that process and it should not be circumnavigated by a judge who is discharging without conviction in these cases, to avoid the process; not necessarily. Let’s be really clear about that: deportation may not happen, and the judges are circumnavigating that, effectively, and we want to make sure that it runs through the same process; the fair and established process that already exists.

Before I take the next call, I’d just like to note, members, please: the scenarios are consuming a huge amount of time. The committee of the whole House is to see and have issues and questions addressed relating to the bill. Can we just bring it back a little bit tighter to relative questions on the parts in the bill.

Thank you so much, Madam Chair. I just wanted to clarify to the Chair, one of the reasons—in particular, for clause 13—why some case studies have been brought forward is that, for example, in clause 13 we have seen one case study being used—

You are doing it already, Mr Ricardo.

No, just noting. What I’m seeking clarification from the Minister of Immigration is: how many people have been deemed to be a threat to security that the Minister would have not been able to strip away residency from that now she will be able to strip residency from as a result of clause 13? I’m seeking, actually, clarification on how many people would this clause actually seek to capture.

The other question I have was that I would like to seek clarification in the language, because people asking questions and giving answers use the term “national security”. Now, in this clause and in the principal Act, the language of “national security” is not used; it’s just “security”. It’s “threat to security”, not “threat to national security”. Those are actually quite different things. Can the Minister explain what she would mean by “threat to security”? I do think it’s dangerous to use the term “national security” when that is a term that’s used for quite serious things, as opposed to “threat to security”.

Now, my other question in relationship to clause 13 that has not been canvased is why did the Minister not choose to include a requirement for her to consider whether the person had received, for example, adequate support? For example, mental health support, access to counselling, etc. At the end of the day, we know, from the examples that the Minister herself has referenced, that, in those cases, there was a lack of access to mental health services. I’m interested to know why that wasn’t built into clause 13.

Now, on clause 18, I have also a question in relationship to how many people the Minister currently would be deeming to capture. I’m sure and I hope that she received advice around, for example, how many people on temporary visas would have been found to be guilty or pleaded but not convicted over, say, the past 10 years. I think, to me, this is important for the Minister to clarify to the public what group or population we are talking about.

I hate it when the Minister or anyone uses the term “those people”. Who do we mean by “those people”? I hear from the Chair that she doesn’t want us to bring examples, but the Minister did just that when, in her contributions, she used one quite extreme example of somebody punching a pregnant person as a justification for this bill. That is why I’m asking on clause 18: how many people in the past, for example, 10 years, five years—even in the past year—have been found to have been guilty or pleaded guilty but not convicted, and therefore not liable for deportation that she now would like to seek to capture?

What nationalities are more likely, if we take a sample over the past decade, to be captured as a result of clause 18? Again, it’s simply not good enough for the Minister to use terms like “those people” without telling us exactly the range and the scope of people that would be captured. Surely, when designing clause 18, she would have said, “This is a systemic issue.”; not an issue of one specific example that would have not been dealt with.

The second question on clause 18 that I have—because the New Zealand Law Society rightly pointed out that the Immigration and Protection Tribunal (IPT) process can often be insurmountable for people. Can the Minister give us assurances that she may be exploring additional resourcing to, for example, entities or advocating for resourcing for entities like Community Law to make sure that the potential increase in IPTs being lodged as a result of clause 18 will be able to be dealt with in a way that doesn’t just become this supposed process that people can follow but, actually, in practice, is completely insurmountable for people to lodge an IPT to be able to challenge the liability of deportation.

I just really want to encourage the Minister to stop using the term “those people” and give us the numbers of how many people she wishes to capture in clauses 13 and 18 specifically, so that we’re not just actually further marginalising communities. Ibrahim Omer, a former Labour MP, rightly pointed out, when the attacks in New Lynn happened, that he did not want to see asylum seekers and/or other groups prejudiced by what happened there. Yet we are seeing exactly the same thing under this piece of legislation.

Just in the spirit of speaking more slowly—which I am trying to do—if that member could also just slow it down a bit. Take further calls. It’s just really hard to keep up, especially when you are merging and mixing two different issues; it is hard. I’m just asking for you to slow down a wee bit and be really clear about the different things you’re speaking about, because there are two different things that were merged in here.

The first thing was around the case where we have a protected person that we would like to strip of residency because they are a national threat. You asked about the numbers. Now, at this point in time, I’m advised that there isn’t anyone that we would have on our books. However, this is future focused. The Samsudeen case was huge, it was distressing, and it was difficult for people in New Zealand to fathom that there was, at the point in time, nothing that we could do.

Now, the previous Government, to their credit, worked on this. It was very difficult and very tough in the case of a protected person. This is something that we can do and I think we both agree that we should do, but it is future focused. We don’t want this sort of case to happen again, where we sit there and go, “Oh, well, there’s nothing we can do.” There has to be something. This is something that we can do. But I can confirm with the member at this point we’re not aware of anybody.

In terms of—and this is the second that was mixed in slightly, and this is around the numbers of the people who are being discharged without conviction on the grounds that they may be deported. Look, we don’t have exact numbers, but what is being reported to us, especially down south and in Queenstown and in the southern area of New Zealand, is that it is happening more and more. The case numbers are huge and so this is why it is something that’s been brought forward because it is being circumnavigated.

I just want to draw the member’s attention to the definition of a security threat. It’s defined in section 4 of the Act: terrorism, espionage, foreign interference. It’s very clearly defined in the Act.

Madam Chair, thank you. I do note that colleagues on the Government benches are getting a bit antsy and taking closure motions. I just wanted to say that there are nine discreet and substantive parts to this bill. So far, we’ve covered off the cancellation of residence class visas, we’ve covered off the new flexible powers of the Minister to benefit classes of persons, and we’ve dealt with the definition of mass arrivals. But can I just draw the Chair’s attention to the other substantive parts that we haven’t got to yet. We’re currently talking about deportation and criminal offending—Subpart 5. We haven’t yet got to Subpart 7, on out-of-hours warrants. We haven’t yet dealt with charging of premiums—clause 47. We haven’t yet dealt with the very important Subpart 8 on the warrants of commitment for asylum seekers, nor clause 41 on electronic monitoring.

This is your chance.

Yeah. And I’m just wanting to say to the Chair, who’s only recently joined the session, these are very—

Have been watching since 9 a.m.

OK. These are very substantive parts. If I may say, there’s been very little repetition, and we’re having, I think, some pretty good dialogue. I just wanted to say that.

In relation to Subpart 5 on amendments relating to deportation, I do think this is an important issue. I wanted to ask the Minister—really in response to concerns that were raised by a number of submitters at select committee, including the Law Society of New Zealand; concerns that the change undermines legal certainty and fairness, and it erodes judicial oversight and due process protections. I wanted to ask the Minister whether she’d considered whether this change would undermine the current potential advantage from an early guilty plea that it risks incentivising more defended trials, with flow-on effects on the justice system?

The regulatory impact statement (RIS) notes that there is no data to support this change. I wonder whether or not the Minister can, subsequent to the RIS, offer us any data that supports this change. The RIS also frames the amendment as enhancing public confidence in the immigration system. I wondered whether or not, again, there’s any evidence to support that suggestion. The amendment would, effectively, nullify the deliberately conferred discretion vested in sentencing judges under sections 106 and 107 of the Sentencing Act, which allows judges to consider the broader context, mitigating factors, and the personal consequences of a conviction. In light of all that, did the Minister seek advice from the Ministry of Justice on this matter?

There is still the discretion of the judge to discharge without conviction if he so wishes. But, essentially, the process that is being eroded is the process that already exists under Immigration New Zealand; the established process where delegated decision makers and the Immigration and Protection Tribunal have absolute full information about a case of a person who is liable for deportation. That is not the same when you have that situation with a judge and it is circumnavigating another process at Immigration New Zealand where all of the relevant information around someone’s deportation liability is considered. It’s a long-held established process that sits under the delegation of the immigration process. It is being circumnavigated in far greater numbers than it ever has been without that full information. The amendments that have been put forward on this will not be accepted.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you, Minister, for your response previously. I want to move on to a new clause. I’m looking at clause 32, new section 317AA. I’m specifically looking at new section 317AA(4), which is around threat or risk to public order. I want to refer the Minister of Immigration to my amendments at 8.40.31, which is to delete this section—for the definition of threat or risk to public order, delete “failing to comply with this Act.” Now, the reason I’m bringing this amendment to the Minister’s attention is that I think neither the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees guidelines on the applicable criteria and standards relating to the detention of asylum seekers and the alternatives to detention or Victoria Casey KC’s report on restriction of movement of asylum seekers identified failing to comply with the Act as a factor which justifies detention, because there’s a specific section on that. Both publications say that a short-term detention may be justified where there are threats to national security or security or public safety or there are genuine real risks of absconding. Absconding, I agree, is an important part, but failing to comply with the Act isn’t. That’s my amendment to the Minister if she would consider removing that particular part.

The next part I want to talk about is actually in her Amendment Paper—so Amendment Paper 445—which has just been tabled yesterday. Part of that is to introduce new clause 40A and new clause 40B. My tabled amendments to the Minister’s amendments are tabled at 8.40.32 and 8.40.34. Now, the reason I tabled these two is mainly just to note that there is, I guess, potentially a gap or oversight—unless the Minister is able to clarify—that when you are looking at new section 324B(3), which is where you’re making an application for release on condition, for both non-claimant and claimant, what’s missing there is consultation or input from the person through the application process. The application, according to new section 324B(2) and new section 324C(2) is an immigration officer may apply. So my two amendments, basically, are addressing the fact that there’s nothing that actually says the person themselves should be involved. My amendment is just to insert new subsections, which are (3)(bb) to the Minister’s clause 40A, amended section 324B(3)(ba) and clause 40B, amended section 324C(3)(ba), which must include input from the person during an application process, such as why they believe they should be released on condition or whether, for example, they believe certain conditions, such as electronic monitoring, which the previous speaker has spoken about, should not apply to their release. This is a suggestion by the Law Society as well, so it just ensures that natural justice principles are upheld.

I think that is my three amendments that I want to engage with the Minister on at this stage. Thank you.

Yeah, we’ve had two of those—I’m just waiting on the third one. But in terms of 8.40.34, the person will have legal representation so they’ll be able to present the views of the person to the judge. There’s no reason for that amendment.

You asked in your amendment, amendment 8.40.31, around why we need the part around—you want to remove the bit about failing to comply with the Act. For an example, failing to comply with the Act might be failing to comply with the terms of the RRRA—the residence and reporting requirements agreement. That is very important and that is one of the things that would be failing to comply with the Act, which is why we won’t be accepting that amendment either. I’m just waiting on 33.

Thank you, Madam Chair. I want to speak to Subpart 7, the provisions that require immigration officers to obtain a judicial warrant prior to conducting out-of-hours residential compliance visits, otherwise known as dawn raids.

The purpose of these provisions is to ensure that immigration compliance powers, when they’re exercised outside of normal hours, are reasonable, proportionate, and in the public interest. Labour strongly supports these changes. They arose out of the Heron review that our Government initiated in response to the revelation—around the same time as our Government made the Dawn Raids historic apology, in fact—that these visits were still going on. It signals, as I said earlier, a departure from more punitive models of immigration control and we appreciate that.

I wanted to ask some questions of the Minister of Immigration about whether or not specific provisions were considered to ensure that out-of-hours visits are a measure of last resort. The bill doesn’t do that, so I wonder what consideration has been given to ensuring that the way that these powers are implemented through procedures and policies and operations will ensure that is in fact the practice.

I also wanted to refer to some tabled amendments from Vanushi Walters, my colleague, who has moved the following proposed amendments in clause 43 to add the following words in new section 324J(3)(d), if given prior notice, unless there is a compelling reason not to do so.

Is there a number on the top of that?

It’s 10.46.00. That wording, I believe, would have the effect of ensuring the obligation is on putting it in primary legislation to put the obligation in a much clearer and starker way, that this is to be only carried out when all other avenues have been exhausted.

Also, Vanushi Walters’ tabled amendments 10.46.01, in clause 26, to include a new section that reads “include an assessment of whether the proposed entry and search is compliant with international and domestic standards”. Third, another amendment by Vanushi Walters, clause 26; the amendment is time stamped 10.46.02. This would insert a new clause that would add disabled persons and pregnant persons, new section 293B(3) and (4), inserted by clause 26—so consider the potential impact of the proposed entry and search on anyone else who may be present in the dwelling or marae, including children, elderly persons, disabled persons, pregnant persons.

This is really about ensuring that the way that these powers are exercised would be consistent with our human rights obligations, and I hope that everybody in this House is highly sensitive to the history of the Dawn Raids and the importance of these powers being exercised in a way that is sensitive to the legacy of trauma that was from the aftermath of the Dawn Raids. Yeah, I’ll leave that there. Looking forward to the Minister’s response.

OK, going through those one by one, the first thing the member was asking about was the process and the safeguards in doing an-out-of-hours compliance visit. As the member knows, in this bill the warrant has to be signed off by a judge. The judge needs to make sure that the actions are proportionate, that all other avenues or possibilities have been exhausted, and they do need to take into effect whether or not there are vulnerable people or children or situations in the household. There are plenty of protections in the issuing of that warrant.

Going through the amendments one by one: time stamped 10.46.00 from Vanushi Walters. The intent of this amendment has already been met through the Government’s Amendment Paper, requiring reasonable notice to be given in writing. The amendment at 10.46.01; the amendment’s not necessary as the domestic standards expressed in the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act reflect international standards. At 10.46.02, and this is around the disabled or vulnerable persons: these are included within the wording “other vulnerable persons” and do not need to be listed separately.

As long as we are moving along, I’ll call Ricardo Menéndez March.

Thank you, Madam Chair. I wanted to speak to my amendment 23.20.07. This is in relationship to clause 42, in relationship to release on conditions. I know we’ve started talking a little bit about the provisions on electronic monitoring. I wanted to seek clarification and then, potentially, support for my amendment. The way that I see the legislation being written in clause 42 in relationship to release on conditions and, basically, amended section 324F(1)(da) “a condition requiring the person to submit to electronic monitoring”, I wonder whether, for the avoidance of doubt, she would want to make sure that the language specifies that it is an adult? The intent of this is to not have children being subjected to electronic monitoring. I did want to just ask whether she thinks that the language in clause 42 was adequate to just capture it as “person”, or whether it is her intention to subject under-age people to electronic monitoring, per the provisions in that clause? Clarification around that would be particularly useful.

If she’s able to both clarify that she does not intend to subject children to electronic monitoring, and, if so, just for the avoidance of doubt, change the language to “the adult” as opposed to “the person” would be really, really useful. I think this is particularly important because we’ve seen that there are other provisions and other clauses that enable immigration officers, for example, to get equipment and therefore there will be those interactions between immigration officials and the people subjected to electronic monitoring. I cannot see a particular benefit of—well, it would be good to understand if the Minister thinks there is, if any, a benefit of having an under-age person being subjected to electronic monitoring, and, if so, what are those? Again, seeking support for my amendment 23.20.07 and clarification of under-age people subjected to electronic monitoring.

Thank you, Madam Chair. I wanted to speak to Subpart 8, which, to my mind, is one of the most important parts of the bill, because it implements the, I think, more or less sort of final stages of the implementation of Victoria Casey’s—Casey KC, as the Minister has been saying—long list of recommendations that she made. I have a particular identification and strong attachment to this work. I was the Associate Minister when the report was done by Amnesty International and the Asylum Support Seekers Trust. With the support of Kris Faafoi, the Minister at the time, we asked Immigration New Zealand to commission Victoria Casey. I will note, for the record, that in discussions with officials, Immigration New Zealand, stoutly defended their track record and said that there was nothing to see here and that Immigration New Zealand’s practice in this area was entirely consistent with New Zealand’s international obligations. Victoria Casey found the opposite to be true. That was an interesting moment.

And your question is?

Well, the question is, really, that Victoria Casey delivered a pretty solid reform agenda. I think there is good cross-party support for all of this implementation. But the Minister, with this bill, hasn’t implemented all of her recommendations. In relation to clause 27, irregular arrival is excluded as the sole basis of detention, but the bill doesn’t expressly rule out things like administrative convenience or immigration compliance objectives; why not?

Victoria Casey also recommended, in line with United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) guidelines, that detention be reviewed within 48 hours and that maximum time limits be established. The bill retains the four-day initial detention period before judicial oversight; why is that?

Third, why doesn’t the bill prohibit the detention of asylum seekers in corrections facilities? This was one of the strongest recommendations by Victora Casey. The Amnesty International investigation showed how traumatic and dangerous it was for asylum seekers to be locked up in the Mt Eden remand facility. There were many examples of trauma and violence and abuse that asylum seekers were subjected to. Given how the Government set up managed isolation and quarantine facilities during COVID, which could be guarded by security guards in a way that was secure, surely there is no need to retain, as this bill does, prisons as a detention facility of last resort for asylum seekers.

Further, UNHCR told the Education and Workforce Committee that child refugees should never be detained for immigration-related purposes and that families with children should never be separated from their families in detention. I’ll ask the Minister: why did she not support that advice?

In light of all that, I wanted to speak to my tabled amendment to clause 27, which makes a number of proposals. It proposes to insert in amended section 310(1) a new paragraph (f) “any use of the powers of arrest and detention may only be exercised as a last resort, acknowledging that liberty is the default position”.

What number? Sorry, Phil.

I’m sorry, I don’t have the timestamp on that particular one.

Next, a new paragraph (g): “the powers of arrest and detention may not be used for purposes not expressly permitted by the Act”. Further, new paragraph (h): “any use of the powers of arrest and detention must receive judicial review within 24 to 48 hours of the initial detention”. That would bring us in line, I believe, with UNHCR guidelines. New paragraph (i): “any continuous detention must be reviewed independently at intervals of no longer than seven days, with the burden of proof on the Crown to justify both initial and continued detention”. New paragraph (j): “no detention is permitted for longer than 28 days, during which time, detained refugees and asylum seekers must be guaranteed the right to information in a language they understand, prompt and confidential access to a lawyer, and to bring judicial proceedings challenging the lawfulness of their detention”. New paragraph (k): “no detention is permitted of a person or persons under the age of 18, nor of families with children, nor any detention that separates parents from children”. Finally, new paragraph (l): “prisons and correctional facilities may not be used for detention purposes”.

Now, I believe the effect of this amendment would be to ensure that this bill fully reflects the recommendations made by Victoria Casey KC. I urge the Minister to give it serious consideration.

Thank you, Madam Chair. I would also like to speak on a new part of the bill under Subpart 8 that we haven’t covered yet, as well as one of my amendments. That is clause 40 inserting new section 324F(3)(d)—this is on page 31, line 11 of the bill—where it says, “a condition that the released person take a specified action for the purpose of facilitating the person’s deportation or departure from New Zealand:”. The issue that has been raised in this specific clause is, while it is comparable or has parallels to the previous paragraph (c), the released person in this case—because it’s about facilitating the person’s deportation—needs to specify that that released person is a non-claimant.

The concern would be it would not be appropriate where a refugee claimant’s claim that has not been finally determined for someone who is, for example, going through—and the deportation departure risks breaching Aotearoa New Zealand’s non-refoulement obligations under the refugee convention. This particular amendment is just to ensure that we are not going to capture those instances where claimants are also going to be factored into this particular part. That’s a very small and discrete amendment—sorry, the amendment is 8.40.32.

Thanks, Madam Chair. I really appreciate the opportunity. I just want to seek clarification from the Minister of Immigration, who has already covered this, but in her reply, I would just like to revisit and just quickly go back to clause 25, which amends section 286 in the principal Act, “Powers of entry and search relating to deportation”. The Hon Phil Twyford asked some questions to do with the Dawn Raids, and what I want to get assurance on from the Minister—who replied to the Hon Phil Twyford’s question—is just around the out-of-hours warrant and new section 293B(2), that the application is made to the District Court judge and that it is to take into account, when the judge is doing the warrant and approving it, proportionate and vulnerable protections.

Minister, what I want to ask you is that (a) do you have officials—because I appreciate that it’s operational and that you would get reporting from time to time as would expect—who give the breakdown of those out-of-hours warrants? Also, is there any other information that’s provided to you with respect to the fear and the trauma that it leaves with, particularly, New Zealand citizen families? I don’t support that they’re harbouring sometimes, but they’re really complex situations. The reason why I ask for clarity around that, Minister, whether you get some of that other information, is because in electorate offices like mine, it is the family members who are legal citizens who come to the office seeking any other way to help their people, or family members, who have been arrested or removed in out of hours. From time to time, these family members are coming to MPs of different parties and expressing their strong views around that. I just wanted to request and ask: is any of that official information passed on to you, Minister? Thank you.

This is a section we’ve been over, but, to repeat myself: any out-of-hours activity needs to be signed off with a judicial warrant, and the judge will have to take into account many factors. Is it the last resort? Has everything else been discounted, are there vulnerable people in the house, are there any other things that would mean that this was not the appropriate action to take? Those safeguards are baked in.

I just want to go through some of Phil Twyford’s questions. The question was proposing to include provisions guaranteeing the right to information in a language they understand, and legal representation. This is already provided for in the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act. We have a question around a proposed amendment to ban the detention of children. It’s, again, very unlikely this would happen. A judge is unlikely to consider this as proportionate, reasonable, or the least restrictive measurement necessary. Those things are already built in.

More broadly, on amendment 6.20.01, these changes would make substantive changes to the detention regime and require significant reworking of Part 9 of the Act, and operational changes like purpose-built detention centres would need to be considered, given the member’s requirement that prisons and correctional facilities may not be used for detention purposes. This is not something that we will be considering.

Thank you, Madam Chair. I wanted to speak to my amendment 23.20.03 in relation to clause 26. Apologies, sorry, it’s 23.20.04—my bad, they were just next to each other. This is in relation, also, to clause 26. The question I had for the Minister of Immigration was: we’ve talked about the Heron KC report throughout the questions, and it’s been mentioned in the answers, but one of the recommendations there and one of the options that was given was to limit out-of-hours immigration rates to situations involving public safety or matters of national security.

Can I ask the Minister: why not just follow that recommendation, and rather than leaving it at the discretion of basically a judge, just make it extremely clear that we’re narrowing it down to two specific criteria to then prevent loading the judiciary with additional work to be able to determine as to when out-of-hours visits are appropriate or otherwise? And to just then create two very specific situations noted by the Heron KC report.

I also note this because what we’ve noted throughout the debate in terms of the role of the judiciary when it comes to decision making of the different provisions of the bill, is that there seems to be a bit of a contradiction—not contradiction, but I guess a different application of how the Minister chooses to trust the judgment of a judge—for example, when it comes to liability of deportations where that’s being passed on to Immigration New Zealand. But it seems like she is quite happy to then leave that to a judge when it comes to out-of-hours visits. I think in some ways by being able to restrict the two criteria to just public safety and matters of national security, I think we could just better strengthen the rights of people who could be subjected to out-of-hours visits and genuinely honour these recommendations and the apology that happened in relation to the Dawn Raids.

One of the other areas that I wanted to go back to is to—and in one of her contributions I did appreciate her engagement around the definition of “security”. During the debate, I went back to the principal Act and noted that the way that security is defined is not just to provisions of terrorism that she noted; it also includes provisions around affecting our reputation, for example, which is actually quite broad. I think it’s a little red herring, maybe, or just a very extreme example to just point out the terrorism components of the definition of “security” but not recognise that, actually, we have quite a broad definition when it comes to “reputation”.

How does the Minister see the definition of “reputation” impacting the ability for the Minister to, effectively, make someone liable for deportation should they—sorry, to strip someone’s residency and put them on a temporary visa, should they be deemed as a risk to our reputation? I know she used the example of terrorism. But I think we’ve got to be intellectually honest with ourselves. I’m not, sorry, accusing the Minister of otherwise, but it’s just like, let’s be clear about what, actually, the definition of “security” is.

The questions were simply just: would she support my amendment to narrow the scope that out-of-hours visits can happen? Can she please clarify how she would apply the provisions in the principal Act on security when it comes to reputation for the purposes of stripping someone’s residency away should they be deemed a threat to our security—not just the most extreme examples—when it comes to terrorism? I would appreciate the engagement and particularly her commitment to the options given in the Heron KC report.

Dealing with those two in reverse order, the definition of “national security” is not in scope of this bill; it is a previously determined definition and we won’t be entertaining any changes, as it’s not in scope.

Look, in terms of the tabled amendment 23.20.03, in the name of the member, essentially, this is deleting—

I meant 04, sorry—04—23.20.04.

OK. Well, let’s deal with them both, since we’re here. Because 23.20.03, essentially, is deleting clause 26, which is just removing the ability to do an out-of-hours compliance visit, and of course we will not be supporting this. It is really important that there is an option of absolute last resort that has plenty of safeguards and guardrails around it in terms of the fact that we need to go to the judge to get a judicial warrant in order to undertake this activity. As I’ve already mentioned on two or three occasions now, all those safeguards exist there. But the point is that there are always people who use this as a loophole because they know that if they are in a certain place at a certain time, compliance activity cannot be undertaken, and it makes it very, very difficult for Immigration New Zealand to make sure that people are abiding by the terms of their visa and—if it is time for them to leave the country—that we are able to undertake that activity. But, as already mentioned, we have looked at the recommendations of the Casey report and made sure that we’ve put all those safeguards in place.

Just also, while I’m here, it reminded me of a question that Phil Twyford asked earlier about the recommendations of the Casey review. I think there’s only one more that we need to put in place, and that’s coming in the next bill that we’ll be introducing. I’ll get to 23.20.04 in a second.

I move, That debate on this question now close.

I’ve been watching for the last hour, and I was here for the hour before this, and I’ve just observed that the spokesperson for Labour has a couple more burning questions. But I’m indicating that now—and the Minister has been very engaging—so, the Hon Phil Twyford, I’ll take a couple of questions from you. Thank you.

Thank you, Madam Chair. We haven’t yet dealt with electronic monitoring, clause 42, or clause 47, charging of premiums—two very important parts of the bill. But I wanted to speak to my amendments around clause 32. Now, this is important. We’ve dealt with a similar issue in principle, but not in relation to clause 32. It’s really about the precise wording that would justify, in this instance, detention of an asylum seeker. Clause 32 inserts new section 317AA, which sets out the options available to a District Court judge when considering an application for a warrant of commitment. The Law Society the Education and Workforce Committee expressed concerns about the phrase “threat or risk to public order” in new section 317AA(4)(a). So this is the core of the justification for a warrant of commitment.

Now, neither the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees guidelines nor the Casey report identify failing to comply with the Immigration Act as a factor which justifies detention. Both of them say—both the guidelines and the Casey report—that short-term detention may be justified where there are threats to national security or public safety or genuine and real risks of absconding. I agree with the Law Society on this case that detention outside of those limited circumstances is not justified. My amendment to clause 32, in new section 317AA(2)(b) “after the word ‘risk’, insert ‘of absconding’ ”, because, at the moment, risk, just on its own, is extremely broad. Risk of what? I think it would be better if we insert the words “of absconding” after the word “risk”. Also, in the second tabled amendment to clause 32, new section 317AA(2)(b); so in subsections (2)(a) and (2)(b) of new section 317AA, let’s tighten up “risk” by inserting the words “of absconding”.

We’ve dealt with this one before. This is not the first time that this has come up—the deletion of this: that they have to comply with the Act. I already made this point that not complying with the Act might be something like not abiding by your RRRA—residence and reporting requirements—or something like you were not where you were supposed to be and you weren’t reporting in, for example; or something that might be against the Act will be failure to turn up to an interview. There are a number of things that are really important around retaining that part that Mr Twyford wants to get rid of in that amendment. But I’ve dealt with that before in someone else’s; that’s not the first time that’s come up.

I move, That debate on this question now close.

The question is that Dr Lawrence Xu-Nan’s tabled amendment to Amendment Paper 445 amending new clause 40A be agreed to.

The question is that Dr Lawrence Xu-Nan’s tabled amendment to Amendment Paper 445 amending new clause 40B be agreed to.

The question is that Ingrid Leary’s tabled amendment to Amendment Paper 445 deleting new clauses 40A and 40B be agreed to.

The question is that the Minister’s amendments to Part 1 set out on Amendment Paper 445 be agreed to.

The question is that Dr Lawrence Xu-Nan’s tabled amendment to clause 4(1), amending the definition of “first available craft” to insert “or after a representative of the person being notified”, be agreed to.

The question is that Dr Lawrence Xu-Nan’s tabled amendment to clause 4(1), amending the definition of “first available craft” to insert “unless in exceptional circumstances”, be agreed to.

The question is that Dr Lawrence Xu-Nan’s tabled amendment to clause 4(1), amending the definition of “first available craft” to insert “and section 166”, be agreed to.

The question is that Ricardo Menéndez March’s tabled amendment to clause 4(1), amending the definition of “first available craft”, be agreed to.

The question is that Dr Lawrence Xu-Nan’s tabled amendment to clause 4(1), amending the definition of “irregular entry into New Zealand” to insert “willingly”, be agreed to.

The Hon Phil Twyford’s tabled amendment to clause 4(1) inserting new paragraph (c) is out of order as not being in the correct form of legislation.

The question is that Dr Lawrence Xu-Nan’s tabled amendment to delete clause 5(2) be agreed to.

The question is that Dr Lawrence Xu-Nan’s tabled amendment to clause 7, new section 50(4D), inserting new paragraph (aa), be agreed to.

The question is that Vanushi Walters’ tabled amendment to clause 7, new section 50(4D)(b), inserting new subparagraph (iii), be agreed to.

The question is that Vanushi Walters’ tabled amendment to clause 7, new section 50(4D)(c), be agreed to.

The question is that Dr Lawrence Xu-Nan’s tabled amendment to clause 7, new section 50(4E)(b), be agreed to.

The question is that Dr Lawrence Xu-Nan’s tabled amendment to clause 7, new section 50(4E)(c), be agreed to.

The question is that Dr Lawrence Xu-Nan’s tabled amendment to clause 7, section 50, inserting new subsection (4F) relating to ministerial discretion, be agreed to.

The question is that Dr Lawrence Xu-Nan’s tabled amendment to clause 7, section 50, inserting new subsection (4F) to review the effectiveness of a special direction, be agreed to.

The question is that Dr Lawrence Xu-Nan’s tabled amendment to clause 8, new section 52(4A), be agreed to.

The question is that Dr Lawrence Xu-Nan’s tabled amendment to clause 8, new section 52(4D), to insert new paragraph (aa), be agreed to.

The question is that Dr Lawrence Xu-Nan’s tabled amendment to clause 8, new section 52(4E)(b), be agreed to.

The question is that Dr Lawrence Xu-Nan’s tabled amendment to clause 8, new section 52(4E)(c), be agreed to.

The question is that Dr Lawrence Xu-Nan’s tabled amendment to clause 8, new section 52, inserting new subsection (4F) relating to ministerial discretion, be agreed to.

The question is that Dr Lawrence Xu-Nan’s tabled amendment to clause 8, new section 52, inserting new subsection (4F) to review the effectiveness of a special direction, be agreed to.

The question is that Dr Lawrence Xu-Nan’s tabled amendment to clause 9, new section 53(4A)(a), be agreed to.

The question is that Vanushi Walters’ tabled amendment to clause 9, new section 53(4B), be agreed to.

The question is that Dr Lawrence Xu-Nan’s tabled amendment to clause 9, new section 53(4D), inserting new paragraph (aa), be agreed to.

The question is that Dr Lawrence Xu-Nan’s tabled amendment to clause 9, new section 53(4E)(b), be agreed to.

The question is that Dr Lawrence Xu-Nan’s tabled amendment to clause 9, new section 53(4E)(c), be agreed to.

The question is that Dr Lawrence Xu-Nan’s tabled amendment to clause 9, new section 53, inserting new subsection (4F) relating to ministerial discretion, be agreed to.

The question is that Dr Lawrence Xu-Nan’s tabled amendment to clause 9, new section 53, inserting new subsection (4F) to review the effectiveness of a special direction, be agreed to.

The question is that Dr Lawrence Xu-Nan’s tabled amendment to clause 10, new section 57(6), inserting new paragraph (aa), be agreed to.

The question is that Dr Lawrence Xu-Nan’s tabled amendment to clause 10, new section 57(7)(b), be agreed to.

The question is that Dr Lawrence Xu-Nan’s tabled amendment to clause 10, new section 57(7)(c), be agreed to.

The question is that Dr Lawrence Xu-Nan’s tabled amendment to clause 10, new section 57, inserting new subsection (8) relating to ministerial discretion, be agreed to.

The question is that Dr Lawrence Xu-Nan’s tabled amendment to clause 10, new section 57, inserting new subsection (8) to review the effectiveness of a special direction, be agreed to.

The question is that Vanushi Walters’ tabled amendment to clause 11, new section 61B(3), inserting new paragraph (e) relating to the Genocide Convention, be agreed to.

The question is that Vanushi Walters’ tabled amendment to clause 11, new section 61(3), inserting new paragraph (e) relating to Human Rights or humanitarian issues, be agreed to.

The question is that Ricardo Menéndez March’s tabled amendments deleting clauses 12 to 14 be agreed to.

The question is that the Hon Phil Twyford’s tabled amendment to clause 13, replacing section 75A(1), be agreed to.

The question is that Ricardo Menéndez March’s tabled amendment deleting Subpart 5 be agreed to.

The question is that Dr Lawrence Xu-Nan’s tabled amendment to clause 18, deleting subclauses (1AA) and (1), be agreed to.

The question is that Ricardo Menéndez March’s tabled amendment deleting clause 26 be agreed to.

The question is that Ricardo Menéndez March’s tabled amendment to clause 26, new section 293B(3), amending paragraph (e) and inserting new paragraph (f), be agreed to.

The question is that Vanushi Walters’ tabled amendment to clause 26, new section 293B(3)(c), be agreed to.

The question is that Vanushi Walters’ tabled amendment to clause 26, inserting paragraph (f) into new section 293B(3), be agreed to.

The question is that the Hon Phil Twyford’s tabled amendment to clause 27, inserting new subclauses (3) to (10), be agreed to.

The question is that the Hon Phil Twyford’s tabled amendment to clause 32, new section 317AA(2)(b)(i)(A), be agreed to.

The question is that the Hon Phil Twyford’s tabled amendment to clause 32, new section 317AA(2)(b)(i)(B), be agreed to.

The question is that Dr Lawrence Xu-Nan’s tabled amendment to clause 32, new section 317AA(4), deleting paragraph (b) of the definition of “threat or risk to public order”, be agreed to.

The question is that Dr Lawrence Xu-Nan’s tabled amendment to clause 40, new section 324F, be agreed to.

Ricardo Menéndez March’s tabled amendment deleting clauses 42 and 43 is ruled out of order as being inconsistent with a previous decision of the committee.

The question is that Ricardo Menéndez March’s tabled amendment deleting clauses 52 and 54, and subclause (4) of clause 36, be agreed to.

The question is that Ricardo Menéndez March’s tabled amendment to clause 42(1), inserting “no more than 1 month” in new paragraph (da) of section 324F, be agreed to.

The question is that Ricardo Menéndez March’s tabled amendment to clause 42(1), inserting “, if an adult” in new paragraph (da) of section 324F, be agreed to.

The question is that the Hon Phil Twyford’s amendment to clause 42(1), new paragraphs (db) and (dc), be agreed to.

The question is that Vanushi Walters’s tabled amendment to clause 43, new section 324J(3)(d), be agreed to.

The question is that the Hon Phil Twyford’s tabled amendment to clause 47, new section 351A(1), be agreed to.

The question is that the Hon Phil Twyford’s tabled amendment to clause 48, to insert new subsection (8), be agreed to.

Members, we come now to Part 2, the debate on clauses 55 and 56, which are “Amendments relating to fiscal sustainability”. The question is that Part 2 stand part.

Thank you, Mr Chair. To start with, Part 2 is equally important to Part 1 because it’s actually half of the title of this bill, which is “fiscal sustainability”.

My first question to the Minister of Immigration is regarding the advice, in a broader picture, from the Regulations Review Committee, particularly when it comes to the levy-setting component of this. Now, as you know, in terms of how we look at levies and the difference between levies, fees, and tax, there are very specific criteria. Broadly speaking, considering some of the things that are going to be touched on in this bill, I wondered if the Minister would consider my amendment, which doesn’t actually change much but simply calls this section for what it is—that it’s not actually a levy, but a bill.

What number?

Ah, yes—very good question, thank you Minister. It is 8.40.35.

The reason I want to raise it as a broader thing—and then we can get into the details of it—is that levies are usually used specifically for the operations of a particular agency in order for them to ensure that there are checks and balances and all ends meet. What we are seeing in this section, and I want to draw attention—and other people will be able to speak to some of the specifics, but, for example, I want to draw the committee’s attention to new paragraph 399AB(2)(a), which is for “the operation of, the public health and education systems”.

The other reason I’m asking the Minister’s support on this clarification between a levy and a tax is that levies are usually also within the general responsibility of the Minister in charge, which usually extends to a particular agency, but not so much in terms of what is being asked here. The Minister, for example, as far as I’m aware—and the Minister may correct us—the Minister of Immigration, who oversees the levy and the immigration levy and Immigration New Zealand, is not the Minister who is in charge of the “infrastructure required for, or operation of, the public health and education systems”. It’s a technical aspect. It’s based on a definition, but it’s a very important definition in the general process, and this is something that if you seek advice from the Controller and Auditor-General, you will find similar advice between levy, fee, and tax.

The first thing I want to ask the Minister is whether the Minister will support my amendment to change “immigration levies” to “immigration taxes”.

Thank you, Mr Chair. I know my colleague the Hon Phil Twyford will have some questions regarding what this levy does specifically. We do support it, in terms of sharing the burden, but my very different question is: what is not in Part 2, relating to the levy, based on the amendment that the Minister of Immigration dropped today? While we accept the changes around electronic monitoring, there are going to be additional costs to the immigration system, and as Lawrence Xu-Nan has said, levies, by definition, have to relate specifically to the purpose that they are created for. It’s very clear in this bill that they are to fund education and health and to operationalise those. That’s very explicit, and it seems like this is quite a separate kind of immigration matter to what we’ve previously been speaking about. Yet we have had changes now—good changes—made to the system regarding mass arrivals, where electronic monitoring, which is a fairly cost-effective way of dealing with people, will be limited. But we haven’t heard anything from the Minister about what the risk mitigation will be for that, and what the funding arrangements will be.

When we’re looking at the costings, the question I have for the Minister is: whether she has conducted a cost-benefit impact assessment on the changes, including costs to immigration, now that she has tabled that amendment? Because that’s something that we have not had time to consider, and it wouldn’t have been at select committee—that’s particularly with the restrictions to electronic monitoring, and considering, also, the additional costs to policing and other things that are going to happen as a result. They are very broad. They are definitely not the subject of what we would expect a levy for. But my question is: if we’re going to look at the totality of the immigration system with these changes, is this the right vehicle? Should there be something in this bill, which includes mass arrivals, to indicate how the Minister is planning to pay for the fiscals on that and, also, the affordability and the sources of revenue for the alternative methodologies, now that we know that electronic monitoring won’t be available?

Just for those who are watching at home, we know that levies need to be certain, they need to be simple, they need to be neutral, and they need to be flexible. Certainly, we can see that, and I know that my colleague the Hon Phil Twyford will have some questions around how they apply to the employment situation. But my broader question, if you like, is: what is missing from this? The part itself does say “Amendments relating to fiscal sustainability”, and I read that as meaning fiscal sustainability of the whole system. How are we going to pay for the mass-arrivals changes previously, if not by a levy? Are we going to apply the tyranny of silos and put policing and other costs elsewhere, or is there going to be a proper costing done that looks at the totality? Then how are we going to pay for those additional measures?

The member Ingrid Leary kind of answered her own question in her speech. Essentially, as she rightly points out, we are broadening the levy base in immigration, because, at the moment, we only are able to levy the people who are applying for a visa. We are unable to apply levies to employers, for example, who are other people who get direct benefits from the immigration system but who aren’t contributing towards it. This is exactly what this part does: it broadens it out so that if things like the mass arrivals or the electronic monitoring or any other running of the immigration system which is a defined cost and is set out is able to be contributed to by a much broader base of people and not just the migrants themselves. That’s in answer to that question.

Responding to Dr Lawrence Xu-Nan, the levy sets out a finite set of purposes that the levy can be charged for to specific groups. This makes it not aligned with a tax, which is very broad. The provision is carefully drafted so that it is not a broad tax but a very clear levy set out for a finite set of purposes.

Thank you so much, Mr Chair. I do have an amendment 23.20.09. This is in relation to tightening what these levies can be used for so that it is only for the immigration system, and I wanted to understand if the Minister of Immigration would be in support of it. I had some questions in relation to clause 56, new section 399AB, on page 40 and on subsection (2)(a), which is the intent of the wording in relationship to this—and to note that we don’t support this, but at least it’s good that the Minister has clarified that it’s public health and education systems; so “public”. But the language around infrastructure does not specify that it’s public infrastructure, right? So can I just get the clarification of the intent—whether the Minister could foresee these levies being used to fund public-private partnerships, for example, and to contribute to the costs of those. That is important because, effectively, by not clarifying the types of infrastructure more broadly, it leaves a bit of a lack of clarity in the language of it. I’m just concerned around the scope of just kind of keeping it so broad when it comes to the language of infrastructure. Clarification around that would be useful.

The other question I had was, in clause 56, new section 399AB(2)(a)(i) in relation to that, which is in the specification of funding specialist teachers, school property, teacher training, or learning support. This makes an assumption that all migrants use the education system, but can I just ask whether, for example, if you’ve got a single adult coming here who may not be coming on a student visa, may just be choosing to work, may not be pursuing education at any point in their life, as to whether they should also be required to pay a levy to contribute to the education system; or is it only the intent to then target specific visa holders that may be deemed to be using the education system more broadly?

I would also be keen—my third question is in relation to clause 56, new section 399AB(2)(b) in relationship to employers. Now, what work has the Minister done or sought reassurances from industry bodies of employers that there may not be a level of, I guess, lowering of wage growth as a result of the provisions in here? I’ve seen that the Minister has obviously tweaked around some of the wage requirements for visa holders coming here and not all, actually, visa holders have conditions on their visa that require them to be in jobs that they earn a specific amount of wage. Now, what reassurances can the Minister give us that employers may not use these provisions on clause 56, new section 399AB(2)(b,) and as a result of them contributing levies to justify paying lower wages to migrant workers and, therefore, suppressing wages for migrant workers and locals more broadly as a result of those additional costs? If she’s able to provide us some reassurances from industry bodies that this will not happen, that will be useful.

It is a requirement that employers are paying a wage that is commiserate with industry standards for the skill of the person who is being employed—our immigration officers are always checking that. I would also note that we’ve just had a fee review, where we’ve raised fees and have not seen any evidence of the fact that employers are reducing wages to somehow make up for a small fee increase. But built into the immigration system is that when we are looking at an application for someone coming into the country who is, for example, going to be a painter and has a certain amount of experience and skill, we are always looking to make sure that they are being paid at a rate that is commiserate with their skill and experience. There is something built into the system there, but we’ve not seen any evidence, when we’ve done our fee reviews recently, of an increasing fees to employers of, for example, job checks—or when we’re asking employers to be accredited, we’ve not seen any evidence, or I’ve not been provided with any evidence, that wages have gone down as a result of that.

Thank you, Mr Chair. I think it’s fair to say that Labour was intrigued by these provisions, and we remain so—somewhat agnostic about them but willing to go along, really, in support of the principle that if costs can be spread more fairly, then all the better.

I wanted to just ask for the Minister of Immigration’s response to a number of submitters—I remember the Employers and Manufacturers Association particularly—pointing out that the kinds of levies that one would anticipate from these provisions would very likely create the perception of double-dipping by the Government—seeking cost recovery through these new levies for things that are fully funded by tax revenue, including the taxes paid by existing migrants, without necessarily any expansion of services.

They also asked, I remember—well, they expressed the view that they would feel penalised for going to the cost and bother of recruiting someone on a temporary work visa from overseas, because the education system that is funded by our taxes here in New Zealand is not producing the kind of skilled workers that they need.

I ask the Minister to respond to that. I think the implication of that question or that concern was that these levies, if not implemented in the right way, could really negatively affect the social licence and public support for the immigration programme.

Dealing with those two things: look, there are considerable costs that are worn by the system that are potentially not accounted for. Remember, setting up the ability to have additional levies on different people, like employers, doesn’t necessarily mean that it will be done, and it means there will have to be a process of a fee and levy review in regulations.

I want to make the point that there are significant costs that fall on our system. If you think about education—I’m putting my other hat on for a moment—we have significant costs, for example, in learning support for migrants who have children who have additional learning support needs. The amount of tax payable in, say, the three to five years that the person is here and potentially using services like teacher-aides or speech language therapists or educational psychologists and the like is something that we want to be able to consider accounting for in levies. These clauses are just giving us the ability to be able to consider that.

I think Mr Twyford probably answered his own question in the second part when he talked about the fact that the education system was potentially not providing the skilled workers that these employers were asking for. Part of this bill is actually saying that we would like to be able to set or pay for, or have employers levied to directly pay for, the upskilling of Kiwis into roles so that they don’t have to employ migrants from overseas. Currently, they are enjoying the benefit of the skilled person from overseas, and the question here is whether or not we should be levying to make sure that we are able to fund education services to upskill New Zealanders into those roles.

Thank you, Mr Chair. I want to continue. I want to be getting into some of the specific clauses of Part 2. I want to start with replacement section 399(1), inserted by clause 55, and specifically around replacement section 399(1)(c), “education providers that are signatory providers within the meaning of section 10”.

Now, I want to check with the Minister of Immigration in terms of a couple of things. Number one: what is the revenue that the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment is currently getting from the export education levy (EEL) already? Because, as the Minister would know, under the relevant regulations, those who are registered are already being charged 0.8 percent of the levy for a tuition fee for a student and those who are unregistered are being charged at 0.5 percent. I used to work at an international school where I had to pay export education levies every year all the time. Under this new requirement, in terms of the immigration levy, would, then, institutes who accept international students be double levied, so the new immigration levy plus the EEL? That’s my first question on that. I think that’s an important clarification, particularly for schools that accept international students and private training establishments that accept international students, as well as tertiary institutes.

In terms of the other thing that the Minister has said, and one of the things that we are noticing as well is schools—and the Minister may have an idea as well that schools often do bring in international students in order to supplement their operational fund and be able to do more things for the schools and for all of their students. If they’re being levied and then the levy is being used as part of the education system, would the school have any guarantee that some of the levies that are put towards it will also come back to them, or will it be something that is more evenly distributed to other ones?

My third question to the Minister is around what the Minister said before in terms of how you’re going to have people here who potentially are on a work visa with children who have additional needs who may be using learning access or a variety of forms of learning access. But I just want to check with the Minister, surely if you’re here and you’re working, you’re paying taxes anyway, and people who are paying taxes as PAYE are already contributing towards the kind of core facilities and infrastructure that a taxpaying person would be eligible for. Therefore, their child, regardless of whether they have paid an additional levy or not, should be able to access the same thing as anyone else who pays the same amount of tax, because it’s not like people who are on a work visa are paying lower tax than people who are permanent residents, etc.

I just want to check what the Minister means when the Minister has just referred to those additional things, or if the Minister can give examples of people who are here who are not paying taxes that contribute towards the public health and education systems.

Thank you so much, Mr Chair. I just wanted to move on to subsection (6) within clause 56, new section 399AB. This is the one that allows the Minister to, by special direction, “(a) exempt any person or class of persons from the obligation to pay all or part of the levy; or (b) refund all or part of a levy paid.” Now, can the Minister of Immigration, please, reassure us that her intention is not to include applicants of the migrant exploitation protection visa when it comes to this levy or people who are applying for the family violence visa as well as part of this levy?

Now, there are some visas that people have to access as a result of, well, tragedy and hardship that people experience. I think the powers that this levy grants the Minister are pretty broad. I don’t remember her giving us explicit clarification and reassurances that some of those visas that are for people who are finding themselves in particularly vulnerable situations will be exempt from having to contribute to those. I noted that this is a line that could allow the Minister to, basically, exempt people—part of these powers. I think it would be good for the Minister right now to give us that reassurance in relationship to the powers that the Minister is given.

Now, one of the subsequent questions, following up on my colleague Dr Lawrence Xu-Nan, is also, as part of the signing of this part, whether she sought advice to allow her to have a picture as to whether migrants in the medium term’s contributions through tax towards education and health are greater than the resources they utilise. I have seen some documents showing that migrants are actually net contributors to the tax base due to the fact that they can’t access things like welfare and things like other public services while they are working. The reason why I ask this is that it is concerning to be building this narrative that somehow migrants, compared to the general population, utilise or extract more resources from the public system, as opposed to what we have seen in some papers in relation to migrants actually contributing to a greater degree to the tax base than they take as a result of the utilisation of public services. To me, that puts into question the justification and this narrative that we have heard that, somehow, migrants need to contribute an additional level of resourcing for these systems—so whether she sought any advice or analysis on the kind of contribution versus intake of public services from migrants.

The second question which I referred to earlier is: which groups of visas has she already pre-emptively chosen to exclude—for example, migrant exploitation protection visa or people who are experiencing family violence?

Just running through that, currently exempt from levies are people who are applying for domestic violence visas, refugees, and migrant exploitation visas. These exemptions already exist currently for levies. As we work through the fee and levy review and go through the regulations, then further exemptions would be considered at that time, and that’s what the bill sets up the ability to do.

I just want to make it really clear that the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment doesn’t receive any of the export education levy, it is for a completely different purpose under a different Act, and is, as I think the member knows, for quite a different, separate purpose, not for helping to contribute to the costs and broadening the base—contributing to the costs of running the immigration system.

The second part of this, the levy that we are considering and putting the vehicle into this bill, if we were to levy for different purposes outside of what we do now—like health or education, for example—a levy must fund specific purposes, like specialist teachers, teacher training, or learning support, for example. Just to the previous speaker’s point, we already, under the Immigration Act and under the levy, have the ability to levy for things like English as a second language funding, so we already do that because we acknowledge that it is a direct cost mostly borne out by migrants. But what we’re acknowledging in this bill is that there are more costs that should be directly payable, to a proportion, through a levy by migrants. That is because they are here for a shorter period of time, and as I’ve already mentioned, they must be for specific purposes that are directly linked to those people. That’s why it’s very clearly set out that there has to be a relationship there.

Thank you, Mr Chair, and really appreciating the Minister of Immigration’s engagement with these quite important questions. I have to put it on the record that I was approached by the international students at Otago University about a year and a half ago, who are really concerned at the jump in fees for them to be able to study at Otago. So while we cautiously support this idea of spreading the fee load, I’m concerned that we might end up with a two-tier system where we have employers who are able to afford and support students, or if students are in a particularly advantaged situation because it is clear that somehow their fees will be more affordable, whereas other students will not be able to do that. So just seeking an assurance, really, that we’re not going to be creating subclasses of migrants who are really feeling the pinch from these fees and levies.

Well, they’re levies and they pay university fees, but I do take the Minister’s point that there are costs involved with manaaki-ing people into New Zealand. The Minister herself brought into the debate and talked about the fact that the wider costings borne by the immigration system are not captured within this. We do have the wording in Part 2, “fiscal sustainability”. What we haven’t seen or heard from the Minister is what the fiscals are for the new mass arrivals regime. I am sure, given the duration of time that this has been considered across Parliament, including by Ministers under the previous Labour Government, that setting up what a mass arrivals scheme would look like and the impact of that on immigration, on airport operational capacity, on the cultural training and safety that might be needed for enforcement officers, for the ability to use information and data to track the 24-hour time frame to see whether there is something that qualifies as a mass arrival. Then also there are processes needed to be able to efficiently deal with people if there were, I think, 30-something people coming in at one time.

There must be costings on that, and I’d really like to know from the Minister, since she did raise herself that this is a broader systems cost that is not contained in the levy—it would be good to know what the cost to the taxpayer is. I really appreciate the fact that it’s not going to be pushed into this levy and that we’re not suddenly seeing an expansion of powers that extend it from operationalising health and education and then going to mass arrivals. But she has talked about broadening it further. We don’t really know what that broadening means. The Minister has talked about particular educational things that might be included, but there must be some specificity, I think. I know the Minister draws on education because she has that portfolio and knowledge, and also immigration, but I’m really curious to know—and for the Hansard—what does she foresee as the benefit of broadening those powers?

Then, secondly, where are the fiscals, or can she share with this committee the costs of the mass arrivals? I’m assuming that the cost of doing this well is going to be, ultimately, a huge cost savings for taxpayers. But I will remind you that the Minister did mention that herself, and that’s why I’m asking, because under Part 2, when we’re talking about sustainability, we’ve got this wedged into two very different parts of an immigration question. We want to take a systems approach and it would be good to understand the fiscals for both of them.

It’s a very nice try from the member, but she raised mass arrivals, not me. I’ve made the broad point that in order to run the immigration system we need to levy. There will be costs that fall. In the fee and levy review and in regulations that we set, those will be taken into account. It’s actually irrelevant to Part 2.

Also, if the member wants to know the direct benefits of the proposed levy, I suggest she looks at clause 56 inserting new section 399AB, “Extended immigration levy”, because it’s laid out in subsection (2) quite clearly.

I move, That debate on this question now close.

Thank you very much, Mr Chair. I had a question in relation to the provisions in new section 399AC, inserted by clause 56, which we haven’t touched on yet. This is in relation to: “Before recommending the making of regulations for the purposes of section 399AB, the Minister must consult any persons and organisations the Minister considers appropriate,”. Now, I understand that obviously this is left broad enough for any Minister of any Government to do this consultation, but has the Minister already set out, or sought advice on, who she foresees will be the organisations and the people that she intends to consult with? Would she be able to give some clarity on, and put on the record, the range of bodies that she will look to consult—for example, will unions be part of that; which industry bodies will she be prioritising; and when it comes to persons, is it going to be sort of like immigration lawyers, experts, etc.? I think some clarity over that would be useful.

I think, particularly, in the context of the public trust being tested, in relation to who Governments choose to consult with in relation to policy design, it would be good to put it on the record. If she hasn’t done any work in relation to the provisions of new section 399AC or hasn’t lined up any organisations or people, I can accept that, and it would be good to have that clarified as well.

I wanted to ask whether—or why—there aren’t any, by the looks of it, reporting requirements—and I know that we could potentially get them through Official Information Act requests—but who she is consulting with and, kind of, a bit of an explanation as to why she may have included some organisations and bodies compared to others. I’m just keen to also get the Minister’s clarification on this.

I wanted to follow up on the previous engagement, and I thank the Minister around her engagement on the exclusion of some of the visa categories that are specifically for vulnerable people. She did not necessarily give a commitment that some of these visas would be excluded; it’s just something that would be looked into—which takes me to my colleague Dr Lawrence Xu-Nan’s tabled amendment 8.40.36, which specifies victims of family violence resident visa, refugee family support resident visa, dependent child resident visa, trafficking victim resident visa, and any other refugee, vulnerable person, or protective person visa categories.

Now, I know that the Minister already talked about the interaction with some of the other regulation-making powers that exist in the current legislation that we have. But without giving us an explicit reassurance that some of these visas will be excluded right now, it’s hard for us to have faith that some of these won’t be captured. We’re happy to rescind that amendment if the Minister is able to give us that reassurance that those visas won’t be captured, as opposed to just letting us know that she’ll look at it at some point. Because I don’t think that gives certainty to people who often are in extremely precarious situations that they may not be burdened by additional costs.

I particularly raise this because for people on the migrant exploitation protection work visa, even just the cost of applying for those visas can be a bit of a barrier, and additional costs, through this levy, could end up becoming a disincentive for people to report exploitation, if they know that they could be burdened with additional costs.

Finally, my other question is in relation to how the Minister would foresee decisions on how the funding that is acquired through the levy would be distributed between infrastructure, public health, and education? Particularly, I wanted to seek guidance and clarification from the Minister as to whether she would see the distribution of those funds between those three entities that are noted as part of a budget process, or whether she’s got any sort of clarification as to how she foresees those three bodies that are being named, in terms of decision making, when it comes to the distribution of those three. I would appreciate the Minister’s engagement. But, particularly, the one I care the most about is the one on new section 399AC, which we haven’t touched on.

I move, That debate on this question now close.

Thank you, Mr Chair. And just a very quick question from me and it’s a new point which is really around section 399AC, in clause 56, where we can see in subsection (2), “At intervals of no more than 5 years following the commencement of this section, the Department must review the amount and method of calculation of any extended immigration levy.”

I’m keen to understand why it’s five years. I know that’s quite an ordinary drafting time frame, but it’s a pretty fluid situation at the moment with the cost of living. We have seen big rises in immigration fees, as I mentioned, for international students who are really concerned.

Would it be fairer to reduce that amount and make it annual or perhaps every two years, especially taking into account the impact of the levy on those who are applying for visas? We don’t see any weighting in the way the bill is currently drafted that really prioritises them, and therefore there is a real risk that in terms of these levies, along with the increasing cost of living, the rules just roll over and they’re not fit for purpose for the context.

Would it be useful for the Minister to consider a shorter time frame? Did she actually consider other time frames or was this just put into the bill because it happens to reflect something that already existed in the previous bill?

In relation to that last part, it’s not in scope of the bill, so it wasn’t something that we considered.

Can I just answer the questions relating to the previous speaker. Firstly, in terms of what the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment spends in terms of those levies, it will be reported on exactly what is collected and then how the money is distributed. So there is accountability in the system. I just will make the point that the migrant exploitation visa is free. There are no costs for it. So while the member is concerned that it might increase by a certain percentage, it’s a free visa. But I’ve already made the point that any extensions to the levy base will be considered through regulations and the fee and levy review. But all of those things are currently exempted.

Now, in terms of clause 56, new section 399AC that the member talked about, essentially, the people who we are going to consult, as you would expect, are the people who are affected. It will be made public by Immigration New Zealand, who has been consulted with.

I move, That debate on this question now close.

Thank you, Mr Chair. I actually have a really short question, and if the Minister of Immigration will just nod, that is sufficient for me. Thank you to the Minister for responding to the question around export education levies, but one of the things we didn’t hear from the Minister is: does that mean that education providers will be double levied—one for education export levy and one for this? That’s all.

They’re two completely different levies. One is in a completely different Act and is for a completely different purpose. It is, essentially, an insurance scheme for when an education provider falls over. To protect our reputation, we pay back the fees of the impacted students. It is a completely separate thing in a completely different Act. The member shouldn’t conflate the two. This is a completely different proposal to broaden the levy base to people who are benefiting from the immigration system, like export education providers, and like employers who currently might pay a fee, like an employer, but do not pay a levy.

Now, if we want to broaden this and have a more fair system, and, in answer to previous question, maybe reduce the levies that we currently levy on migrants, then we need to have a broader base. It is fair and reasonable to expect that people who are benefiting from the immigration system should be equally charged a levy so that they can, essentially, pay for the benefits that they are currently getting but are not contributing towards.

The question is that Ricardo Menéndez March’s tabled amendment deleting clause 55 be agreed to.

The question is that Dr Lawrence Xu-Nan’s tabled amendment to clause 55 and 56 be agreed to.

The question is that Vanushi Walters’ tabled amendment to clause 56, new section 399AA, be agreed to.

The question is that Ricardo Menéndez March’s tabled amendments to clause 56, amending the heading and deleting new section 399AB and 399AC, be agreed to.

The question is that Ricardo Menéndez March’s tabled amendment to clause 56, new section 399AB(2)(a), be agreed to.

The question is that Dr Lawrence Xu-Nan’s tabled amendment to clause 56, new section 399AB, inserting new subsection (4A), be agreed to.

The question is that Vanushi Walters’ tabled amendment to clause 56, new section 399AB(8), inserting new paragraphs (c) and (d), be agreed to.

The question is that the Hon Phil Twyford’s tabled amendment to clause 56, new section 399AB, to insert new subsection (10), be agreed to.

The time has come for me to leave the Chair for the lunch break. The committee will resume at 2 p.m.

Members, the committee is resumed on the Immigration (Fiscal Sustainability and System Integrity) Amendment Bill. When we were last debating the bill before the lunch break, we had just concluded the debate on Part 2. We now come to Part 2A. Part 2A is the debate on clause 56A: “Amendment relating to repeals, transitional provisions, saving provisions, and related matters”. The question is that Part 2A stand part.

Thank you, Madam Chair. As you have rightly said, this is around amending the deportation liability of residence class visa holders and it amends section 431 of the principal Act. It is really good to see that care has been taken to cross-reference and make sure that where there has been an imposing of conditions and limiting of rights, that the Minister and officials have taken care to ensure that there are, equally, the exemptions that correspond.

If we go to the principal Act, section 431 talks about the deportation liability of residence class visa holders convicted of a criminal offence. In subsection 431(1)(a), (b), and (c), it has various carve-outs for people who would be exempt under that principal Act. What we see from the original amendment—not the amendment of the amendment that was dropped today—is that suddenly we have got people who have been found guilty captured by some of those provisions.

What this quite rightly does is it includes ensuring that those who are found guilty are also able to access those exemptions. I guess the question is why go to all that trouble to unpick something when it would have been easier just to not add “found guilty” into the original deportation provisions. We haven’t asked or heard from the Minister whether she has received Ministry of Justice advice on the rights and impacts of that, and those provisions are in replacement sections 156, 158, 161, and 18C, so I would like to know why we have got this convoluted kind of carve-out rather than not simply extending them in the first place. Did the Minister receive advice about that?

Also, if we think about proportionality, which has been impacted here, and particularly when we’re talking about people who are guilty, there are people who are convicted for things overseas, for very petty things including political things where they could be found guilty overseas, and now they are able to access this exemption but they’re still captured by the extension of guilt to the conviction list in the original Act. I know that’s a bit confusing, but it is a very convoluted process and we haven’t heard the advice that the Minister received on why those powers have been extended. Wouldn’t it have been simpler to not have to do this and we would do away with Part 2A and simply not have that extension?

On that basis, my colleague Vanushi Walters actually does have a tabled amendment. She is much more across the legalities of this than me and I would really like her to have the opportunity to speak to that.

Thank you, Madam Chair. I thought I would rise and speak to my amendment filed at 12.05, which reads, “In Part 2A, clause 56A, insert in section 431, in the heading to section 431, the words ‘unless subject to a discharge without conviction’ after the words ‘or guilty’ ”. As my colleague Ingrid Leary has said, this responds to that concern that was raised by the Law Society in their submission, where they pointed out that the automatic triggering of deportation liability in such cases would really place, or could really place, a person in jeopardy of severe immigration consequences, even where the courts have themselves determined that—applying a proportionality test in section 107 of the Sentencing Act, which is a test that can and should be applied because we expect judges to be turning their minds to the specific consequences of the case—the consequences of a conviction would be out of proportion to the gravity of the offending. So this isn’t something that’s used all the time by judges, but, certainly, as the decision makers closest to the individual concerned and the context of the issues, the concept is there—it’s a familiar one in law—that the judge can determine whether the circumstances are such that a discharge should be granted.

I think the flip side of that, as well, is that judges will be aware of this legislation coming through the pipeline, so you can imagine that a discharge wouldn’t be granted if it wasn’t in the interest to do so or if there were security risks in place. So, just once again, I’m really urging the Minister of Immigration to consider whether that is an aspect of this bill that can be changed. Ideally, my sense is we wouldn’t just be doing it in this part, of course; we would be doing it in both the substantive heading as well as the substantive provision. However, this is an opportunity to fix what seems to me to clearly be an issue, and an issue that sits starkly against judicial powers to assess situations and determine whether liability should attach, whether convictions should attach, or not.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Just following on from the previous two speakers, I want to focus on the fact that this one says “convicted” and “or guilty”. But, again, I’m going to mention, reference, a previous section but not actually talk about the previous section, which is that in a previous section we specifically talked about two types of being guilty: being found guilty and pleading guilty. But over here, the title is, rather than saying, like the previous section, “convicted”, “found guilty”, or “pleaded guilty”, it is just “convicted”, “or guilty”.

I want to check with the Minister of Immigration that in this case the inserted words “or guilty” covers both types—“found” and also “pleaded”. If it does cover both types—for example, not just simply those who are found guilty—I wondered if the Minister could advise the committee on when you’re looking at deportation or deportation liabilities, has there been any work that’s been done looking at how this would potentially affect people’s intention to plead guilty in the first place, because whether they are pleading guilty or found guilty or don’t have a conviction, are acquitted, or are convicted, the outcome is all going to be the same to them in terms of deportation liability of resident visa class.

So I just want to check those two questions with the Minister—if guilty covers both types and whether there’s any sort of research or any sort of advice being given around the impact this will have on people who may no longer then wish to plead guilty because they’re going to be deported regardless; they might as well try their luck and go through the court process.

OK, so we don’t potentially have any answers to those questions. I’m sure, Lawrence, you can ask another question. I’m just going to get some advice. This is not a reflection on the Minister in the chair.

Absolutely not, and I really appreciate you, Madam Chair. We understand that the Minister in the chair is not the same Minister we had previously, but also that there are officials involved. I just want to seek clarification from you, Chair—if the Minister should receive some advice on this, it’s something that a Minister could speak to at a later part and just quickly reference this section on some of the questions we may have. That’s all.

I’m just taking some advice. Thank you. So the advice is, unless you have some more questions, we will take this part to a vote. So we’ll do that now.

The question is that Vanushi Walters’ tabled amendment to clause 56A be agreed to.

Members, we come now to Part 3. Part 3 is the debate on clauses 57 and 58, “Consequential amendments”, and Schedules 1 and 2. The question is that Part 3 stand part.

Thank you. We’ve just got a couple of questions—

Oh, sorry. The question is that Part 3 stand part.

Thank you, Madam Chair. The consequential amendment in clause 57, “Schedule 1AA amended”, basically inserts the part set out in Schedule 1 and makes all the necessary consequential amendments, which includes creating a new Part 4. We just have questions around what the impact of that is from a rule-of-law perspective regarding the new ministerial powers that might come into effect, because the people could be out in the community on conditions under the original Immigration Act or other Acts.

Then new powers have been conferred by new section 324F, inserted by clause 40. I don’t think there has been a New Zealand Bill of Rights Act (BORA) vet, but I do understand that there has been section 7 advice. So we’re trying to understand what would happen if a new condition was imposed on somebody under those circumstances.

It could be an oversight, and my question is a kind of policy question, I guess. Is that an intentional oversight to extend powers to Ministers? Does the Minister accept that it’s a BORA issue and would she want to have a look at it and maybe close it up if it is, or is it something that happened unintentionally? I think it would be important to have some more legal questions on that.

I’m just laying out what the substance of the policy question is, which is about the impact of this section and schedule on situations where existing conditions have been imposed on people and are now swapped out and there are broader powers for conditions to be made.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Perhaps just to add some detail to the issue that Ingrid Leary is raising, I wanted to compare the two separate powers—so the existing power to impose conditions, versus what’s being proposed here to impose conditions—because they are different. So the current power is under section 320(1). The language there is that “the conditions imposed on release may be any conditions that the Judge thinks fit to impose in the circumstances, including all or any of the following:”. It then lists three quite specific potential conditions that can be imposed. So applying the rules of statutory interpretation, ejusdem generis says that the general word shall not extend in its effect beyond the subjects that are listed. In this case, again, while it appears to be broad power, it’s actually listing three very specific circumstances.

The new power, which, again, Part 4 is referencing for these people who already have conditions imposed on them under section 320, is new section 324F, inserted by clause 40. Now, in that new power, it feels like much more of what I would call a God grant. So the power’s very broad. It says in subsection (3) “may impose any other condition that the Judge thinks fit to impose in the circumstances, including,”—and then it uses the words—“without limitation”. Those are the key words here, because it says to me that the powers to grant conditions are much broader than those foreseen in the current legislation, where the three specific instances, if you like, are listed quite explicitly.

Then you go from there to the section 7 advice to the Attorney-General, which does examine whether this is a reasonable limitation on freedom of movement and association generally. It concludes that they are. So, again, no section 7 New Zealand Bill of Rights Act vet. However, it doesn’t consider the circumstances where you could have someone who had been detained, partially because of criminal offending, had conditions imposed on them under current section 320, and once this bill passes into law, would have new conditions put on them on the basis of their past offending. Now, that would potentially rub up against section 26(2) of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act, which says, “No one who has been finally acquitted or convicted of, or pardoned for, an offence shall be tried or punished for it again.” So the courts have taken quite a broad view in terms of what constitutes being punished. So certainly the imposition of further conditions could fall within the scope of what the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act is considering here. It just strikes me that it’s not something that legal advisers turn their minds to and it’s not articulated as an issue in the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act.

So at this committee of the whole House stage, I’m just wanting to hear from the Minister whether she had turned her mind to these circumstances, and if someone had been convicted or acquitted or pardoned of something, whether that occurrence, if you like, could be considered as part of justifying the imposition of new conditions under this new section, under the new Act, that would not have been possible under current section 320.

I just think it’s important to clarify that this part that we’re talking about relates to the civil detention components, so criminal convictions and all of that stuff has nothing to do with this part. This is about the continuation of existing conditions and, therefore, variations of conditions that would occur under this, so it’s a very different component.

Thank you, Madam Chair. I just have one question for the Associate Minister of Immigration on Schedule 2, so this is clause 58, “Consequential amendment”, in Part 3. In Schedule 2, it makes an amendment to the Search and Surveillance Act, particularly the item relating to section 293B, where we’re looking at “may apply for and execute warrant to enter a dwelling or marae and search for a person”. I want to check with the Minister in terms of the scenario—for example, because it says “dwelling or marae”.

I want to check if “dwelling” is based on the definition, if any, in the Search and Surveillance Act 2012, or are we looking at the definition of “dwelling” that we have just seen in a previous part of this bill, which is clause 25, new subsection 286(3)? In that particular definition “dwelling”, it does specify that “ ‘dwelling’ means any building or part of a building that is used for residential accommodation of any kind, and includes a garage or shed associated with a building or part of the building”. However, in both that definition of “dwelling” as well as marae, you’re looking at a fixed construct essentially, but not necessarily the grounds. So, for example, hypothetically speaking, if a person is in a tent either on the grounds of a property or within a precinct of a marae, does that mean that an immigration officer could not search that because it’s neither a dwelling nor a marae?

Thank you, Madam Chair. I’ve got a specific question in relation to Schedule 2. One of the grey areas in relation to immigration officers’ ability to enter different premises is in relation to faith-based institutions. I raise that because, quite a few years ago now—this would have been under the previous National Government—we did have, for example, some Indian students who were facing deportation. They were in the Unitary Church because that was one of the institutions that are often deemed to be out of touch for immigration officials.

If you’re here illegally—

What I’m seeking clarification for is—

—you should be sent home.

—whether it’s by convention—pardon?

If you’re here illegally, it shouldn’t matter where you’re hiding.

Well—interesting. The member may wish to seek a contribution if he wants to challenge my question.

The question here is about whether the current definition of “dwelling” would include faith-based institutions. That is important because—not just in New Zealand but, actually, across different jurisdictions—faith-based institutions have been one of those areas that are seen as sort of safe havens for people who may be trying to, for example, resolve an appeal or even have a current appeal in front of a Minister or the Immigration and Protection Tribunal while they may be liable for deportation. I do want to understand how those institutions may be captured or otherwise under Schedule 2.

I think clarification on that would be useful, because we do have a history of faith-based institutions being safe havens for migrants who may be appealing to the Minister, for example—which is their right, despite what the heckles from the ACT Party might otherwise try to assume.

Thank you, Madam Chair. I just wanted to make a brief contribution to clarify my earlier question to the Minister. I do understand that it’s a civil regime, but my question was more in relation to the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act, section 26(2), which is about a second punishment, and that punishment could be a civil punishment. A second punishment, even if it’s a civil punishment, then touches on section 26(2) if the decision maker is bearing in mind a prior conviction or a prior acquittal or a prior pardon as part of their decision making to impose the civil punishment. In this case, the civil punishment would be the imposition of those further conditions.

I move, That debate on this question now close.

The Minister’s just taking some advice so I’ll just see if the Minister wants to take a call first before I take a motion.

Yeah, I think we’re getting back again—it’s not a civil punishment. This is a detention process that is being managed in the immigration process that we’re talking about. This is not a punishment; it’s a detention process.

I move, That debate on this question now close.

Members, we now come to our final debate—clauses 1 to 3. This is the debate on “Title”, “Commencement”, and “Principal Act”.

Thank you, Madam Chair. I’d like to start with some questions regarding the commencement, because what we see in the Amendment Paper today is that clause 2(3) refers to a number of sections which will not come into effect until the first anniversary of Royal assent, and the rest of the Act comes into effect upon Royal assent. When I look at those sections, they relate specifically to the electronic monitoring system. We are really happy with the changes in the Amendment Paper around safeguarding people so that electronic monitoring is not used as a form of detention and that it has been narrowed, and it is on that basis and from the Education and Workforce Committee work and the understanding that electronic monitoring was one of the biggest issues for us that we have supported this bill.

I just want to seek clarification from the Minister and I apologise that I’m asking for some context here, but it is an Amendment Paper that we saw today. Does this mean that there will be a transitional period of about a year where the limiting of the electronic monitoring provisions will not be in effect, and what does that mean if there were to be a mass arrival in that time?

I would like to remind the committee that the reason Labour is not fixated but very concerned about electronic monitoring is because of the international conventions and legal principles, which include the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the 1951 convention relating to the status of refugees, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. They all basically say that deprivation of liberty should only be used as a last resort, if at all, and that electronic monitoring should not be seen as arbitrary, that it shouldn’t be a digital shackle. It talks about privacy concerns, vulnerability, and the issue that the Minister has mentioned herself in some ways when she talked about immigration detention being different from criminalisation and from civil punishment, and yet there is this blurring around the edges. The overwhelming message in international law and best practice is that the goal should be to manage individuals in the community through less intrusive means wherever possible.

Now, because this Amendment Paper is quite new, it may not have the effect that I think it has, and in that case, I’d like to know what effect it does have, but it just feels like there is now a separation of when everything will come into effect. So you’ve got the original amendment from Royal assent and then you’ve got the subsequent amendments that have come in that limit the intrusion into people’s rights that are going to take longer, if I am reading that correctly.

That might explain, then, why my Amendment Paper on sections 40A and 40B was declined, but in the absence of that, what is the situation in that transition period? And even if I am not interpreting that correctly, it still does cause some confusion, clearly for me as a parliamentarian, but probably more so for people trying to work out what the arrangement is around electronic monitoring and the different time frames.

A subsequent question which is similar, and I won’t dwell on it, is the other period of time which talks about some of the sections—I won’t read them all out—coming into force three months after Royal assent. What is the rationale for that and what is the advice around—clearly there’s been some advice, I would assume, to have these different milestones coming in. Hopefully, they are to support the human rights of people. They may well be to make sure that the regime is set up adequately to be able to cope with an influx of people. My concern is that if there isn’t a system and process in place that assures the limiting of the electronic monitoring provisions that we are so keen on in Labour, and which is part of why we are supporting the bill as it’s currently being drafted up to the amendment, then we’d like to hear from the Minister exactly what that looks like, for clarity. Thank you.

Yeah, I think, just for clarification, the delays in the commencement of the electronic monitoring relate purely as you sort of suggest in your outline. It’s about establishing the systems and processes to ensure that all of that system is place—it is a complex system—to ensure it’s done right. So it’s that 12-month period to ensure all of the contracting and the system is set up in place.

Subsequent to that, then, is it correct to understand that the electronic monitoring may still take place but with the much broader incursion into the rights of people who might be detained under the mass arrivals provision, or will there be no electronic system in place?

Thank you, Madam Chair. I have two questions, one on the title, which is: considering that the bill actually increases the number of people who would be liable for deportation, does she think that the title accurately describes the bill to a layperson watching this debate? Because otherwise, who is the system supposed to keep the integrity for? This term of “system integrity” is used as a catch-all phrase. I think it’s interesting because I remember the Minister of Customs herself in the second reading criticised, I think, our party for talking about slogans. But I think system integrity is actually a relatively broad term that I think can be weaponised. So I’m curious to know as to whether the reality that the actual provisions from this bill—and this bill actually has quite a few different moving parts—whether the title actually, genuinely describes what the bill does.

Now, on the commencement, I did want to ask also on the provisions which will come into effect on the first anniversary of Royal assent in relation to electronic monitoring. Has the Minister received any advice around, for example, the procuring of the devices that would be needed to be able to adequately implement this bill and whether part of the one-year period would be to also, for example, procure those devices? Has she already started work or to receive advice in that regard; if so, what is it? Because I kind of can see that the one-year gap could be also to sort out some of these devices that would be needed. If that is the case, how many devices is the Government looking at procuring in order to be able to make sure that once we reach the first anniversary of Royal assent, should there be this mass arrival that we’ve been told that we need to prepare for—despite kind of no substantiation of evidence that it is coming—we’ll actually be ready; if so, will a year be sufficient to adequately prepare and procure the necessary devices?

Just in terms of the previous question, the electronic monitoring wouldn’t come into effect until 12 months so there wouldn’t be any interim electronic monitoring system in place.

Ingrid Leary had previously stood up to make a call, so I’ll take a call from Ingrid Leary.

Thank you. It’s just around the title as well. As I previously noted, there’s a kind of strange twinning of the “mass arrivals” part of this bill and also the “fiscal sustainability and system integrity” part. What we heard from the previous Minister in the chair was that the fiscal sustainability part actually relates, in a very narrow way, to levies that respond to visa applications, essentially, and the funding of health and education and making that a little bit fairer but also being able to extend the powers of it. The system integrity part probably relates to both, including the mass arrivals part. I just wondered if it would be clearer if the title should read “Immigration (Visa, Fiscal Sustainability and System Integrity) Amendment Bill”, just to get the word “visa” in there so that, when we’re looking at those sections about the levies and all of that, we’re not going to get confused and think that that relates to mass arrivals.

In some ways, it probably should have been in a separate bill. If we could add that into the title, then it’s very clear to us that, under Part 2, which talks about fiscal sustainability, that levy section is very narrowly focused. We would expect, if we want to look at the affordability of what is being proposed—and I do think it will be value for money because, ultimately, it’s going to save money down the track, but we’re not going to be looking into this bill for that affordability. It’s been made clear to us that things like policing, the airports being stepped up to be able to cope with this kind of system, and the training that’s required would come from general taxation and not from here. That’s not very clear from the title at the moment. Thank you.

I move, That debate on this question now close.

The question is that Dr Lawrence Xu-Nan’s tabled amendment to clause 1 be agreed to.

The question is that the Minister’s amendments to clause 2 set out on Amendment Paper 445 be agreed to.

The question is that Dr Lawrence Xu-Nan’s tabled amendment to clause 2 amending subclause (1) be agreed to.

The question is that Dr Lawrence Xu-Nan’s tabled amendment to clause 2 inserting new subclause (2AA) be agreed to.

I will report this bill with amendment.

Madam Speaker, the committee has considered the Immigration (Fiscal Sustainability and System Integrity) Amendment Bill and reports it with amendment. I move, That the report be adopted.

The bill is set down for third reading immediately.

on behalf of the Minister of Immigration: I move, That the Immigration (Fiscal Sustainability and System Integrity) Amendment Bill be now read a third time.

This bill is an important step forward for New Zealand’s immigration system and supports the Government’s broader priorities of driving economic growth and attracting the skills New Zealand needs to thrive. A strong, fair, and responsive immigration system is essential to delivering on our ongoing Going For Growth plan, supporting businesses, and ensuring New Zealand remains an attractive destination for talent and for investment. Immigration is vital to our economic and social prosperity, and this legislation helps to strengthen the foundations of a system that New Zealanders can have confidence in. It ensures that our settings continue to be fair, transparent, and fit for purpose in a changing world.

This bill is important to ensure that compliance and detention settings are more balanced and transparent to better align our provisions with the recommendations of the Casey KC and Heron KC reviews, strengthen both immigration risk settings and the protection of migrants from exploitation, enable the immigration system to respond to challenges with greater flexibility, and allow the cost of the immigration system to be recovered more fairly.

The bill delivers on these objectives through a series of targeted, sensible reforms. It introduces stronger safeguards for vulnerable people, including a higher threshold for the detention of asylum seekers and judicial oversight of out-of-hours compliance activity. These changes respond directly to the recommendations of Victoria Casey KC and Michael Heron KC, made in their independent reviews, and they reflect our commitment to transparency and accountability. It also addresses migrant exploitation by creating a new offence for charging premiums for employment offers. Charging for job offers is already illegal under New Zealand law, but it only applies when the victim is an employee here; it does not cover people who are extorted but who never arrive, or who arrive to find that the job offer has evaporated. This awful practice is causing real harm and is undermining trust in our immigration system. By closing these legislative gaps, we can prosecute more cases and send a clear message that exploitation is not tolerated in New Zealand.

The bill strengthens immigration risk settings by clarifying deportation liability for residence class visa holders who commit serious offences and by enabling the cancellation of resident status in those very rare cases where a person poses a significant security risk but cannot be deported immediately. These measures protect the integrity of our system while respecting our human rights obligations.

Flexibility is another key feature of this bill. It allows the Minister to respond quickly and fairly to unusual events, such as airline disruptions or natural disasters, where large groups of people are stranded in New Zealand. This ensures that our system can adapt to real-world challenges without unnecessary bureaucracy or costs.

I know there have been concerns expressed about the potential for overuse of those powers, but I’m very confident about the scrutiny and transparency provisions in the bill. The Education and Workforce Committee further slightly raised the bar regarding ministerial consideration. The Minister will have to certify that an exercise of the power is reasonably necessary to address the situation, and that it is a very appropriate addition.

Finally, the bill futureproofs immigration funding by creating options to share costs more fairly and sustainably across those who benefit from, or create risks for, the immigration system, or—with appropriate safeguards, including consultation—those who benefit from services in the wider community. Amendment Paper 445, passed by the House, made minor and technical changes that will ensure the workability of the electronic monitoring provisions. I look forward to those provisions being available. Electronic monitoring, where it is practicable, will be a very positive alternative for people who would otherwise have to be held in corrections remand facilities. There is a lot of work for both the Minister’s officials and corrections officials to operationalise electronic monitoring, which is why those aspects of this amendment bill will not come into effect until a year after Royal assent.

I would like to acknowledge the many submitters who engaged in the select committee process; their insights have strengthened the legislation. Also, on behalf of the Minister of Immigration, the Minister is very grateful to the Education and Workforce Committee, which undertook a thorough and thoughtful review, ensuring the bill reflects robust policy and serves the public interest. She also thanks her parliamentary colleagues for their constructive debate and careful consideration throughout all stages of this bill.

This is a balanced, forward-looking package of reforms that will help New Zealand manage risk, protect migrants, and maintain confidence in the integrity of our immigration system. I’m proud to commend this bill to the House.

The question is that the motion be agreed to.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. This bill is not perfect. The Labour Party would have preferred to see stronger safeguards—that is, clearer limits expressed in the legislation and stronger judicial oversight—on the new powers that allow the Minister of the day to cancel a residence visa of someone who is categorised as threat to national security; on the use of electronic monitoring; on the conduct of out-of-hours compliance visits, otherwise known as dawn raids; and, perhaps most importantly, on the detention of asylum seekers. But, on balance, we took the view that the positives in this bill—judicial oversight on the detention of asylum seekers, a new, bespoke regime that recognises the particular vulnerability of asylum seekers; the out-of-hours compliance regime, which requires a warrant of commitment; and a much stronger and clearer offence in law for people who seek or receive a premium for a job in order to get a visa as one of the ways of combating the exploitation of migrant workers.

On the other elements in the bill—the extended levy-making powers; the ability to cancel the visa of someone who’s classed as a threat to national security; the flexible powers, that is, the ability for the Minister to make a special direction for a whole class of people; and the provision around deportation and criminal offending—on all of those, Labour took the view that they, on balance, are probably useful and helpful additions to the system.

Why is this bill important? Well, around the world right now, immigration policy is a political dumpster fire. Right-wing populist parties in so many countries, but including in the United States and across Europe, have campaigned against and demonised refugees and migrants. Sadly, they have succeeded in so many places. Political parties who were once committed to the 1951 refugee convention are now engaged in a race to the bottom. It distresses me to see the UK Labour Party and other European social democratic parties engaging in that race.

New Zealand needs immigration. The demographic modelling is very clear; we can’t survive in the same political and economic form without more young, skilled, energetic, hard-working migrants coming here and helping us develop this country. We have so many industries that have structural labour shortages. We need migrants, and we need to get better at getting them here to make new lives.

Respect for human rights, the 1951 refugee convention, is part of the modern history of this country. The values that underpin it—welcoming people who are escaping genocide and persecution to come here and make successful lives and become great New Zealanders—are absolutely at the heart of who we are as a people. It pains me to see parties like New Zealand First in this Parliament deliberately mimicking the corrosive and devise anti-migrant rhetoric of the UK Reform party. When you add to that attention seekers like Brian Tamaki openly and deliberately using racist, anti-migrant rhetoric in a desire to get a few more dollars in the collection plate—this kind of political rhetoric gives permission to the racists to divide our society and do damage to our democracy.

In my view, the best thing that we can do as a country and as a Parliament is to strengthen, not weaken, our adherence and commitment to international human rights standards; secondly, to be constantly improving and fine tuning the immigration system in a way that makes it clear to the public that the system is fair, it is well administered in the interests of the people of this country, and, of course, of migrants, to retain that public confidence in the system.

It is incredibly important, in this Parliament and in New Zealand’s society, that the centre holds; that we maintain a consensus—hopefully, a cross-party consensus—in this Parliament that New Zealand needs migrants, that we are better for migration, that migrants make an overwhelmingly positive contribution to our country, and that we need to get better at welcoming them, helping them settle here and become great New Zealanders. How we welcome newcomers and how we make them feel and how well we assist them to settle goes to the heart of our values as New Zealanders and who we are as a nation.

Madam Speaker.

Apologies, I was just taking attention to some detail. Ricardo Menéndez March.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. We have more in common with asylum seekers and migrant workers than we do with billionaires and politicians on the other side of the House who seek to divide our communities and hand out billions of dollars to landlords, the fossil fuel industries, and the tobacco industry.

This is a Trojan Horse of a bill, because, for all the virtue signalling that we have heard from the previous members, the reality is that this bill is diminishing the rights of migrants and it also expands the liability of deportation for migrant communities. It also keeps painting refugees as though they are a security threat. When we hear narratives about the integrity of our immigration system and how important it is to manaaki migrants, why don’t these politicians, from whichever side of the House they come from, focus on genuinely improving the human rights of migrants, which, by the way, are not even recognised adequately in our Immigration Act, because the policies that come out of the Immigration Act are, effectively, exempt from the Human Rights Act. Migrants are actually not adequately protected in legislation when it comes to their human rights.

It’s really important to put it on the record that what this bill does is it creates additional tools for the Minister to, effectively, deport migrants. To say that this is about protecting migrants by, yep, adding an additional charge for charging premiums offshore and criminalising that while, at the very same time, gutting the supports that exploited migrants can receive is a joke. This is not a Government that takes migrant exploitation seriously, because, if they did, they would not have been cutting the length of time that someone can be on the migrant exploitation protection visa. It is simply not a serious Government when it comes to migrant exploitation and treating our migrant communities with the respect and dignity that they deserve.

On the Government side, we have had the New Zealand First party scapegoating migrant communities left, right, and centre. In fact, their whole whakapapa of a party has been on scapegoating migrant communities. On the other side, we have had the ACT Party, who have continuously scapegoated refugees and painted them as a security threat. Then, we’ve got National, who have not hesitated to use the language of the far right when it comes to “opening the floodgates”, in their language. I do want to say I’m incredibly disappointed that the Labour Party continues to support this kind of legislation, but, then again, I remember that as the Greens we have been fighting against unjust deportations, whether it’s a Labour or National Government.

The truth is that this came off the back of a mass arrivals bill that was not supported by human rights organisations. Introduced by the previous Labour Government—who refused to listen to the voices of human rights organisations who said, “Why this bill?”—they said, “Because we’ve got to prepare.”; in the same way the Government side has said, “We have got to prepare for mass arrivals.” But do you know what they have not prepared for? Our underfunded health system, our education system that is struggling to keep up with the needs of students, and our public housing stock. They prefer to use slogans of getting prepared for mass arrivals by boats or planes that have never happened and have not been able to be substantiated as an imminent threat.

The things that we do know we have to prepare for, they have failed to adequately resource. They have gutted our public housing infrastructure. They have gutted the ability for us to have inter-regional rail so that we can connect our towns and cities. Instead, they have given billions of dollars to the wealthy few and the companies that are wrecking our environment and our planet. If they are so serious about preparing for the actual risks that our country faces, they would be turning their heads to issues around infrastructure and the cost of living and the climate crisis, not this bill that seeks to continue treating migrant communities as a security threat, when most asylum seekers are actually lacking adequate support for them to be adequately settled in our communities.

To use one horrid attack in West Auckland as the one example to justify stripping residency from asylum seekers is honestly disgusting. We saw charities on the ground, as well as advocates, including a former Labour Party MP from a refugee background, who at the time rightfully pointed out that that attack should absolutely not be used to diminish the rights of asylum seekers. What do we have now? A bill that seeks to strip residency status from people who may have sought asylum if they are deemed to be a security threat.

When we talk about a security threat, it’s also disingenuous for the Government members to point to issues around terrorism, again, pretending that refugees pose a terrorist threat to our country. The definition of “security” in our legislation also includes issues in relationship to reputational damage, effectively, to our country, which could be weaponised against our communities. We have seen that in the past in the way that black and Middle Eastern communities have been weaponised and targeted by politicians on the other side of the House. Not that long ago in the previous National Government, we saw an Opposition that was also quite willing to scapegoat Asian communities for a housing crisis that we were experiencing—the political football of targeting migrants and refugees and using that as a distraction to not deal with the serious issues that we have at the time, like housing, like healthcare, which is actually supported by countless migrant workers, who simply want to be treated with respect and dignity and yet are experiencing unsafe staffing conditions.

Additionally, this bill seeks to try and remediate the cuts that the Government has made to our public services, like health and education, by charging migrants levies without recognising that migrant workers already contribute disproportionately to the tax base to the services that we all need and use. Why? Because migrants, especially in the first few years of being here in this country, are unable to access many of these services that we all need, yet they’re contributing in tax. Now, the Government, after gutting our healthcare system, after gutting our infrastructure, and instead passing that on to the wealthy few—

Repetition.

—have chosen to put in place levies. It’s interesting that Casey Costello, who tends to just use Philip Morris’ lines, says, “Repetition”, when, actually, in her contributions in relationship to this bill, she has failed to own up to the fact that her own leader has had a career of scapegoating migrants and refugees. All that she has said during her contributions has been slogans and completely frivolous contributions that do not address the issues in front of us. It’s actually disgusting that we have a New Zealand First Party that is quite happy to form a coalition with a National Party, who shows up to ethnic community events and does not own up to the fact that they have decided to form an agreement with the most anti-migrant, anti-refugee party in this Parliament.

The Green Party, instead of causing division by targeting migrant communities, is committing to taxing the wealthy few so that we can all have dignified lives, so that we can fund the public services that our communities need, instead of charging levies through this bill to make up for the cuts that they have made because they have realised they’re now having to make up for the shortfall due to the billions of dollars they have handed out to landlords and tobacco companies and the fossil fuel industry.

When it comes to electronic monitoring, it’s easy to say that it’s a better alternative to detention when it comes to mass arrivals when it was, once again, parties on both sides who supported having a mass arrivals regime. We tried to add additional protections for people subjected to electronic monitoring during the committee of the whole House stage. We tried to put in an amendment to exempt children from being subjected to electronic monitoring and that was not supported by the Government side. What that tells me is that they seem quite happy to have children escaping some of the most harrowing conditions that one can ever imagine being subjected to policies like electronic monitoring.

This Government paints these issues of asylum seekers as though we are receiving a huge amount of asylum seeking claims, but last year we had one asylum seeking case per 10 days. That’s a tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny fraction compared to the claims that countries like Canada, the US, and the UK see—extremely small amount compared to others. What we have as a country instead is an opportunity to boost the support systems and the judiciary, who can often help process those very same claims so that asylum seekers can be processed in a dignified manner, as opposed to pushing forward legislation that simply increases the liability of deportation and pretends that the Government cares about migrant exploitation, when every other action that they have taken tells us the exact opposite.

For example, they could have decoupled work visas from single employers to give migrant workers better mobility for when they are in exploitative situations, and they have chosen not to do so. Once again, the Green Party will keep fighting to hold both major parties to account for their policies on immigration and their track record of, when things get tough, pointing the finger at migrants instead of addressing the reality that we’ve got billionaires hoarding up a stupid amount of wealth at the expense of our communities and property speculators who continue making a buck while people go without. The Green Party does not support this bill and will fight to overhaul our immigration system so that it genuinely puts human rights at the centre of decision making.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I don’t know which bill that member was talking about, but I’m taking this call on the Immigration (Fiscal Sustainability and System Integrity) Amendment Bill. I’m taking this call on behalf of ACT to support this bill.

We know that immigration is important to our nation, but immigration doesn’t mean open borders for anyone and everyone. I know that is what the Green Party wants—open borders for anyone and everyone. They don’t care about national security. They don’t care about the safety of our communities. They don’t care about an immigration system supporting our economic activity. They don’t care about those things.

Point of order.

All they want is—

I take personal offence at the imputation that we don’t care about national security. I take offence at the comment—

You can’t take personal offence on behalf of a group of people.

I take personal offence. I’m part of the group that was mentioned.

Wait for a sec. I’ll just take some advice from the Clerk. OK, so the advice I have received is that, because this is a wide-ranging debate and the member himself has been wide-ranging in his comments as well, in terms of his references to other political parties, that is also afforded to other political parties to be wide-ranging. But I would ask the House to not be personal in your comments.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. Resuming from where I left off, we do really care about national security. We care about supporting our economy, and we do care about supporting our community. We want to see that our immigration system is healthy and that it’s not compromising the safety of our communities or the safety of our nation. That is why we want to see that our borders are managed in the way we need to. We are learning new things in the immigration system, and we know that people are applying different kinds of mechanisms. They are becoming really innovative to dodge the system, so we have to keep up and we have to make sure that our legislation is able to keep up as well. That is why this bill is so important.

The other thing the Green member spoke about is the exploitation visa. He is concerned about the exploitation visa. On this side, we are trying to stop exploitation. We are actually working on the root problem rather than creating the problem and then seeing how we can solve that problem which has been created and let that problem be created on an even bigger scale. We don’t want that problem to be created on a bigger scale, but we want to see that we are minimising that problem, and that is why we are ensuring this bill goes through, which is about the integrity of our immigration system.

These policies are great—good policies are good—but if there are no compliance checks, there is no point in having good policies. That is why we have put some provisions in this for compliance checks as well. But, yes, of course, for out-of-hours warrants for compliance checks, there is going to be additional oversight through this legislation.

The final point I want to make—I’m not going through all the changes that this bill is making. The other point which I’m really happy to see in this bill is that we know that a lot of people, those who misuse our immigration system to bring people from overseas, those who really want to be here in New Zealand who can’t come through the normal legal channels so they are enticed to pay for a job offer which doesn’t exist—so these people, those who pay for those jobs, come here to New Zealand; they are not filling the genuine gap that we have in our businesses. They are here as surplus people, I would say, because they just want to be here in New Zealand and we want to stop that activity—charging premiums. Whether it happens here or it happens overseas, that needs to be stopped, and we want to see that our immigration system is bringing people—those who are genuinely filling a gap in our economic activity.

Overall, I would say it’s a great bill, and any party that cares about our immigration system being a sound system should support this bill. The ACT Party is really happy to support this. Thank you, Mr Speaker.

I rise to speak on the Immigration (Fiscal Sustainability and System Integrity) Amendment Bill. New Zealand First has always stood for a sustainable immigration system that serves the interests of our people and safeguards the vulnerable ones from exploitation. Before entering this House, I was actively involved in both investigation and advocating for exploited migrants, and I was invoking a lot of resource and energy in terms of providing the protections from exploitation that immigrants often need to have. It is from this experience that I appreciate how important these pieces of legislation are.

New Zealand First’s manifesto has consistently emphasised the need for integrity in the immigration system and a fairer cost sharing so that New Zealanders are not unfairly burdened. This allows the system to be sustainable. It is important in this House that we stand on our record of what we’ve delivered and how we’ve achieved for the betterment of this system, and I think this piece of legislation will deliver exactly that. We have a track record that shows we are committed to ensuring that exploitation is eradicated from our country, that our immigration system is sustainable, fair, and transparent, and that we are prepared for any event should we need to address the fairness of our system. Therefore, I commend this bill to the House.

Just for clarity for the House, if Te Pāti Māori is not here, that call drops down to the bottom and people compete for it at the end. It will then go to the next call, and this is a split call with Te Pāti Māori and the Green Party.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. This is a shameful bill, and we are proud as the only party in Parliament that opposes this particular bill.

What this bill does is it creates fear. It wants to divide and conquer and create a distraction from the fact that this Government and successive Governments have not put enough funding into our core infrastructure and public systems. This is creating an ICE-lite of the US by saying, “You know what? We don’t want the judiciary to actually exercise discretion—the legal experts of this country to exercise discretion—what we want, instead, is to make sure that that power is held with Immigration New Zealand, so that way, they can deport people as they wish.”

The fact that they have changed the language from “convicted” into “guilty” and also “found guilty” as well as “pleaded guilty” is shameful. Legal experts have submitted to say that the status quo is sufficient. The broadening is not going to be—and there’s no evidence to say that the broadening of this is going to be—good. This is not going to be a bill that is going to be palatable for my communities, because my communities are the ones who are going to be affected—not someone who, apparently, says that they will categorically support the bill for their leader, just to turn around and say they don’t support it two days later.

This is a bill that just basically says that we don’t trust the law and order system that we have here in Aotearoa. We don’t trust the decision of the judges—unless the judge is taking a punitive approach, in which case, you know what, they are doing a great job! What this bill does is look at punishing children. It is going to make sure that people who have already suffered from trauma are going to be further traumatised.

As we are seeing in this bill, we are seeing that hapū and iwi have not been consulted as a part of this. Te Tiriti is not a part of this. There is no part of this bill that talks about manaakitanga as a core principle of the Treaty of Waitangi, because when people are coming here, rather than taking the approach that we should be taking, instead, we’re saying “Don’t you dare do anything. Don’t you dare express the fact that you have also suffered trauma.”

We have just recently seen what we have done in terms of the abuse in State care. The Greens have also been incredibly vocal of the fact that we want to break some of these vicious cycles that we’re seeing. Yet, in this bill, we’re seeing that same level of care, that same level of understanding, has not been extended to asylum seekers, to refugees, to migrants—and the fact that every other party in Parliament is supporting this, which is shameful. All of you are happy to go to meetings and community events and celebrations and pose with ethnic communities to get a photo, to get their vote, but when the time comes to speak for, or on behalf of, our communities, you shy away; you stay silent.

You know what, this is something that is going to create a double tax system. You’re saying that migrants are coming here, they are working, they are residents, they are doing all this, they are paying tax dollars—but that is not good enough for you; they should be paying an additional levy on top of it because they are putting our health system and public education system in burden. You know what? So does decades—decades—of underfunding in the education and health systems. That is why that is. Stop scapegoating my communities—stop scapegoating my communities. Seriously, this is something that we have seen over and again.

The previous speaker, Ricardo Menéndez March, has spoken about the fact that we are seeing these sorts of bills coming through regardless of who is in power. During the committee of the whole House stage, people in this very party—regardless of who you are—have raised concerns over some parts, yet they still support this bill. They are happy with the fact that levies are going to be used not for the purpose of a levy but as an extra tax for migrant communities. That is shameful. At what part of this bill—at what part of being a New Zealander—is it OK for us to do that to one group? Why, at the same time as we’re giving $2.9 billion to landlords, $200 million to offshore oil and gas, and $200 million to the tobacco industry?

The Greens will fight for migrants, and we will not support this bill—and, apparently, we’re the only party here who are willing to do that.

Thanks, Mr Speaker, for giving me the opportunity to speak on the final reading of this bill. I just want to again acknowledge the great work of the Education and Workforce Committee. We clearly did good work in terms of the amendments, and that was talked about both in the second reading and in the committee stage. Therefore, I want to commend it to the House.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. First of all, I want to acknowledge the emotion in the House today, particularly from my Green colleagues, but also from my ACT colleagues, I think. Obviously, this is the kind of bill that that becomes an issue in, and I would suggest that it has, in fact, been a robust debate throughout, where really the whole issue and the issues in this bill have been canvassed robustly by this House, and that’s what we’re here to do.

I support this bill, and I want to talk about why. The first thing I want to talk about is something that has not been talked a lot about but was talked about in the committee of the whole House stage, and that is the issue around premiums of employment. I’m talking about that because I know a little bit about it from a practical level. When I was an employment lawyer, I had this case when I was relatively new to the profession. I had three Indian chefs who had been kicked out of their employment when they had attempted to join the union. The employer had kept their passports, and they were in a really difficult position with regard to immigration. We told their tale in what was, I think, the Employment Tribunal at the time, rather than the Employment Relations Authority, and we had an interpreter tell their tale. Their tale included that they had given premiums to the employer, and the tribunal member at the time dismissed this out of hand. They said, “That’s just ridiculous. That wouldn’t happen.” The interpreter stepped out of the role as interpreter because he was so shocked. He said, “Excuse me, sir, but this happens all the time. This is called ‘bakshish’—this happens all the time.”

I look back on that case, because it had some other features that were pretty shocking. These guys were working 92.5 hours a week, they were working through dinner and lunch, and they were living on the premises. Their work was dismissed by the employer, who said they weren’t really doing anything at all—they were layabouts, and they were lying, etc. We had a contract that had a company seal for one price, which had been given to immigration, and a company seal on another price per week’s work on another. The tribunal awarded an amount under the minimum wage for the first 40 hours but refused to allow any extra money for the extra hours worked, because there was no requirement under the law for that. These are the things that make relationships like that exploitative. I think back to that time, and I think, “If only we had taken it seriously—if only that tribunal member had taken it seriously.” Because it was outside of the norms and values of that time, the tribunal member just immediately sided in that way with the employer and thought that these people were lying and making it up. It was just beyond his experience.

I’m glad to see the law catch up a little bit here, and it’s a really good lesson for me. I think there would have been a lot less pain if we had taken it seriously. I think some of the concerns that the Green Party have expressed about exploitation are very real. We haven’t nailed this one; there’s a lot further that we can go to make sure that people are not trapped in exploitative situations as migrants in this country. There are other places we can go.

I think we have to come to this from a realistic point of view, and I wanted to talk about the other situation that I know a little bit about. That is the situation of the New Lynn stabbing. That was a situation where people knew that the person involved was radicalised; they knew he was very dangerous; he was an asylum seeker. They were in a very difficult situation. The judges were in a difficult situation with regard to him being—I think he’d spent more time in prison on remand than he could be kept on for. The police were in a really difficult situation, and I think they had two officers constantly tracking that man, because they were just waiting for the bomb to go off, basically. That would not only have cost people a lot of money doing that, but people were in real danger, and there was a real price to pay.

These freedoms are very important to the Labour Party, in terms of making sure that there is a balance—but there is a balance. There are victims in this situation—and that’s not scaremongering. It’s something we have to be responsible about in this House. We have to think our way around really hard problems. We can’t always stand on the moral high ground if there are going to be real victims in the situation. In that case, we didn’t have the law right, and people paid a really high price. I think it’s really important that we think around this and that we don’t let our sense of moral rightness get in the way of looking around a problem. These are tough problems.

I want to come to probably the one I struggled with the most, which is the “mass arrivals”. That’s a hard thing to do—it’s really hard—and we will have supporters, in the Labour Party, who will be upset by this and not think that we’ve got it right. What I would say to those people, and to the ones who didn’t support us who are in the same position, is that this is a piece of legislation that attempts, again, to deal with the reality of the situation. We are in a time of great crisis where people will travel a long way to get away from oppressive situations and from desperate economic situations—they will take enormous risk—and we will struggle to cope when they arrive on our shores, and we will do our best to make sure that they are treated justly in those situations. It won’t be a case where we will close our eyes to that situation. These are very real predicaments that we face as a country.

I for one would like to see us take on a lot more refugees in this country and expand our definitions. I for one see that as being a pathway to reaching out to a world that’s in crisis. I’d love to do that, and I’d like to put my actual energy into making sure that we actually do reach out to people in those countries—not only to refugees coming to our own country but as supporters of their capacity to stay in their own countries. From what I understand, most refugees would actually rather be at home. That’s their predominant wish—to go home—and I get that. I think that’s really important. We need to not close ourselves off in New Zealand.

I appreciate that we can be subject to a lot of forces at the moment that are quite evil—they’re quite fear-based. I don’t intend to suddenly succumb to those kinds of fears, and I don’t intend to encourage them in others, but I think it’s incredibly important that we have a realistic law with realistic boundaries that actually helps protect that. People won’t get fearful if they don’t have examples of not feeling safe. That’s a really important part of what we’re doing here. We’re assuring people that we learnt the lessons from something like the New Lynn situation, where we’re responding to it because of the actual reality of the world we live in, which is not ideal. Not everybody is a saint.

I am wanting to say that I think the debate in here over this bill has been robust. You saw how carefully my friend Ingrid Leary went through the bill and asked questions, and you have seen it be tenacious, but we’ve ended up with a bill that we’re supporting, and that’s why we’re not joining the Greens in opposition to the bill—because this is reality. We hope that this bill deals with it, if not perfectly, then in a way that is thoughtful and is compassionate.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I commend the bill to the House.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I’d just, like others, acknowledge that this isn’t an easy area to make policy in. We’ve struck a few bills that have similar themes to this, much like the Crimes (Countering Foreign Interference) Amendment Bill that this House debated as well. It is a question of really looking at security interests and balancing those against the rights interests that clearly also exist.

I do spend a fair amount of time speaking to parts of our migrant community and our former refugee community in Auckland. Whenever I’m speaking about the immigration space, I find myself using the words “the God grant” when I talk about the discretion that the Minister has, and that’s really because of two reasons: firstly, because the discretion itself, even under the current legislation, is incredibly broad. The Minister has really robust powers to make decisions without providing reasons in the current legislation. The other reason I call it a “God grant” is because those powers have this impossible ability not just to affect the lives of individuals but to affect the lives of generations to come.

I think about when the Hon Phil Twyford was the Minister for Immigration and Kabul fell. Within days, our Government stood up a system to look at who needed to come to New Zealand urgently and set up a system of visas to do so. I think about the families that I know now who have children who will grow up as Kiwis—so, again, “the God grant” seems like a fitting way to term these extraordinary powers in what is rather an extraordinary Act. We did, of course, the same with Ukraine, and there will be Ukrainian children who grow up as New Zealanders as well.

As it is “the God grant”, it’s also “the God grant” when a Minister decides not to use their powers, as we’ve seen here this term when the Minister hasn’t set up a system in response to the humanitarian crisis and the unfolding genocide we’ve seen in Gaza. Extraordinary discretionary powers, and probably, if you look at the set of legislation, some of the broadest powers that you will see in terms of how it can impact people’s lives, which is why several of my amendments at committee stage tried to not provide an anchor on the discretion—I would say they would provide more of a compass in terms of guiding the Minister’s discretion, to direct the Minister to turn their mind to our obligations under the Genocide Convention, under international human rights law and humanitarian law.

I say this all to make a very simple point, which is: although those amendments weren’t accepted into the bill, those obligations still exist. As this bill becomes an Act, certainly on our side of the House, we will be looking to ensure that the Minister, when they’re exercising discretion under these very broad “God grant” powers, is turning their mind to international human rights law, humanitarian law, and our obligations under the rights system here.

I raised a number of amendments trying to include them, but I also raised a point at the end about the imposition of conditions on people who were released into the community and that there was potentially some unfairness around that. The Minister’s response was that that wasn’t a penalty, and I was listening intently. I would just say that there is a trend, internationally, of recognition in some jurisdictions of the fact that even when something is framed as a civil penalty in the law, it can feel like a criminal penalty in truth. I know that that has happened, for example, in the US, where it’s been said that labelling a sanction as a civil sanction is not determinative of its status, but also in Canada, where the Canadian Supreme Court has rejected the argument—it also noted that it was possible, in some cases, for non-criminal sanctions to be considered punishment for the purpose of double jeopardy, and the same in the European Court. Those human rights interpretations, in my view, are also very, very important.

The final thing I’d say is that my view is that this is one of those bills that should be reviewed, and it should be reviewed very soon once we’ve seen how it operates in the context of those human rights principles.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. It would do well for one party in particular in this House to remember a tried and true saying: a failure to plan is a plan to fail. This bill is about planning. I commend it to the House.

Often when we’re out in the electorate, we get asked as MPs why there isn’t more cross-party collaboration. It’s quite tricky sometimes to explain that if the Government of the day is setting an agenda and then expecting everyone to agree, that is not collaboration. However, today, I think as parliamentarians we can be proud that what we have seen is a truly cross-party collaboration and bipartisan journey that started actually under the previous Government and shows pretty good lawmaking.

I think that the indicator of that is that we’ve landed on something that is not perfect, as the Hon Phil Twyford said, but it is something that probably all of us can live with—apart, perhaps, from our friends in the Greens. When I look at the way they have characterised this debate, they have expressed moral outrage at what they see as an impingement on human rights and a targeting of immigrants. I don’t share that view, but I do have to say that I was very suspicious of this bill when it was first discussed under our Government. What I wanted to know was, really, what is the problem we’re trying to solve here? Is this something that is American or Trumpian in its intended impact? Is it hysterical or is there going to be a real problem?

As times have continued, we have seen continuing issues on the high seas involving asylum seekers and pirates. We have continued to see the huge immigration problems in Europe. Then, I’m also reminded of our own recent history with the really unfortunate stabbing in Auckland. We must remember our immigrant communities, but we also must remember the communities that have been impacted by that event and the sovereign inability to deal with a very high-risk known situation. That is something that was a gap in our law.

We can also go back to the Tampa scenario of 2001 when we did have a mass asylum, effectively, because there were the refugees on the Tampa, the Norwegian container ship that happened to be near Australian waters. There was an impending election in Australia. Those people were rejected from there and sent to Nauru. There were hundreds of people on board, and 43 children, and 133 of those were eventually accepted into New Zealand by the compassionate decision-making, in my view, of the then Prime Minister, the Rt Hon Helen Clark, who has talked about that event as one of her proudest decisions.

When we talk about the contribution of some of the people from these communities who have endured real hardship and been shown manaaki in New Zealand, we have Abbas Nazari, who went on to become an international scholar who settled in New Zealand. They have gone on to have families, as Vanushi Walters has said, so that we have descendants of people who have benefited from the manaakitanga that we have shown and who in turn have contributed immensely to our society—the fabric of our society and the richness of our society.

The problem is, as the previous speaker said, the failure to plan is planning to fail. If I look at what the Green Party are suggesting, if I think of the counterfactual about not having a system, in fact, I think we will end up with a situation, if there is a mass asylum scenario, where it will be way more unfair for the people trying to enter New Zealand. It will be considerably more arbitrary. They will be more exposed to human rights abuses, and I’m sure that that is the last thing the Green members would want. I think it’s really important for us to be pragmatic and understand that this is not a fiction; this is a real risk. It may be a low risk, but it is a real risk, and that is why we need to have a solution which may not be perfect but which we can all live with.

Having said that, I do agree with the comments from my colleagues that we would have liked to have seen some more caveats on some of the extended powers. There are ministerial powers that have been extended, and they haven’t had the proportionate oversight or accountability, in my view, so we will need to keep an eye on that.

Also, we did see, I think, in terms of looking at a cross-party approach, the really diligent manner with which this bill has gone not only through the House but through the Education and Workforce Committee and a Minister of Immigration who seemed very engaged and willing to listen and to make amendments, particularly around the electronic monitoring situation. We did have amendments and also recommendations that came out of the select committee which discussed the concern that they would be a boundary protection tool rather than a containment tool. That is indeed what we have managed to land on, which is quite a big shift from what was originally proposed, and I think that shows the democratic system working effectively.

I too would like to have seen the Minister perhaps have more influence in her own executive when it came to the application of what Vanushi Walters has described as the “God powers” when it comes to visas being able to be granted to the families of those who are suffering in Gaza. I have been continually in contact with many families in my own electorate. We have a lot of Palestinian families down in Dunedin. They have been to hell and back, quite frankly, over the last couple of years.

One of my dear Palestinian friends has gone to the bedside of her incredibly ill father in Gaza with no certainty about the visa status of family members there and also of her own immediate family. That is a failure of this Government, in my view, to do the right thing and to afford the access to families and use those “God powers” in a way. Now, I’m not suggesting that’s the Minister’s fault. I just don’t understand why the Minister perhaps doesn’t have the influence to be able to make that happen when that would be the right thing to do—and she’s very aware of the concerns from my community.

I’m also a little concerned that a New Zealand Bill of Rights Act vet doesn’t appear to have been done on this bill. That would have been ideal, particularly given all the competing rights that were involved here. What we did see through the committee of the whole House, right near the end, was that there could be either an unintentional or an intentional extension of conditions on people who may not normally have that requirement legally, as a result of the way the schedules operate. We did ask the Minister in the chair at the time, the Hon Casey Costello, to explain whether that was intentional or unintentional, because if it was intentional, that would be rather sinister in my view. If it was unintentional, then it would have been an opportunity to fix that up. Vanushi Walters spoke very clearly about the way that could be done. In fact, she dropped an amendment on to the Table that would have tidied that up really nicely, but unfortunately we didn’t see that.

I want to agree with some of the things that the Greens have said, because I do think that they are real concerns in our country about the type of support that we offer to refugees. While I support the comments from my colleague Helen White about needing to up the number of refugees that we take—because the world is in such a conflicted and vexed and precarious situation—we also do need to ensure that we have resourcing so that they cannot be re-traumatised by their experience of coming into New Zealand. I don’t think we have those resources even at the right level currently and we need to make sure that we do so. Better mental health supports, for example, might be able to avoid the situation that we saw in Auckland last year. There are no guarantees for that in PTSD-type situations, but at least mitigating the risks around mental health scenarios would be really important.

Also, not just assuming that migrant communities are going to be dropped into a particular city because that’s where many of their community are. I know, for example, for many of our rainbow community, they would actually rather be in communities away from immediate families or connections where LGBTQI+ rights are a difficult conversation in their own countries.

We do need more resourcing, we do need to show a bit more love, I think, to our refugee communities, but, ultimately, one of the best ways we can do this when it comes to mass arrivals, in my view, is to make sure that we have a well-considered and thoughtful system that treats people fairly and humanely, that protects national security, and gives them every judicial process available that we can to make sure we are treating them with dignity and compassion. I commend the bill.

I commend this bill to the House.

Kia ora, Mr Speaker. It’s a privilege—and it’s a heavy privilege—to stand and speak to this legislation this afternoon. I was in the House last night and a lot of today listening to the arguments, listening to the critique of this legislation. Again, it is not words on a page but the lives of people and of communities, as we’ve heard about. We’ve heard people talking about their own electorates and about the migrant refugee families that will be impacted, potentially, or their whānau from across the seas.

I reflect on what we’re talking about this afternoon, and I think of the privilege we have to live in these Shaky Isles, the privilege we have to live in such a beautiful place at the bottom of the world, a place of peace and tranquillity, and a place that people want to come to, because for so many people around the world, there is not peace, there is not tranquillity; there is struggle, there is famine, there is war, there is persecution, and the list goes on.

As has been said by the Hon Phil Twyford, our lead on this legislation, and by the speakers that followed from the Labour Party, we do support this bill. We do say it’s not perfect, but we know that we need to put things in place to ensure that there are protections and that those migrants, those coming in, are looked after.

As I look at the words and the different clauses of this bill, I just want to make a point around the 1951 refugee convention. Again, we’ve moved so far into the 21st century and beyond that convention that we just need to pause and again remind ourselves of what we are doing as a nation in terms of our responsibility to refugees, to those who don’t have the privilege that we have in this space. As I listened this morning and this afternoon, there were nine amendments to the Immigration Act, and, again, these were about ensuring that we improve and fine-tune the immigration system.

We did some work in the previous Government on these changes, and I think we could say that, yes, we have a party that is opposing it, but when it comes to the majority of the House, we’ve landed in a place where we can agree and we can move forward. Some of that is to look at the broadness of a piece of legislation like this, even though it’s around a specific group in terms of refugees or those coming to New Zealand.

It is interesting as I look through the bill and look at things like the ministerial powers that this will provide around granting visa applications. When I look at the criminal offending and the deportation changes that it brings, the challenges when it comes to the need to potentially cancel somebody’s residence or visa-class application, and when it’s looking at the out-of-hours warrants—and we talked about electronic monitoring, and it is a challenge. As my colleague Vanushi Walters said, this piece of legislation, if it does pass this afternoon, which I assume it will, is legislation we would and should revisit in the years to come to make sure that we aren’t overstepping the mark, to make sure that this isn’t something that goes unchecked. I would rather not have someone locked up in a prison. I would rather not have someone on electronic monitoring, but it’s a better position than being in prison.

We look at asylum seekers and the reason they would want to come here, as I said at the start of my contribution, and we need to ensure that we modernise the laws of this place. Again, the last bit is around the immigration levies and what that looks like.

This is a small piece of legislation that can potentially have a big impact, and we hope that is for a good reason, and that it does protect refugees, those coming into our country. We have privilege and we have diversity in this country, and we should share it with others, and we should be open. Therefore, I commend this bill to the House.

I present a legislative statement on the Legal Services (Distribution of Special Fund) Amendment Bill.

That legislative statement is published under the authority of the House and can be found on the Parliament website.

I move, That the Legal Services (Distribution of Special Fund) Amendment Bill be now read a second time.

I would like to, firstly, give my strong and sincere thanks to the ever-hard-working and robust Justice Committee for your consideration of the bill. The committee only seems to have gained in strength and skill over the past 10 months, so I want to congratulate them for the work they’ve done on this bill. The committee recommended unanimously that the bill be passed with only one change, and that is to the commencement date. That is because the original date has since passed, so I think that’s a pretty sensible change to recommend, and one which I’m sure all members will support.

This Government is committed to an effective and efficient justice system, and community legal services play an important role in promoting access to justice. The amendments in the bill are necessary to support the long-term funding of organisations that deliver community legal services by clarifying how the Lawyers and Conveyancers Special Fund can be used.

The special fund works by collecting interest from banks on solicitors’ and licensed conveyancers’ nominated trust accounts. Money in the special fund must be paid to the Secretary for Justice for the purpose of funding community law centres; however, as the law currently stands, it is narrowly framed. It’s actually unclear whether the special fund can be used to meet other expenses incurred by community law centres in the provision of those services, such as their overheads.

Without the special fund, Crown funding or other sources, like donations, have to be used. This bill makes a narrow but important change to provide that certainty to community law centres that money from the special fund can be used to meet these indirect expenses. It does not affect the core purpose of the special fund, which is to fund community law centres. The change will support sustainable access to legal services within our communities around the country. I commend it to the House.

The question is that the motion be agreed to.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. First of all, I want to recognise the really important work that community law centres do. They’re an important part of access to justice in New Zealand, and the special fund that the Minister’s just referred to—the Lawyers and Conveyancers’ Special Fund—is, of course, the way in which they are funded.

I guess it is interesting that, last night, we were doing a statutes amendment bill which was full of tweaks and clarifications, and yet here we have a bill which has one substantive clause and is purportedly a tidy-up because the original legislation wasn’t “sufficiently clear”. Why we need to trouble the House with a single bill for a tidy-up rather than putting it in a statutes amendment bill—either the one that we’ve just seen or I know there’s another one which is waiting in the wings—why we couldn’t do that, I don’t know.

The other question: I was always perplexed—and I never got a good answer to at select committee, to be perfectly honest—as to why this bill is even needed, because the way the whole framework operates is the money from lawyers’ trust accounts goes firstly to the New Zealand Law Society, and then it goes into a special fund which is administered by the Ministry of Justice, and then the Ministry of Justice purchases services—legal services—from community law centres so they can enter into the various contracts with community law centres around the country.

I don’t know who it was, but someone seemed to think that when you purchase community services—and if this is the precedent, there’s going to be a whole lot of contracts around the country for all kinds of services which are in in trouble—but the idea is that, whilst the existing law says you can purchase community legal services, apparently it wasn’t clear enough that that includes ancillary services, so all of the things that go alongside it, things that support; for example, computer systems, administrative staff, library systems, and all of those things that are a necessary part—an absolutely necessary part—of providing community legal services.

Of course, the other thing is Community Law Centres of Aotearoa, which is the overarching body—the idea of an organising and coordinating body across community law centres and whether, in fact, that could be purchased out of the special fund, because it didn’t strictly fit in with the phrase the “purchase of community legal services”. Now, to be perfectly honest, I can’t accept that when you enter into a contract for purchasing a service, you’re not also empowered to purchase those things which are necessary for the service to be provided. Whether it be community legal services or social work services or drug and alcohol addiction services, all of those things have a necessary administrative framing around them. But somewhere in the Ministry of Justice, I think some over-enthusiastic lawyer—I mean, there’s far too many of those, we know—has come up with the idea that purchasing community legal services is a narrow thing. You know, I get it: you’re dealing with Crown funds. Well, actually, you’re not; you’re dealing with funds from lawyers’ trust accounts.

That’s actually an important point that I would point out—that sometimes the Ministry of Justice seems to deal with this special fund as if it’s its own money. It’s not. It’s money which must be spent on community legal services. They are simply a clearing house for those funds, and they perhaps need to take a slightly different approach, because it’s not an appropriation. One of the things, when we read the Budget and look at the provision of funds to Community Law Centres of Aotearoa, it doesn’t appear in the Budget, because it’s not an appropriation. It comes from an entirely different way. There are occasionally—or there have been occasions where—the Government has topped up the special fund, in which case, obviously, an appropriation is needed.

The kind of rigour that the Public Finance Act might bring to an appropriation line in the Budget is not the kind of rigour you necessarily need when you’re purchasing community legal services from funds from the special fund—a fund which comes from lawyers’ trust accounts. The main point is this could have been in the Statutes Amendment Bill—

Exactly.

—thank you, Vanushi Walters—and we probably don’t even need to be here anyway, but here we are.

I guess the other thing is this: here we are under urgency, right? They want to keep cracking on with this; they want to go straight into the committee of the whole House stage when we have a lot of questions. Yet it’s about as urgent—well, it’s just not urgent. I mean, it’s a really good example of how this Government does, in fact, use urgency for non-urgent work. This is a thing—an issue—that’s been floating around for a while. It’s a short bill and it could have gone on any Order Paper, but no—they’ve put it in here under the auspices of urgent business, and it’s simply not urgent.

I guess the other thing I’ve just observed here is that the special fund—it’s worth just examining it in the longer term. In fact, there’s other work around the special fund that would have been far more useful, and in particular, the amount of the interest or the split of the interest, because lawyers’ trust accounts, in fact, have hundreds of millions of dollars in them at any one time. Banks love that because that’s money that they can take—you know, that’s just sitting there—and use as, essentially, their float, and lend money out and so on; make good money on it. They are therefore required to pay an appropriate rate of interest on it into the special fund, but the way it’s done is that 60 percent of that interest goes to the special fund and 40 percent goes to the bank in their back pocket, notionally for the administrative costs of administering trust accounts.

Well, that was done way back, I think, in—when was that?—2008, when the Law Practitioners Act turned into the Lawyers and Conveyancers Act, and arguably there was some administration, but the administrative burden of administering trust accounts now is extremely low. If you look at it, the banks are getting about $10 million a year from the special fund in profits, and that is eye-watering. I think it works out—I’ve done the numbers and, I think, from memory, it was about $10,000 per account that the banks get to keep. That’s $10 million that could usefully go into the community—ideally, I suppose, because it’s lawyers’ trust accounts, for legal services to the needy.

But look, if the Government is determined to proceed with this bill—and the other thing I would note and that I’ll raise later is: if the Government has been funding the ancillary services—as it says, the other services which support the provision of community legal services—is there a validity problem, and how are they addressing that? If the Government has entered into contracts without authority, then we’ve got a problem on our hands. This bill doesn’t seem to have any validation. It’s quite common to see validation bills, right—local government muck things up all the time; we’re constantly validating their actions—but there’s no validation aspect to this bill. That’s something I really want to interrogate and understand a bit later on.

But I do want to make clear that we absolutely support the work of community law centres. A little shout-out to Sue Moroney, who has been the chief executive of Community Law Centres of Aotearoa and has stepped down, given a new role that she’s got, I think, on Hamilton City Council.

So, yes, we’re going to support this bill, but if you’re going to bring it through urgency, a bill that isn’t urgent could have been in the Statutes Amendment Bill. We’ll give it a working-over and see where we go to from there.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I think I just want to pick up on, first of all, the previous speaker’s, the Hon Dr Duncan Webb’s, point that this bill is being brought back to the House under urgency. But I also think that there is a level of symmetry there, because, if the Hon Dr Duncan Webb remembers, this bill was introduced under urgency in June, and one of the questions that we had back then was: why was it introduced under urgency in the first place? I mean, yeah, I guess, on one hand, tangentially, you can have budgetary implications, but, again, the budgetary implication of this bill is about as removed from the rest of the bill that is needed, potentially under urgency, as it comes.

Then here we are, under urgency again, going through the remaining stages. I think the first thing I do want to mention and kind of pick up on is that during the initial urgency, because it was the first time that we were able to see the bill, the Green Party did oppose the bill out of caution. In the first reading, I spoke on the necessity of this bill in the first place and whether there is something more to it than initially meets the eye. Because, again, it was introduced under urgency. There wasn’t any form of a regulatory impact statement at that stage that I could see. However, as the Hon James Meager mentioned before, there was a very robust, you know, Justice Committee process. Again, props to the Justice Committee for the work that they do on a variety of different bills—but this is one of them that had a lot of consideration by that select committee during the select committee process.

So in terms of some of these contexts—yes, in terms of the legal services distribution of the special fund—we are looking at, particularly, the special fund that is done through the Lawyers and Conveyancers Act 2006, which provides money into the special fund that must be paid to the Secretary for Justice for the purpose of funding community law centres. I’ll talk a little bit more about the purpose and some of the details of the fund, which we were able to obtain as part of that select committee process. But just in terms of the select committee, there were 13 submissions on this particular bill—sorry, 19 written submissions on this particular bill. Then we’ve had quite a few people who opposed this bill, interestingly. I think the most important oral submission was done by Community Law Centre Aotearoa—CLCA—which is appropriate since this is one of the bills that affects them the most.

In terms of the submissions, I think it’s important to note that while there were some submissions that opposed this bill, they were partly out of the scope of the bill in their opposition. But, nevertheless, both themes in the opposition is deserving of some highlighting in the second reading.

I think the first theme that took place as part of that is: what does it mean in terms of less funding for direct community legal service? One of the ones I can think of immediately is the Citizens Advice Bureau (CAB), for example, which also offers a different kind of service, but also is an important service to this area. They also do a lot of work in terms of educating the communities on some of the legal issues or awareness things around the Privacy Act, etc. But this highlights the importance when it comes to things like access to justice, which is one of the core priorities for the Greens when we’re looking at this, because, again, I think many of us, or all of us, should, hopefully, unanimously agree that the rule of law and equity in access to justice is something that is paramount when we’re looking at the legal system. But, again, at this stage, we don’t see that equitability when it comes to the justice system, and both our community law centres that this bill affects as well as the CAB fulfils some of those and fulfils a requirement, as well as the legal aid, which fulfils various requirements for our communities to be able to have that if people aren’t able to pay for lawyers in the first place.

So that’s one of the first things. I think that it is outside of the scope of this bill, but it does highlight an issue that we need to address more broadly when we’re looking at other concerns—for example, when we’re setting the Budget for various community organisations. Again, because this bill was introduced in the Budget in May, it’s appropriate to also bring the Budget into the conversation here in the second reading.

Also, the other, I guess, theme, when it comes to opposition, is around what it means for any particular ring-fencing from a Māori and Māori law perspective. I also think that in that case it is also important, I guess, to note that while the bill itself doesn’t really address this particular area, but through conversations with CLCA, CLCA does have a very big focus not only regionally dependent because it very much depends on the need of the communities—but the equity impact or Māori-led service deliveries is something that is quite prominent within CLCA, depending on where you are. With that, I do want to give a special shout-out to the Community Law Centre Aotearoa in Rotorua. That particular CLCA, for example, does deal with a lot of the cases around the Māori Land Court, for example.

So it is, again, one of the things that the submitters have raised as part of the submission process that deserves highlighting, and it’s something that we should always consider, as with any policy setting or legislation—to ensure that we consider the equitability for Māori and how Te Tiriti o Waitangi and He Whakaputanga also centre in a lot of the decisions that we make.

Finally, I mentioned in the beginning that we, as the Justice Committee, did want to get some more information as a part of that process, on exactly what are some of the fundings that has been available, and what are some of the, I guess, relationships between the Crown and how the special fund, in this case, is used. I think it’s important as part of that select committee process that we are looking at the fact that, in cases where—OK, so, I guess, to start with, when we’re looking at the Lawyers and Conveyancers Act, it does set out how the special fund is used. In that particular legislation, section 301(5) allows banks to retain 40 percent of all interest payable on nominated trust accounts, but with an agreement that the CLCA has an arrangement in place with five of the commercial banks to receive an additional 20 percent of interest on lawyers’ nominal bank accounts.

This is what is being used to fund the 24 community law centres, and I think this is where, I guess, the initial concern and the initial purpose and the reason that the Minister of Justice brought this bill to the attention of the House and it was introduced in the House: it is around the contractual relationship under that particular usage of the special fund, and also the way that the secretary who holds some of that special fund is able to distribute the special fund, and we see that being played out in clause 4 of the bill.

But it’s also important to note here that as part of that submission process, the New Zealand Law Society also notes the amount of interest on trust accounts retained by the banks and the impact this has on practising fees, and the amount appears to be greater than what is retained in other jurisdictions. I think this is also something that is worthwhile, although outside the scope of this. But I think, again, it’s something that the legal experts in the New Zealand Law Society have raised and that is an important consideration for any further bills.

I agree with the Hon Dr Duncan Webb that something like this potentially could have been packaged as part of the statutory bill, because it seems to provide clarifications as opposed to make any sort of substantial changes. I think this is where some of the, I guess, overlap took place during the select committee process, with submitters hoping that the scope of this bill could be expanded and maybe there was room in this bill to expand that scope. But, again, as the bill stands, it’s quite a minute adjustment and clarification on how the Legal Services Act is playing out and how the secretary is able to do that.

With that, I’m happy to say that, in the second reading, the Green Party of Aotearoa New Zealand will be supporting this.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I rise in support of this piece of legislation. I note that my colleague Todd Stephenson normally sits on this committee but, unfortunately, he can’t be here to take this speech. This bill just clarifies how money from the Lawyers and Conveyancers’ Special Fund may be used by the community law centres, ensuring that the Secretary for Justice can contract for a wider range of costs that support the delivery of community legal services. This is a good bill and I commend it to the House.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I rise on behalf of New Zealand First to support the Legal Services (Distribution of Special Fund) Amendment Bill. I sat on the Justice Committee to hear the submissions on this bill. As has been briefed by other speakers, we had only 19 submissions, but the submission that we did have from the Community Law Centres of Aotearoa—they made a very good contribution to the select committee. It was very interesting to hear that 24 community law centres across New Zealand rely on this funding. From their submission—just taking a part out of it—they provided free law-related services to 47,000 clients and education to up to 26,000. I thought that contribution very much showed how important this funding is to them.

The biggest part of this was trying to broaden the use of the fund. We had an initial briefing how the direct services, the legal services, the representation advocacy work, and education could be used for this funding. However, things like the overheads, professional development, training fees, and coordination and maintenance couldn’t. So, really, this bill, through clause 4, replacement section 94(1), is just broadening the ability to use the fund.

Also, it is enhancing community law centres’ ability to assist the most needy. That, again, is very, very important. It offers sustainability within the legal aid system, without new Government spending. On this side of the House, any way that we’re not using taxpayers’ money where we can actually make dollars go further is something that we endorse. On that, I look forward to the committee of the whole House and I commend the bill to the House.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. This bill, as my colleague Lawrence Xu-Nan mentioned, is something that we initially opposed. The bill was originally considered under Budget urgency—I think it was in May rather than June—but then introduced in July, and it appeared at that time to be a change which would broaden the acceptable use of funds that were legislatively ring-fenced for legal aid services, but resulting in less funding for legal aid itself. So here we are, again, in urgency, considering a bill that doesn’t really need to be done under urgency. In fact, we seem to have been sitting under urgency for most of this term, which really shows that we have a Government that is more anti-democratic than anything and doesn’t really pay attention to good legislative process.

So mean-spirited.

Mean-spirited, perhaps, but it is a Friday and we do have things to do, but we will stay here until Tuesday next week, we’re quite happy—we’re quite happy. We know that a major barrier to seeking justice is its cost and high fees mean some people cannot—cannot—have access to their rights. This is not in the public interest. Community law centres are available to help with some matters, but are not adequately resourced, so legal aid is limited.

I do remember, many, many years ago, having had recourse to legal aid, and without the money to be able to go to a lawyer, it was really, really helpful—to be able to deal with a company that was doing double glazing but did a very poor job and contested their work, claimed money that they shouldn’t have claimed, and I didn’t know quite how to deal with that. Community law was incredibly helpful at enabling people—we were a young family at the time—to deal with that problem and assist us through a challenging situation.

We know that community law centres are an essential part of meeting the growing access-to-justice gap that we have, empowering people to resolve their legal issues. We know that the need in this area is growing. It is growing because we have increased poverty in our community; we have people under energy hardship in our community; we have people dealing with disreputable companies who are willing to take whatever money they can get; we have people who are dealing with agencies that are not serving their need in our communities because of this Government’s actions. That’s a problem, so we do need access to legal assistance.

We need to resource community law centres so they’re better able to meet their clients’ needs—their clients, who are the people are suffering or struggling the most in this society now—and restore and their mandate to act in individual cases and engage in more justice sector advocacy.

We were opposed to this bill at the earlier reading because it appeared to usher in a change that would broaden the acceptable use of legal services funding, but as my colleague Lawrence Xu-Nan has mentioned, that concern has largely been resolved during the select committee process, and we note that Community Law Centres of Aotearoa has given its support to this bill. As a result, we will support this bill at this point, but we will note that we think that the overuse of urgency is a dangerous, dangerous thing that this Government has engaged in, and we think that the anti-democratic nature of this Government is something that we really do need to address. We need to consider this—it’s a bigger question—so while we certainly do listen and pay attention to our community, we also want to make sure that our community has the ability to input into legislation.

Rather than sitting in urgency, we want to see better time for select committee process—longer time. This bill’s had some time, but we’re sitting in urgency doing the devil’s work with this Government, and we want to make sure that they don’t abuse urgency and give us more time to have the public have input into processes. Thank you. We’ll support this bill.

Mr Speaker, we have Opposition that is crowing about the use of urgency at the same time as saying these are non-controversial bills. Why don’t we clear the Order Paper, get through this quickly, and get on with the work of this House? I commend the bill to the House.

Thank you very much, Mr Speaker, for the opportunity to speak on the Legal Services (Distribution of Special Fund) Amendment Bill. What a crucial bill for the cost of living of all those Kiwis that are out there right now struggling to put food on the table! I’m sure this bill will make a big difference to people who queue up in the grocery line each week wondering how they’re going to feed their kids or put shoes on their feet!

What this bill does is it identifies that the Legal Services Act 2011 enables the secretary to enter contracts with community law centres to purchase legal services. However, there’s a glitch. Because this provision is narrow, it is really unclear whether community law centres can use money from the special fund to meet the indirect costs they incur when providing services, such as their leases or utilities. The Government has taken it upon itself to sit in urgency—not to help people get a job; not to help people pay for their food; not to help people pay for their mortgage or their rent or even help clothe their kids—to change it so that there’s a small technicality in the Legal Services Act to enable community law centres to access some funding.

I’m saying nothing wrong about community law centres, though. They do an outstanding job in New Zealand. Can we just pause for a moment and take a look at all the good work that they do. They have been substantially underfunded by previous National Governments and have really struggled to be able to provide the free legal advice that they do. I think this will actually go towards paying their leases, potentially. It would have been even better if there was additional money to be able to provide them to function and do all the good work they do. We know that many people struggle to access justice because the funds are prohibitive. Many people want to be able to proceed with legal advice—whether it be family law or other issues, immigration, or employment law—but we know that the ability to pay for a good lawyer is really prohibitive for a lot of New Zealanders. Community law services step into that space and do an excellent job. I’d like to acknowledge the Hutt Valley community law centres. We refer a lot of people to them through both of my offices that operate in Petone and Wainuiōmata, and they provide people with free legal advice in areas where people can’t afford a lawyer and they don’t know what to do next.

What community law services often do is they stipulate special sessions where people can come in and receive expertise and advice about a particular area, whether that be immigration, family, or employment law. They’re special, dedicated sessions where people can come and access a lawyer. I want to acknowledge those lawyers who do give their time and effort to go and provide that advice. It is warmly received in the community—especially those who are stressing about issues where they don’t fully understand how it’s going to impact upon them and their future and their families and their budget. Having that legal advice accessible to them is incredibly important.

For those reasons, we support the bill, but we don’t think urgency is a particularly good time to be passing legislation like this given that New Zealanders are struggling under a cost of living crisis and that, largely, Christopher Luxon is out of touch and has broken his promises to New Zealanders. He’s cut women’s pay; he’s promised to make the cost of living better, and while families struggle to pay the bills, he’s looking after property speculators and fossil fuel companies and largely abandoned middle New Zealand. But don’t worry, everybody—we’ve now got a technical change to the Legal Services Act so that they can all pay their rent, so, rest assured, help is on its way!

I’d also like to say that the Lawyers and Conveyancers’ Special Fund was established back in 1982, and it collects from banks 60 percent of the interest earned on solicitors’ and licensed conveyancers’ nominated trust accounts.

The Justice Committee only wanted one change made to this bill; the commencement date was changed to reflect the fact that 1 July 2025 has already passed—so we missed that one. This Government has fallen behind its plans in passing legislation, hence why we’re all sitting here ramming through a whole bunch of stuff at the end of the year, because they couldn’t plan their legislative programme properly. But that’s all right—we can just stay on a Friday and do all the work they didn’t manage to do during the year. We can expect more of that next year as the Government realises that it’s failed to deliver on its promises and it’s running out of time. New Zealanders are beginning to take notice of that, and that’s reflected in our polls right now.

This bill is important for those people who want to access more ability to get to legal services. If your local community law centre is struggling to pay the rent, this change will now enable them to pay for their lease. In some areas—and I know in Lower Hutt—it’s not easy and cheap to afford rent, so it allows the costs and the functions to be met through the special fund rather than Crown funding. That saves the ability of the Crown to fund that, and funds it through the special fund. It will enable future Crown funding to be reprioritised, and we hope that that does happen. We’re grateful for the fact that this bill, brought in for the use of the Lawyers and Conveyancers’ Special Fund, allows for these expenses in the delivery of community legal services. It’s not explicit in the current legislation that the delivery of community legal services can be paid, and so that’s what this bill is doing. It’s important that community legal services are funded properly, because they provide that vital role.

I don’t actually have all the submissions that we have—so we think that it’s a really important move to do that, but, once again, as I have highlighted, we are really concerned about what the priorities of this Government are. It does highlight that maybe they got their priorities just a bit wrong. If 200 people are leaving New Zealand for Australia every day to find better-paying jobs, I wonder if the Government could have a better policy programme to retain New Zealanders here—to provide jobs and to give young people some hope and some training or apprenticeships. All those things would be great things to do to actually give people here in New Zealand some sort of vision about what the Government intends for New Zealand to be like in the next five or 10 years. But don’t worry, because Labour’s got that sorted out: we’ll be talking lots about jobs, health, homes, and real action on the cost of living. We do have a vision for New Zealand, and we want it built by New Zealanders for New Zealanders, because that matters.

We want an economy that works for everybody, not just a two-tiered economy that serves some people while the rest of the country is really struggling to be able to make ends meet. That doesn’t seem fair, and it seems, quite frankly, really out of touch. While all we hear from the Government is trying to blame the previous Government, as the clock ticks on, people are starting to realise that a lot of the entrenchment and the prolonging of the recession in the economy that we’re seeing now is largely because so many of those big projects around the country got cancelled, 20,000 construction workers went overseas, and that’s been a significant reason why prices have continued to go up and why people just don’t have the wages.

The fact that we’ve now had this technical change to the Legal Services Act really has no impact whatsoever on all of those pressing issues on New Zealanders right across our lands, who are really wondering and scratching their heads and looking at the current Government to try to find some solutions to these daily issues. It demonstrates, really, that they have no clear understanding of the reality of New Zealanders’ day-to-day lives. Many New Zealanders are out of work; the rates of unemployment in regions such as Gisborne are way up. I think it was like a 70 percent increase in unemployment in places like Gisborne and Hawke’s Bay—huge ones. In particular, the doubling of unemployment for people aged 40 to 44—that’s a big doubling of unemployment rates. Our youth unemployment rate is at 15.2 percent. That’s a huge amount of increase in our young people being unemployed.

The solutions offered—apart from this Legal Services Bill—are that they’re taking the jobseeker benefit away from 18- and 19-year-olds, as well, at the same time as cutting funding to apprenticeships and tertiary training. You would think, at a time when they’re taking the jobseeker benefit off 18- and 19-year-olds and when there’s record unemployment in New Zealand, that you would offer some alternatives like training or education or opportunities—but no. We’re consigning everybody to a flight to Australia, because the Government doesn’t really care about the outcomes. At the end of the day, we can all rest assured that the rent in our local community law service’s office will be paid on time because of this bold, forthright, and ambitious bill for the future of New Zealand. I commend it to the House.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I commend this bill to the House.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. It’s a pleasure to take a call on the Legal Services (Distribution of Special Fund) Amendment Bill. I’m a big fan of community law centres. When I was a law student, one of the first things I did was head along to—well, I studied at Victoria—to the Wellington community law centre and volunteer as a student, and then as a lawyer. I used to volunteer on the employment night. As my colleague Ginny Andersen says, many of the sessions are specially focused on particular issues that people have. There was always a line, and there were always a lot of people waiting to see lawyers there.

I really love the community law centre movement because, although in my particular line of work, doing a lot of employment law work—and I did do a lot of work for trade union members—there will always be a section of the community who, for whatever reason, usually financial reasons, are unable to get assistance in any other way than going to a community law centre. The lawyers at community law provide a really invaluable service.

I don’t know how much people know about community law centres, but it’s not a full service—“We’re going to take your case to the Supreme Court”—usually. I think, maybe, there might be a few instances, and my colleague Vanushi Walters, who’s much more experienced in community law centre legal provision than I am, can probably think of a few examples of some strategic and important cases that community law centres do. But generally, it’s the type of hard work of looking through people’s papers, figuring out what their legal problem is, pointing them in the right direction, and telling them it’s going to be OK. It’s not glamorous and it usually won’t get your name on a reported case, but it will make a big difference for those people. For some of them, it will be the first time they’ve talked to a lawyer. The work of community law is really invaluable.

I think New Zealand should be proud of the fact that, actually, our legal community has got together and decided to support New Zealanders through not only staff in community law but also with their trust accounts. You’ll know, if you’ve ever bought or sold a house, when your money goes to your lawyer, it sits in a trust account, and so sometimes, there can be millions of dollars sitting there, of course, earning interest from the bank—accumulated, of people’s different house transactions, not usually just one house, but, of course, that could be also the possibility. Anyway, so there’s a lot of money in trust accounts. The interest goes to funding community law centres—at the moment, it’s about 60 percent. This money then goes to fund these community law centres.

I’ve spoken very positively about the community law movement because it’s something that I think is really important and invaluable, and we should support it. My wish is that we support it more than we currently are. It is disappointing to see this bill focus so much on funding but provide no real additional change in the amount of funding that will be provided to community law centres. As far as I’m aware, this is a clarification, it’s a funding fix, and it just clarifies that the practice, as it currently stands, is legal. It’s not an additional amount of funding for this very important service. That, on the one hand, is disappointing.

The second thing is, if we are going to spend the House’s time looking at community law, I wish that we were doing something that would actually be improving the situation for community law, and this bill doesn’t do that. This bill finds an issue, which I think, looking at it, is arguable. I did look at the primary piece of legislation, and I think, probably, what’s happening currently, on my brief reading, is probably OK. I’d be really surprised to find an instance of where someone would challenge that, as Duncan Webb said, the provision of legal services that requires a building, a premises, a photocopier, the lights to be turned on, running water, health and safety to be present there, desks, computers; I would really be surprised if it was—which is what currently happens, and that’s funded through this fund—found to be not permissible.

We will support this bill. We’d like to see more support for community law centres, and I’d also like to see greater ambition with the legislative programme in front of this House. If this was truly a necessary change, why didn’t we look at how we might be able to support community law centres more? Surely there was something, additionally, that this House could have done to enable them to do their work.

I know everyone around this House who is an MP will have, at some stage—maybe weekly; almost daily—referred their constituents to community law. They deserve our assistance, they deserve our support, and I wish this House would do more to support them.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. This bill is amazing. It supports our community law centres, who do great things in the community for people who can’t afford to pay for their own private representation. I have great pleasure in commending this bill to the House.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. Now, of all the bills that we’ve seen come through the House under urgency, this one has to win the prize—this one has to win the prize for the strangest use of urgency to put a bill through the House. Shame on you, Government. But I’ve got to say, I’m at least very happy that you didn’t use urgency and you did let the bill go through to select committee. You know why I’m very happy? Because we got this beautiful quote from Community Law Centres of Aotearoa itself that says, “We view legislative change to be unnecessary.” Ha, ha! Fantastic. Absolutely fantastic use of time! So they’re kind of going, “Yeah, OK.”, but they don’t see that it’s necessary. Not only are you passing legislation on it; this is the second time you’ve put it on a list as being urgent. It is absolutely bizarre, I’ve got to say.

It is a pleasure, though, to speak about community law, because I spent almost a decade there as a lawyer, a supervising solicitor, and then managing YouthLaw Aotearoa, so they have a very close place to my heart. I’ll have a lot more to say about that at committee of the whole House stage, of course. But I do think that they play a crucial role—the role they’re most frequently known for is the role their lawyers and student volunteers play, but they do play other roles, as well. One of those roles was the first one that I got involved with as a law student when YouthLaw were involved in drafting the shadow or parallel report to the United Nations on New Zealand’s compliance with the Convention on the Rights of the Child.

YouthLaw is part of an organisation that’s called Children’s Rights Alliance Aotearoa. When I was part of it, it was called Action for Children and Youth Aotearoa. An interesting fun fact: the current Children’s Commissioner was on the board of that organisation, as well. That’s the first time I met her. But we travelled to Geneva and we were the civil society delegation who were holding the Government to account to see whether the Government were actually complying with children’s rights. The Hon Anne Tolley was leading the Government delegation at the time. So, yes, they play an important role in terms of direct legal services like the provision of advice and representation, but they also look at law reform roles and issues and they also look at broader issues in terms of reporting internationally.

Another interesting fun fact was that in a previous National Government, the National Government decided that they would no longer fund Community Law Centres of Aotearoa to do law reform work, so that funding was shifted into other legal services. It’s only with the Labour Government coming back in that that service was restored. It always really appalled me that the then National Government weren’t concerned about the systemic issues that we were identifying by actually talking to people about their issues on the ground—so a really broad-based set of services that Community Law provides.

I also wanted to give some examples of the type of legal advice that would be the kind of day-to-day, bread and butter work of a community law centre, especially with my former YouthLaw hat on. There were frequent instances when we would provide advice to young people about sexual harassment issues, often in the context of student jobs. They simply just didn’t know where to go and we would be the first contact for them. For young people experiencing family violence issues—on that we’d get calls directly from young people, but also from counsellors and people working with young people.

We’d work on minor criminal matters, as well, including where young people were charged with offences. An interesting thing that I found working in that role is that young people often will go into situations where they’re with a group and will want to defend their friends. On several occasions, we had young people claiming to be the person responsible for things like minor wilful damage while they were out with their friends when, in fact, they weren’t the person who did it. On reflection overnight, a week later, they sat down and thought about it and did want help defending that.

Most of what Community Law were doing at the time when I was there was employment law cases—I think that’s common across the country still; it tells of that huge employment need in that part of the system. But I think one thing we struggled with—and the system continues to struggle with this—is the delay in actually getting justice when you have an issue in the employment space or, for that matter, if you have what I’d like to call an everyday legal issue, where your recourse is with one of our tribunals. I’m sure Government members would be horrified to know that if you wanted to take a privacy case, for example, to the Human Rights Review Tribunal, you could be waiting up to three years to get in front of the tribunal members and to have a decision made. That, of course, is not access to justice. I mention that because we can sort of protect this funding, but then, of course, we need to make sure that the other parts of access to justice are there, as well.

On the special fund itself—and others have spoken about the 60/40 balance in terms of what comes to community law centres. The amount—and Dr Duncan Webb has referenced this—that comes from the special fund has fluctuated in the past. There have been many times when the Ministry of Justice budget has topped up the funding, and other times when the special fund could accommodate the entirety of community law’s needs. So back in 2019, the total pot of funding going to Community Law Centres of Aotearoa was almost $13 million; the amount of the special fund was $10.9 million, so that top-up was there. By 2023, we had more than $20 million in the special fund. You can see how, when the markets are doing particular things, that really can affect special fund funding.

Now, I raise this because I was a little concerned when the Minister who was moving urgency listed this bill and said that it was part of Budget savings commitments. Now, I think that’s a problem, because there will be times when the special fund can cover the entirety of Community Law Centres of Aotearoa’s funding, but, in truth, as others have said, it doesn’t cover the totality of legal need at the moment. So, in my view, there currently is a need for the Ministry of Justice to be topping up that funding even further. This shouldn’t be—and I hope it’s not—an excuse to say that the ministry will no longer be looking at what the total legal need is. So I am very perplexed at the entry of this bill. That remains my concern—that that is not what the Government should be doing.

So I will be seeking assurances during the committee of the whole House stage that the Government understands that its obligation is to look at access to justice across the board. I’ve just made reference to one part of our justice system which isn’t operating as it should. It must then provide the funds to ensure that people can access what they need to.

I would also say, in terms of that slightly arm’s-length nature that community law have, the special fund funding does give it that. I was troubled when I was at community law when we had Ministry of Justice contracts that had a “no surprises” clause in them. From time to time, when we were doing law reform work, I would advise the ministry that we were about to release a paper or come forward with a policy proposal. On one occasion I had a response that said, “Yes, that’s fine with us. Go right ahead.” Of course, that’s not what a ministry should be doing. A “no surprises” clause means that you inform, but there is no permission. That happened under the last National Government, as well.

So, again, in the committee stage I will be looking to ensure that it’s very clear that the Government understands the independence with which community law centres need to continue to work, and that the pot of funding that is the special fund is earmarked for Community Law Centres of Aotearoa. While administratively it comes through the Ministry of Justice, it is earmarked by statute for Community Law Centres of Aotearoa and, therefore, protects their independence.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. Look, it’s really a shame to hear that on the other side of the House, they think it’s a waste of time to work a few extra hours to give our community law centres access to more funds. We don’t think it’s a waste of time, and I commend this bill to the House.

I commend this bill to the House.

This bill is set down for committee stage immediately. I declare the House in committee for consideration of the Legal Services (Distribution of Special Fund) Amendment Bill.

Members, the House is in committee on the Legal Services (Distribution of Special Fund) Amendment Bill. We come now to clause 1. This is the debate on the “Title” clause. The question is that clause 1 stand part.

Thank you, Madam Chair. I want to check with the Minister for the Environment in terms of the title for this bill. Now, it would be no surprise for, I think, anyone in this Chamber to know that I do have an amendment here on the title, but I want to check something with the Minister first. Everyone is clear in terms of the purpose of this bill—we just discussed that in the second reading—but the question is if the term “distribution” is the best term to use for the title, if it actually represents what this bill does. To me, “distribution” is not so much in terms of how it is used, which is what we’re seeing in a later clause, or the circumstances in which the community law centres are able to use it, but more, “distribution” I would assume to be how that could be spread or distributed to other things that’s beyond, potentially, the scope of this bill, or potentially other law community initiatives.

I wonder if, for example, the Minister would consider my amendment that the “Legal Services (Expenditure of Special Funds) Amendment Bill”, or even “(Usage of Special Fund)”, might actually be a more accurate title that reflects what this bill does. I’m going to start with that particular question and see if the Minister is able to make any comments on my amendment. I don’t, unfortunately, have a number for the amendment.

Thank you, Mr Chair, and I thank the member Dr Lawrence Xu-Nan for his generous offer of that amendment, but, no, we won’t be accepting that.

Thank you, Mr Chair. My question here relates to some of the history of this bill. This begins with legislation that was passed in 2006, and it changed provisions that came before it, where the special fund also potentially funded the Law Foundation, as it was then. Because the special fund wasn’t at that stage accumulating sufficient funds, all the funds ended up going to community law centres anyway. With the 2006 changes, that was made very clear in terms of the distribution.

I’m just wondering, really, whether the Minister had considered tying the title to something that related specifically to community law. I could understand if that was not something the Minister wanted to do 10 years ago, because at that stage the community law movement probably wasn’t as cohesive as it is today. Certainly with Community Law Centres of Aotearoa Inc. now being well funded and the separate community law centres being extremely well coordinated and operating very much in unison most of the time, I think there’s an argument to say that we have currently this excellent model that operates across the country, who are coordinating in terms of their practice, and who, I understand, at one stage looked at how they could ensure that people who work at community law are all paid in a comparable way so that they truly do feel like they’re operating as one—whom the public see in the form of the community law manual. So, again it’s seen very much, I believe, as a Government service that people rely on and part of the essential access to justice architecture.

I think it’s potentially time that we recognise that this is a part of our legal access to justice architecture that deserves some protection in terms of the allocation of these funds. That will also allow community law to plan, and to grow—in, I think, a quite different way—and to know that not only is the funding for their legal services and support services guaranteed through legislation but that it’s guaranteed for the entities that they’ve set up. I think that that will help them develop further entities.

In recent years they’ve looked to set up Te Ara Ture, or the bridge to law, which is quite a novel concept. It’s a legal clearing house—Australia has a similar one—and that matches up pro bono lawyers with legal issues that are coming up in the community. I always thought that was extremely innovative, and so, again, if there was a change to the title that truly reflected the mana with which we hold community law, then I think that will continue to allow them to take bold steps into access to justice architecture that can more greatly support those who do need legal help.

One thing I’ve always thought about, given that I specialised in young people and providing them with legal advice, is how we help people who don’t know that they have a legal issue. Part of that is the education outreach work that community law centres do. Again, having that security, by being recognised specifically within legislation, will give community law centres that sense of trust that they need to grow programmes, to outreach to people, and engage with the entities that exist on the ground so that they can outreach and start providing almost pre-advice, if you like, to those people who need it.

Thank you, Mr Chair. Just wanting to take a short call on the first clause of the Legal Services (Distribution of Special Fund) Amendment Bill. This bill, I think, may have an acceptable name, but I think, perhaps, we could improve it, so one of the suggestions that I would make is a change to: “this Act is the ‘Legal Services (Clarification of Use of Special Fund) Amendment Bill’ ”; because that’s really what it’s doing. It’s already being distributed in this way, so it’s really a clarification bill. I think if we could get that in there, that would be good.

The other suggestion that I wanted to make was: it is a common thing in other countries to name bills after people that have been significant—

This has not been taken—we are still on part—

Title.

Oh, sorry. My apologies. Carry on.

That’s fine, Mr Chair. In other countries, often, famous people who are associated with particular movements are named in bills, and you’ll often see that in America, for example—you might see bills that were brought because of a particular person or to solve a particular issue being named after that person. That’s not a practice I’ve seen in New Zealand. I don’t know why that is, and I don’t know if there’s a good reason—maybe the Minister could clarify.

When I was researching the history of the community law centre, this is something that’s been around in New Zealand since the 1970s. As I understand, the first community law centre was founded in Grey Lynn, and one of the key people who was involved in the foundation of the community law movement, and who actually set up the Citizens Advice Bureau in Auckland as well, was an incredible man called Robert Ludbrook. He actually passed away only last year. I seriously think that a nice thing, when we do pass bills that are so closely associated with the contributions of people, to honour those people, would be to consider putting them in the title clause. That’s a suggestion made in good faith, and it was very interesting for me to learn about the origins of Community Law and how it came about. Like many things in our community, it’s something that people saw a need for. Obviously, in Robert Ludbrook’s particular situation, I think he actually received a Queen’s or King’s honour—not sure which exact date he received it on—but it was recognition for his service to doing this type of work: recognising that there was a need for Citizens Advice Bureaus and also for community law centres.

This, I suppose, is more aligned with a bill, hopefully, with slightly more aspiration for the community law service provision in New Zealand. I think, maybe, if we did start naming bills after very important New Zealanders, like this man, then we would maybe start to get some slightly more aspirational legislation through—and so that’s a suggestion.

Technical suggestions: go one way—look at it in relation to clarification of use, which is actually what it does, or have a more aspirational title which actually recognises the mana, the history, and the important figures that were involved in setting up Community Law in New Zealand.

I move, That debate on this question now close.

Thank you, Mr Chair. I just will have a brief mention on clause 1. The reason I want to do that is because a little later on I’ll be proposing an amendment which seeks to make sure that transactions already entered into can’t be revisited. That would then make this not only about the distribution of the special fund, but it would also make it a validation bill. It is common—we’ve seen in this House on a number of occasions, bills which have validation in the title, which, essentially, is a backward looking thing. It’s one of those “for the avoidance of doubt” things for clarity. Of course, our view is that it’s not needed, but the Government’s view is that this is needed. I’m perplexed as to why they haven’t addressed the validation problem. If they think that contracts have been entered into outside of the permitted phrase within the Act, then validation is absolutely needed. My view is that this bill should be—

Hold on!

Sorry? Are you going to take a call?

No, no. I was just excited to hear what your title was going to be!

Oh, thanks. Oh, yeah, well, it’s good to know. I’m excited as well. It’s exciting times here in Parliament!

I think we should just call it the “Legal Services (Distribution of Special Fund and Validation of Contracts) Amendment Bill”. If we’re not going to go large and follow the advice of Camilla Belich, which is to identify in the bill the name of some of the doyens of the community law services—and the fact that in Grey Lynn it was established in 1978. I mean, I think it would be a great thing to do that, but, if not, “Legal Services (Distribution of Special Fund and Validation of Contracts) Amendment Bill”. Let’s do it.

I move, That debate on this question now close.

The question is that Dr Lawrence Xu-Nan’s tabled amendment to clause 1 replacing the word “distribution” with “expenditure” be agreed to.

Members, we come to clause 2, the debate on the commencement of the bill. The question is that clause 2 stand part.

Thank you, Mr Chair, I’ll just take a short call on this. Really, about the commencement, there’s a couple of things that crop up. One is that, when you’re talking about contracting and you’re actually creating a new contracting framework, you might want to just give a little bit of breathing space. It is, essentially, if the Government’s correct in its legal analysis, changing the legislative authority for contracting, and there might be contracts out there, or contracts that are about to be signed, which actually use the wording of the original legislation rather than the amended legislation. Even if it was a week or two weeks, I would have thought that’d be useful.

Again, the other thing is that we on this side of the Chamber don’t usually like retrospectivity, but this might be one of those cases where the Legislation Design and Advisory Committee would note that it’s actually in everyone’s favour, and it disadvantages no one, to have a retrospective element, which, essentially, would mean commencement before the Act is passed. That would be an unusual way to do it, having a commencement which was before the Act was passed, but that would be the other way around it: to say, well, this framework has been in place, in fact, I think, since the Law Practitioners Act, so you could actually have a commencement going back to 1986 just to make sure that these contracts are all properly enforced. There’s a few thoughts on commencement.

Thank you, Mr Chair. I want to ask the Minister of Justice some questions around commencement, but from a different angle from the previous speaker, the Hon Dr Duncan Webb. Now, the committee is understanding that this bill was first brought to the House under urgency. When it was brought under urgency in May, it was only under urgency for the first reading, so, naturally, it would have gone to a select committee process. Considering there wasn’t any referral motion that was being brought to the House, at a minimum the select committee process would have been for four months. I wanted to check, in that case, what was the original intention of having the commencement date on 1 July 2025?

Now, my only assumption back then was that it was because of the fact that it aligns with the Government Budget, because the bill was introduced under Budget urgency, but now, because we’re now long past 1 July 2025, the commencement date has been adjusted by the select committee as the day after Royal assent. I think the question still remains, which we weren’t able to tease out in the Justice Committee, which is: considering this is going to go to a select committee anyway, why have a retrospective date in the first place?

Granted, I think the day after Royal assent makes sense, but I think the caveat that the Hon Dr Duncan Webb mentioned is an important one. I guess, when we’re looking at this, if the original date was 1 July 2025 and now it’s the day after Royal assent—let’s assume it is Monday, or tomorrow if the Governor-General is available on Saturday; I don’t know—what then would happen to this particular area? I want to check with the Minister if anything has changed or if there were any effects that would change.

Again, we have mentioned the fact that the bill was introduced in the House under urgency, and now we’re reading it under urgency, so there must be a level of urgency that is involved in this. There must have been some form of impact or effect that the Government may be aware of that we are not aware of, between July and November.

Those are my two questions: what is the intention originally of the original date, noting that the report-back date was beyond 1 July; and also, then, what is the impact of this bill not passing on 1 July 2025, and now here in November?

Thank you, Mr Chair. I just want to go back here to the question that I raised in the second reading, which is: why is this bill commencing? I’m really just trying to identify the problem here. I have the Community Law Aotearoa submission to the Justice Committee in front of me, and paragraphs 3 and 4 of that, I think, speak to precisely why this bill is not needed—and I don’t even mean under urgency; I mean at all.

I just want to read that because I would like to hear the Minister of Justice’s response, in particular to Community Law’s submission. They say that they view legislative change to be unnecessary. “The Bill appears to be intended to clarify a perceived ambiguity that use of the Special Fund and/or contracts for community legal services may not include functions that enable, facilitate or support the provision of community legal services, such as administrative and management staff. CLCA’s view is that the law already allows contracts to include these matters.”

“Section 298 of the Lawyers and Conveyancers Act sets out the purposes for which the Special Fund can be used (funding community law centres). The Bill does not change section 298. Our view is that ‘funding of community law centres’ includes functions that enable, facilitate or support the provision of community legal services. Section 94(1) of the Legal Services Act governs the content of contracts between the Secretary and community law centres. In our view, section 94(1) already allows the Secretary to fund functions that enable, facilitate or support the provision of community legal services as a necessary part of ‘purchas[ing] community legal services’.”

There’s a very clear view there. There’s a very clear view there from a group of lawyers as well. Again, why is this bill commencing? Why is this bill commencing under urgency? It remains, to me, very unclear.

Mr Chair, I just want to, I guess, seek your guidance. The Hon Dr Duncan Webb, Vanushi Walters, and myself have asked the Minister a number of questions that require clarification from the Minister, and the Minister has not responded to any of our questions thus far. I want to seek your clarification—understanding that the Minister is not the Minister who is responsible for the bill but that officials are there and are available—if the Chair would allow for the Minister to respond to a previous clause’s question if the clause completes and we move on to a new clause. I just want to check if that’s something that would be acceptable.

That’s a fair enough question. There are a number of issues that come in when considering a closure: repetition, new material, and ministerial participation. While questions are still coming from one side of the committee, it’s hard to think there would be a closure without any ministerial participation at all, but I’ll leave that to the parties to decide. Minister, Hon Penny—

Simmonds.

—Simmonds.

Thank you, Mr Chair, I will respond. The Government sought advice from Crown Law, and, after considering the advice, the Government decided that it would be preferable to have the law clarified. The Government acts responsibly when it gets that advice from Crown Law. Obviously, Community Law Centres Aotearoa’s advice is not the Government’s advice. The bill was originally intended to be considered for the start of the new financial year, but, obviously, it moved on and had the select committee process, and the Justice Committee’s report gave the amendment for, as has been noted, the commencement date to be the day after Royal assent.

I move, That debate on this question now close.

Members, we come now to clause 3, the debate on the principal Act. The question is that clause 3 stand part.

Look, there’s so much to talk about in clause 3. Of course, clause 3 identifies the principal Act—the Legal Services Act 2011—and says, “This Act amends the Legal Services Act”. Of course, on this side of the House we don’t think it does.

We don’t think it amends the Legal Services Act at all. It just says the blindingly and bleatingly obvious—namely, that when you enter into a contract with a community law centre, that contract can be not only for community legal services but also for funding, facilitating, and otherwise supporting the provision of community legal services. I think that it should just say: “This Act relates to the Legal Services Act 2011.”, because that’s all it really does. It doesn’t actually change anything. It sort of just waves vaguely in the direction of the Legal Services Act and says, “Why don’t we just add some unnecessary and largely meaningless words to it?”

I think let’s call it: “This Act relates to”. Actually, you could probably do better than that: “This Act unnecessarily points towards and vaguely changes the Legal Services Act.” If this Government wants to waste taxpayer money on legislation like this, so be it. Let’s say it. Maybe that’s what it should say somewhere.

We passed the title clause; we could have put a wasting money and time title, but we won’t do that. We won’t do that; there you go. Let’s say that the Act does what, in fact, it does: just sort of vaguely points towards and adds some unnecessary words to the Legal Service Act 2011.

Thank you, Mr Chair. I do have a question on clause 3, the principal Act. As the previous speaker, the Hon Dr Duncan Webb, articulated, this bill assumes an amendment to the Legal Services Act, but I actually don’t want to talk about the use of the verb here but talk specifically in terms of the Legal Services Act itself—noting that, in the Legal Services Act, the sections pertaining to the community law centre are sections 93 to 96. Indeed, in the next, subsequent clause—we’ll get to it soon—we are amending section 94.

However, what is interesting is where the section that relates to community law centres sits. It sits under Part 3 of the Legal Services Act 2011, which is the administration of legal service systems. The issue then comes to the fact that, when you are looking at the other parts of Part 3—for example, “Function of Secretary for Justice and Legal Service Commissioner” is Subpart 1; “Quality assurance systems for providers” is Subpart 2—it doesn’t relate to the context and the detail of some of the elements that we see in sections 93 and 96. For example, in section 93, immediately preceding the section that we are amending in this bill, it talks about the definition of the community law centre.

I want to check with the Minister of Justice, then: if that is the case, when this bill was first considered and introduced, why wasn’t there a broader consideration of potentially reshuffling or moving around some of the sections of the community law centre, potentially into another part or as a separate and distinct part—as you see in some of the earlier parts with legal aid—so that it stands alone as its individual part?

Now, the other reason that I’m suggesting—and again, this then potentially would have allayed the Hon Dr Duncan Webb’s, I guess, reminder—that this bill in itself is not necessarily the most substantial bill, but I’m just suggesting that there could have been other things that could have been done that packaged things together. If there was any consideration of the Minister that other parts of it were considered to be separated out, also considering that the special fund element only relates to this part, which means that there is a special place of this part—so I think that the legal services or the community law centre aspect should deserve its own sections. That’s my second question: whether the Minister or the officials ever considered having, rather than this being a Subpart 3 of Part 3, to have to be a standalone part within the Legal Services Act 2011.

Thank you, Mr Chair. I’m going to stand to make a similar but different point to Dr Duncan Webb, which is that, yes, while this on its face says that it amends the Legal Services Act, in fact, the change that the Government want to make doesn’t. The way in which the Government have worded this change amends it, in my view, for the worst—for the worst.

Maybe you can get away with saying that you do amend the Act, but I think the language used in the amendment actually adds a level of unclarity, and therefore I hope that, in the next part, when I speak to the amendments that I’m proposing, the Government will accept those amendments to actually make the law clear. In which case, we go back to Duncan Webb’s argument that it’s not needed because the Act already says that.

It is very perplexing, once again, why the Government believe that this is truly an amendment that changes the law and, again, why it was needed. The advice from the Minister is that Crown Law said that clarity would be useful. I’m a little bit puzzled as to whether there are other circumstances at play in terms of Crown Law’s advice that the committee isn’t aware of. It just seems to me to be—I mean, with any Government you, of course, have to prioritise what you’re doing. There will be times when there is law that should be tweaked or clarified.

I spoke to Geoffrey Palmer the other day, who said to me there’s a—[Interruption] Let me tell you about that conversation. He said to me there’s a whole host of legislation—[Interruption] Oh, I can’t believe you don’t want to hear what Sir Geoffrey said.

I can’t hear the member speaking, so that means it’s too noisy.

He said to me that there is a whole host of legislation, both primary and secondary, on the book that really ought to be repealed—not even tweaked, but actually repealed—because it simply doesn’t apply to modern New Zealand. His view was that a good way for a Government to spend time, if you were serious about clarifying the law, would be to ask the Law Commission to undertake a project where they assess past primary legislation and secondary legislation and recommend repeals or updates. You could have the equivalent of kind of the slab bill which we dealt with in the last Parliament, but it would be a mass repeals bill that would really tidy up and clarify the law.

Now, that’s a good way to spend one’s time. The question is: why look at this one on its own and make a tweak which is unnecessary? Again, it really does seem very unusual, and I’m looking forward to hearing the Minister’s response to both that as well as to Sir Geoffrey’s suggestion.

While I acknowledge that a number of members of the Opposition consider their advice to the Government might be superior to that of Crown Law, the Government did, in fact, seek advice from Crown Law and, after considering that advice, decided that it would be preferable to make this clarification with this amendment.

I move, That debate on this question now close.

I just have a very short question—just to acknowledge the fact that I thank you for your engagement, Minister, but if you wouldn’t mind responding to my question as well, that would be greatly appreciated.

Just further on, in terms of the question that I had, I guess the reason I’ve asked if the Minister has considered taking this particular part out of a subpart of Part 3, under the “Administration of legal services system”, and into this undistinctive part—very similar to Part 2, “Legal Aid”—is because the concern that I will have then is whether we’re still going to be looking at the Special Fund being able to be ring-fenced for the use of the community law centre or whether it will also be looking at being used by other parts of Part 3 or other aspects of the legal services system, like the surveyor or assurers that I mentioned before.

In answer to the earlier question from that member, I will note that the Government sought advice from Crown Law, took note of the advice from Crown Law, gave it consideration, and came up with this amendment from it. This is the amendment that we chose.

I move, That debate on this question now close.

Members, we come now to our final debate. This is the debate on the amendment to section 94, “Secretary may enter into contracts with community law centres”. The scope of this bill is very narrow and is focused on the entering into of contracts with community law centres. Therefore, I’m ruling Vanushi Walters’ amendment for the secretary to consider the need for culturally appropriate services when contracting for community legal services, while within the scope of the bill, should be debated within this clause for debate, because it is better considered as a new subsection (2) to section 94.

Thank you, Mr Chair. I’ve been looking forward to debating clause 4 and speaking to my amendments. We will turn to the first one. I made the point in the last clause that my sense was that, actually, the amendments made things less clear, rather than clarifying, so hopefully these amendments will be received well by the Minister for the Environment. The first one is in clause 4, to replace new section 94(1)(a) with “(a) purchase community legal services and/or”. The current clause has “(a) purchase community legal services:”—little colon—

Should that be a semicolon?

Ha, ha! And then it’s got paragraph (b). What that might mean in practice is that, for contracts to comply with the Act, there would need to be two separate contracts, depending on whether community legal services were being contracted for or whether services to fund, facilitate, or otherwise support the provision of community legal services was being accommodated for.

If the argument is that this is about contracts for a community law centre on the ground and what we’re wanting to do is cover some of their background support costs, etc., then I think what we absolutely would need—for clarity’s sake, given that is what this bill is claiming to do—is to just adopt that little “and/or” to make sure we are clarifying this and make sure we don’t need to come back and use another urgency session to add “and/or” maybe in a couple of weeks’ time. This is getting so comical that I really couldn’t put it past this Government to do something like that. Please, to the Minister, would she please consider doing that? I believe that that was a recommendation from the Law Society—another very capable group of lawyers. They saw that the intention was for this bill to bring about a whole lot of clarity, and they’ve helped us out with that suggestion. I’ve put it in an amendment, and I think that that would be prudent for the Minister to accept.

Now, the only reason why you would leave it as-is is if the intention was not to cover that gap of community law centres on the ground, but the intention was to ensure that support services of a different kind were being covered and that those support services exist in a different contract. What I’m thinking, essentially, is a body like Community Law Centres Aotearoa, for example, who may or may not be engaged in direct legal services but who certainly coordinate and provide support and ensure that there’s coordination between the different community law centres—if the intent was to cover those in separate contracts, then I can absolutely see that you would want to keep them separate. But, from what the Minister has said thus far and from what I’ve seen in the papers, that’s not the intent. The intent is to cover community law centre contracts on the ground. This is centres like YouthLaw; this is centres like Māngere. Māngere, interestingly, has a lot of history as one of the earliest community law centres as well. I understand David Lange was quite involved. He was the MP for Māngere at the time and was very involved in the setting up of that community law centre. I don’t think they could have imagined the impact and the coordination that community law centres now have across the country.

Initially, when they were set up, it wasn’t a Government initiative to set up community law centres across the country in a kind of fair and equitable way. They arose because individual advocates were advocating for those centres from the ground up. Contracts were quite different. Again, the way they started, a lot of it was direct legal services - heavy, and then that administration across community law centres really grew in the background.

I’ve only managed to just speak to my first amendment and I have two more. As you’ve indicated, the third has been more suitable to address in this clause, so I really would like to continue and I will be seeking the call to do that.

Also on Māngere, I would also say that Judge Becroft, our former Children’s Commissioner, was highly involved not only in setting up Māngere but actually also in setting up YouthLaw. If you look at the history of community law centres, you’ll find that there’s a string of similar people who set up those first initial community law centres who then went on to seed other community law centres as well, and Judge Becroft is one of those people who, of course, along with Robert Ludbrook, then set up YouthLaw. I knew Robert very well and had the sad—Robert passed not long ago. Well, it’s probably last year now, but I attended his funeral. It was extraordinary the reach that he had in terms of community law, but also into other parts of the voluntary legal advice sector. There were older members of the Black Panthers there as well, who talked about how Robert had been pivotal in terms of providing advice to them.

This idea of providing free legal services sprung out of lawyers just kind of doing it. Then the architecture came up in response to grassroots contracts that were negotiated with then the Legal Service Agency. You can see how administration was really at the back of everyone’s minds. Again, I think if we’re going to get it right this time in terms of those support services, let’s do it right. I do hope the Minister agrees with that first proposal. Moving to the second proposal.

And probably the third one in this.

Moving to the second one, which is also on clause 4, this one is to replace new section 94(1)(b) with language that says, “fund matters that enable, facilitate, and otherwise support the provision of community legal services”. This one was a suggestion directly from Community Law, because they didn’t believe that the language the Government had adopted was clear. Again, this is just comical.

Again, you’ve got a proposal from—sorry, it was a proposal from the Parliamentary Counsel Office in response to what Community Law had said at the Justice Committee. You’ve got a proposal directly from the entity who you’re trying to help out, you’re trying to clarify the scope of their role, and they’ve gone, “Here’s what we’d like you to say.” You have Parliamentary Counsel Office who draft the language for that. It seems a little odd to me that we wouldn’t then include it within the bill. Again, I would say we don’t want to be here, back in urgency, doing this again for clarity’s sake.

The last amendment tabled is what I had proposed would be a new clause 5, but on the instructions of the Chair, I understand that it would be more suited to be included as part of clause 4. I’m happy for that to be the case. That is to insert a new section that “the Secretary must consider culturally appropriate services when contracting for community legal services.” It further says that “when exercising the power under section 94(1), the Secretary must consider the need for community legal services that are culturally appropriate for all parts of New Zealand society, including kaupapa Māori services.” Community Law has, since I was there, before I was there, and post, had kaupapa Māori community legal services with increasing growth. This is just an ask that we embed that within the statute to recognise that it is incredibly important that that’s explicitly there.

Many years ago, community law centres were told by the former National Government that there would be potentially many fewer community law centres. It created this sense of competition for contracts, which I think really disadvantaged the sector. Eventually, we moved past that and there was a lot more cooperation, in my view, under a Labour Government. But, again, I think, when you have statutory direction about what is protected and what the expectations are, then it makes for a sector who can cooperate and plan together much more effectively. Thank you.

I note and acknowledge the suggested proposed amendments from the member. I can clarify for the member that the current drafting denotes that contracts can be made for either or both of the purposes stated in the new section 94(1)(a) and (b). The proposed amendments from the member aren’t necessary. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr Chair. I have, actually, a really quite important question, and then I have a request. The question I have is: has the Minister or her officials turned their mind to the validity of pre-existing contracts? Now, I have an tabled amendment—which I think is on the Table; certainly, it’s been delivered to the Clerks—which proposes, in clause 4, adding the following new subsection which would say: “all contracts entered into by the secretary to fund, facilitate, and in other ways support the provision of legal services are valid regardless of when they were entered into and, in particular, whether or not they were entered into prior to section 94(1)(b) coming into force”.

If this is a tidy-up, which you’re saying it is, and there are contracts out there—because the problem is, as I understand it, and I was talking to my colleague Camilla Belich about this a moment ago, “legal services” is defined in the Act, and it’s defined, arguably, relatively narrowly. There’s an assumption, if you use the word “legal services” when you’re talking about contracting, that you’re using the defined term. There are exceptions to that, but that’s the general interpretive approach. If you’ve done that and you’ve entered into these contracts and the money’s been spent on support services and professional development and all these other things, then there’s a question about whether the money was actually spent in breach of the contracts, because they were for legal services. That’s the first thing, and I’d really appreciate if the Minister could let us know—perhaps take some advice and say, “No, there is no problem”, or “There is a problem, but we don’t care about it”, or “There is a problem and we can expect another bill to fix that very shortly.”

The second question is this—because you’ve got Community Law Centres of Aotearoa saying that, in fact, this bill’s not necessary on their reading of the law; you’ve got the New Zealand Law Society saying, as I understand it, pretty much the same thing, and they’re happy to provide the illegal reasoning; but you’ve got a bit of a black box when it comes to Crown Law advice. We’re all scratching our heads thinking, “Well, they’re seeing something we can’t see.” For something as innocuous as whether this amendment in clause 4 is needed, it will be really useful to provide the Crown Law advice. For something like this, it’s not top secret; it’s not some big issue. It’s just, “Well, we’ve got to this position for the following reasons.” It would be really nice to see that—because, although I accept that my feeble mind isn’t up to the might of Crown Law, some of my colleagues are pretty clever, and I respect the Law Society and Community Law Centres of Aotearoa to get it right. At the moment, Crown Law’s the outlier here. It’d be great to see their advice.

That’s two questions. Certainly, the first one is important: do existing contracts breach this legislation; and, if so, what’s being done about it? The second is: can we have a squiz—a bit of a gander—at the Crown Law advice?

To answer Dr Webb’s questions from his multichoice that he gave me, there is no problem; the contracts remain valid. To your second question, no.

Thank you, Mr Chair. I want to seek the Minister’s guidance or support on one of my amendments to the bill. This is an amendment that is dated 4.36.01.

Essentially, the current wording of section 94(1)(b), inserted by clause 4 of the bill, states: “fund, facilitate, and otherwise support the provision of community legal services.” As some of the other members have mentioned, how it interacts with what is now section 94(1)(a), inserted by clause 4 of the bill, is it has a lot of comparables. My amendment over here clarifies—and this is, again, a recommendation by a submitter and particularly by the Community Law Centre Aotearoa, who deal with this every day, and they are one half of this contractual agreement—that rather than saying “fund, facilitate, and otherwise support the provision of community legal services”, it’s better to say the words: “fund functions that enable, facilitate, or support the provision of community legal services”.

I think the idea that the function aspect of this particular section is incredibly important. Otherwise what you are seeing is that the Secretary for Justice, in fact, then is logged into a contractual obligation to not just fund but also facilitate and support provisions of community legal services. I don’t know if it’s the intention of the Secretary to also facilitate such provisions. Again, when we are looking at something like this, we’ve got three consecutive verbs with a very nice use of an Oxford comma, but, again, I don’t think that is the intention of this bill. My recommendation is to clarify that the secretary is only funding the function, and the facilitation of the support of the provision of the community legal service remains with Community Law Centre Aotearoa. I want to seek the Minister’s guidance on whether she will support my amendment.

Thank you, Mr Chair. Just a short call from me, really, in response to some of the comments that the Minister has made in response to Dr Duncan Webb’s issue that he raised. The Minister—and you can correct me if this is incorrect—seemed to say that there’s no problem with the contracts and that they remain in place. If that is the case, then what is the purpose of this bill? As I understand it, the entire purpose of this bill is to secure the contractual arrangements moving forward. Dr Duncan Webb’s question was: if that’s correct, then surely we should ensure that the previous spending on contracts is also not going to be affected by the fact that this change allegedly needs to be made?

I think it’s made in good faith; it’s a helpful suggestion. If there is genuinely an issue with previous funding, then something should be done to ensure that that funding isn’t challenged or that the contractual arrangements that happened in the past were made in a way that was consistent with the law. If it wasn’t, then that’s problematic, and if what the Minister said is correct, then why are we making this change?

I move, That debate on this question now close.

Vanushi Walters’ tabled amendment to clause 4 amending paragraph (a) is out of order as not offering a serious alternative form of words.

Vanushi Walters’ tabled amendment to clause 4 amending paragraph (b) is out of order as not offering a serious alternative form of words.

Dr Lawrence Xu-Nan’s tabled amendment to clause 4 amending paragraph (b) of section 94(1) is out of order as not offering a serious alternative form of words.

The question is that the Hon Dr Duncan Webb’s tabled amendment to clause 4 inserting new subsection (1A) be agreed to.

The question is that Vanushi Walters’ tabled amendment regarding the need for culturally appropriate services be agreed to.

Madam Speaker, the committee has considered the Legal Services (Distribution of Special Fund) Amendment Bill and reports it without amendment. I move, That the report be adopted.

This bill is set down for third reading immediately.

on behalf of the Minister of Justice: I move, That the Legal Services (Distribution of Special Fund) Amendment Bill be now read a third time.

This bill amends the Legal Services Act 2011 to broaden the use of the Lawyers and Conveyancers Special Fund. Money in the special fund must be paid to the Secretary for Justice for the purpose of funding community law centres. The special fund serves an important role to ensure that people can access free legal help in the community. However, there is ambiguity around whether special fund money can be used to meet expenses incurred by community law centres when delivering community law services. This is because the current law is narrowly framed.

This bill makes a minor change to broaden the use of the special fund. This will enable the Secretary for Justice to enter into contracts to also fund, facilitate, and otherwise support the provision of community legal services by community law centres. It is important to support the long-term funding of organisations that deliver community legal services and ensure people are able to access the legal help they need.

To conclude, I’d like to thank members for their support of this bill. I commend this bill to the House.

The question is that the motion be agreed to.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. What a momentous day it is as we add 12 words to the Legal Services Act! We’ve made our position clear: we’re not going to stand in the way of this bill passing—well, not for very long anyway—because community law centres are really important.

I must say it’s good to know that there’s cross-party support for the continued existence—and, hopefully, the flourishing—of our community law network, because, as the Minister pointed out and other members have observed, community law centres fill a really important gap in access to justice. Access to justice is essential to the rule of law, and the ability to not only go to court—which is only one aspect of access to justice—but also just to know your rights and also to know how you can sort your stuff out in a legal sense is actually really, really important.

To a large part, it’s that second aspect that community law centres fill. They are able to talk to people and say, “Well, look, we think you’re in the right”, or “You’re in the wrong”, or “There’s some middle ground”—but also navigating how then to vindicate those rights. Many a time people say, “I want to go to court and sue”, and so on, and, look, maybe that’s the right course, but many a time there’s another way, whether it be through an alternative tribunal, one of our many ombudsman dispute resolution schemes, or the disputes tribunal.

That kind of information and just that helping hand—because, I can remember, I both used to volunteer at the community law centre, I used to be a supervising solicitor at the community law centre, and I’ve sat on the board of a community law centre. Quite often, people might think their issues are trivial—“I’ve bought this appliance, this washing machine, for $600 and it’s broken.” Now, for some of us, that would not be a particularly troubling thing, but for other people in the community, that is catastrophic because the weekly surplus that they have is so small that that sets them back in a very significant way. To be able to sit down and say, “Well, look, that retailer might have given you the brush off, but the first step is to go back to the retailer and let them know a few things.”—the first thing you need to let them know is that you’ve clearly taken some advice, just on the lowdown. The second thing is that you know what your rights are; that you can’t simply be told, “Well, it’s two years old, so it’s out of warranty.” The third thing is to let them know that, if you don’t get satisfaction there, you know where to go next.

Nine times out of 10, equipping an ordinary New Zealander with those three facts will be more than enough to solve their problem. All of a sudden, the person at the counter doesn’t dismiss them out of hand; they go and get their manager and their manager knows that there’s a thing called the Consumer Guarantees Act. That is really empowering, so our community law centres do need to be funded properly. The Canterbury community law centre does a great job down there in Christchurch, but one of the things that is really important—and perhaps this bill will make sure continues—is making sure those lawyers stay up to date and they’re well resourced. Recently, I know they went through and reviewed all their salaries to make sure they’re paid on a scale which was not derisory—which arguably had been the case—and also to make sure they get further education so that, when the law does change, they can make sure they’re giving up-to-date law; and also that they have all the research tools they need, that they can go online and look at the legal commentaries and the statutes and so on and so forth, which will cost money.

If that’s what this bill does, all well and good. We think it was probably the case anyway, but we’ve been told it’s not, so that’s why we’ll be supporting this bill further in this House. I mean, if you think about it—and there is that problem: I’m disappointed that, in the committee of the whole House, the Minister in the chair, the Hon Penny Simmonds, didn’t really give a great deal of comfort as to contracts which were already extant. It may be that the Crown Law advice that she won’t let us see says that this doesn’t affect existing contractual arrangements, but there is a question about that. The definition of “legal services” in the Legal Services Act is a little bit narrower. I had thought that it was relating to the lawyers and conveyancers definition, which is a very broad definition. It, essentially, says what services are regulated services, and legal services there can be all kinds of services, but a slightly narrower definition, I think, in the Legal Services Act.

Look, it’s a piece of legislation which is saying it’s necessary, but again, I just want to really make sure that, across all parties, we ensure that the special fund that this bill talks about is properly resourced. One of the things which has happened recently is that interest rates have been relatively high. We can talk about that in other contexts later, but one of the upsides of that is that the money going into the special fund has actually been pretty good. We were in a very low-interest environment; the Government actually—and it was the Labour Government that did it—had to top up the special fund. That hasn’t been necessary recently, but it’s perfectly possible that, as interest rates do go up and down, that will need to happen again. It’s good to see that, from what I have heard in the relatively short speeches from the other side, there is a commitment to ensuring that lower-income people do get free legal services, and therefore I’m inferring they will be properly funded.

Of course, the other thing is that it’s not just low-income people. Community law centres generally have an open-door policy. Community law centres don’t tend to seek as customers middle-class and wealthy people who can get their own legal advice and pay for it, but they also come in, particularly in the kinds of clinics that they have where you can have a drop in and ask a few quick questions. It’s not just low- and super-low - income people; it’s a wide range of people that come in.

Also, just recognising that, in terms of early intervention, the work the community law centres do in the family space is really, really good, because when people break up and have property issues and care of child and children issues, getting to sort that out at an early stage, before it gets tangled and acrimonious, can be a really, really useful thing. What perhaps we don’t understand is that, many a time, people split up and no lawyer sees it—often ever—but that’s not a good outcome sometimes for the children in particular in the relationship, because it’s always better to have some kind of structure around how that child is cared for; how the child is funded, right? Child support either within the IRD system or outside of it is an important part, and our community law centres funded through the special fund are a really good part of that. I’m sorry if I’m boring you Vanessa Weenink, but, you know—

No, no. You’re not boring us; not at all!

Wakey, wakey. It’s been a long day. I must say the other thing that we need to address about the special fund is the proportion of it that goes to community law centres, in terms of the interest on trust accounts, whether it remains appropriate that banks keep 40 percent of the interest on trust accounts. You’ve got to remember that’s clients’ money. The general rule should be it goes back to the client, but, in this case, the legislature has intervened and said, “Let’s use it for community law centres”—and then said—“and let the banks keep 40 percent of it.” That’s a pretty significant share. As I think I said earlier, perhaps in the second reading, that’s about $10 million of interest that would go to clients or the special fund that the banks are getting. I mean, of those three people—clients, poor people needing legal services, and banks—I know where I think it should go, and I know the least deserving of it. But there you go; that’s something we can address on another occasion.

This is a bill that’s not urgent, that could have gone in a statutes amendment bill, that’s probably unnecessary and doesn’t address all of the problems it needs to address, but we’re generous people on this side of the House; we’ll probably support it anyway.

The time has come for the dinner break. The House will resume at 7 p.m.

Good evening, members. When we broke for the dinner break, we were debating the Legal Services (Distribution of Special Fund) Amendment Bill. We are up to call No. 3 in the third reading; it’s a Green Party call.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I rise on behalf of the Green Party to support this bill in its third reading. As I’ve mentioned in my second reading speech, this is a bill that was originally introduced under Budget urgency, and it was something we opposed initially but, through a very thorough select committee stage as well as engagement with the submitters, we have now supported this bill.

This bill was something that we did go through in the select committee stage, and I want to just highlight some of the key points during the committee stage that deserve some attention on this bill. Understandably, this is a small bill—only four clauses—yet we were able to have a good discussion on each of the clauses. I think, particularly, let’s start with clause 1 from a title perspective; we did have quite a robust conversation around the title. I would really like to thank the member Camilla Belich, in particular, as well as Vanushi Walters, who gave a very good and an insightful history of the context of Community Law Centres Aotearoa that brings this bill to us. It’s now been wrapped into the Legal Services Act 2011.

It is unfortunate that the Minister did not take on board my title amendment, and the main reason for that is because the main reason I’m putting the amendment is because I do believe that “distribution”, in this case, is not the appropriate word to use. I think it might have been the member Camilla Belich’s suggestion that “clarification of distribution of special fund” would have been much more insightful, or “clarification of special fund”, because it simply is not actually to do with the distribution of the fund itself. In that sense, the title can be interpreted as a little bit misleading.

In terms of the commencement date, we saw that the commencement date has changed: it’s now the day after Royal assent. The original commencement date is 1 July 2025. There is a level of significance because, as I mentioned, this is a bill that was introduced under urgency in May, but only the first reading was introduced under urgency, and there was no motion that had been brought to the House at the time that it was going to have a shortened select committee stage. It was a question that we raised with the Minister—we weren’t able to get that in select committee, but it was a question we raised with the Minister during the committee stage—on how they’re intending to have this bill and this Act come into force on 1 July 2025, when they were still in the process of the select committee.

Also, at the same time, members asked the Minister questions around whether, between 1 July 2025—considering that it was introduced under Budget urgency; therefore, understandably, there will be some Budget implications—but considering that, with the Budget implications, what has changed, if anything, and what impact does it have to the Government or to the implementation or the commencement of this bill now that, even after Royal assent, you’re looking at a four-and-a-half month delay in terms of the commencement, and whether there’s any significant issues?

Then we moved on to the principal Act of this bill, and that is clause 3. I think this is the area that we did spend a little bit of time on during the committee stage. It’s important to highlight the fact that this bill—and I’ll talk more about clause 4—but this bill is a very small bill that could have been wrapped into the Statutes Amendment Bill, which was something that the Hon Dr Duncan Webb has mentioned, but instead it’s being introduced as a separate bill. We did check with the Minister to see if it was going to be wrapped into its individual bill that that deserves a select committee process and everything separate, beyond what we see in the Statutes Amendment Bill; whether there has been any thoughts about wrapping in other things from the Legal Services Act into it as part of a package, particularly when we are looking at the fact that the community law centres part of the Legal Services Act—it occupies Subpart 3 of Part 3, “Administration of legal services system”, specifically sections 93 to 96, and section 94 is what’s being amended here—whether there’s been any consideration on expanding the scope and potentially looking at separating out the community law centres into its own part within the Legal Services Act.

The rationale for that is—well, there are two reasons for that. Number one is, in terms of sections 93 to 96 on community law centres, it doesn’t necessarily fit nicely under the definition of “Administration of legal service system” , similar to other subparts of that Part 3 of the principal Act. Also, other legal service providers—legal aid, for example—have their own section: it’s Part 2 of the Legal Services Act. If legal aid has its own section, then presumably there is a possibility that community law centres should also have its own section within that particular Act. Also, another important part is that this particular bill deals with special fund, and “special fund” in principal legislation is only applicable to community law centres. By embedding it as a subpart of a major part, questions were raised on whether that is going to mean expanding, or whether we’re still going to be able to maintain the integrity of the ring-fencing of that particular fund within that particular subpart.

Finally, the crux of the bill is clause 4, which has the most significant amendment. Now, this is something that I think the member Vanushi Walters has raised a number of really significant tabled amendments around, which weren’t accepted, and it’s a shame because a lot of that actually came from the submitters themselves in terms of the amendment. It came from legal experts in the New Zealand Law Society; it came from the Community Law Centres Aotearoa themselves, which is the most affected by this particular legislation—so it was unfortunate that the Minister wasn’t receptive of some of these amendments.

I do want to mention my specific tabled amendment, as well, that the Minister didn’t really consider as a part of that, which I actually think is an important one, because the current wording of clause 4, amended section 94(1)(b), does say “fund, facilitate, and otherwise support” in the context of the secretary. The clarification I have—and this also came from the Community Law Centres Aotearoa’s submission—is that it should state that the secretary is “funding the functions that enable, facilitate, or support the provision of community legal services”. The reason I want to raise this as a particularly important aspect is the way that we’re looking at a succession of sequential verbs—of using “fund, facilitate, and otherwise support”—also, then, would imply that it’s also the secretary’s role to facilitate and otherwise support the provisions, when, in fact, my assumption is that the secretary’s role is to fund, and the functions of that remains with the Community Law Centres Aotearoa, which then ties into the “facilitate, or support the provisions of community legal services”. This is something that the Minister wasn’t able to support, but I’m hoping that, by mentioning this particular nuance, it does give a scope for, potentially, both Crown Law and the Ministry of Justice, but also provides some sort of clarification in terms of interpretation for the Community Law Centres Aotearoa, as well.

To conclude, the Green Party of Aotearoa New Zealand does support this bill. We do recognise that, although this is a small bill—and we’ve heard a lot of murmurs from the Government side as we were debating this bill during the committee of the whole House stage—but it is a bill that has been introduced. It is, out of a lot of the bills that have been introduced by the Government, reasonably benign, or actually completely benign. If we’re going to be able to see more bills being introduced like this, this is something that we could actually encourage and have something that is reasonably benign that everyone could support. With that, the Green Party commends this bill to the House.

I rise in support of the Legal Services (Distribution of Special Fund) Amendment Bill. This bill makes a change to how the special fund can be used. People sitting at home who watched that last speech could be forgiven for having no idea what this bill is about or what anyone’s talking about, but it’s pretty simple: lawyers and conveyancers up and down New Zealand, for various reasons, have trust accounts where they hold their clients’ money for a period of time. Fans of that iconic New Zealand show Outrageous Fortune may recall that Jethro got in trouble for abusing or misusing money in the trust account, and Gary Savage actually blackmailed him and stiffed him on a property deal as a result. A lot of lawyers have these trust accounts; most of them don’t misuse it.

What’s interesting is that they sometimes accrue interest when they are put in the bank, and that interest goes to the special fund and the Secretary for Justice—that is, the chief executive of the New Zealand Ministry of Justice—uses that money to fund community law centres. I actually think that’s quite a nice feature of our legal system, because community law centres help a huge number of people and it’s not obvious what else would happen with that interest that could be better than this.

But there’s a small problem. The law, as it stands in the Legal Services Act, says that it has to be used for “community legal services”. There’s some dispute as to whether the depreciation, the maintenance, the electricity, the rent on a community law centre counts as a “legal service” or another use of money. What we’re doing with this legislation tonight is saying, actually, the Secretary for Justice can make some rules about what exactly is included, assuming they’ll use their common sense to ensure that the money does actually go to providing community law services, even if the precise use is not paying for a lawyer to sit in a room.

It’s pretty sensible stuff—not difficult to explain—and, you know what, maybe if Lawrence Xu-Nan learnt to do that, we’d put up some more agreeable bills for him. I commend it to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I rise on behalf of New Zealand First to support the Legal Services (Distribution of Special Fund) Amendment Bill. I’m going to take you back to Budget night, because I spoke to this bill also in urgency on Budget night—I was the last speaker of that session before the clock ticked over to 12 o’clock, and I remember saying, as I was talking about the rest of the Budget, that that Budget was a game-changer for business, in some ways. The policy that we’d announced that day in the Budget was Investment Boost, which was a game-changer, but when you take it back to this bill, this is a game-changer for access to justice and access to legal services, and that’s why this bill is so important to community law services.

In the speeches that I’ve given through the first and second readings, as I said, I sat on the Justice Committee, heard the submissions, and we got that substantial submission from the Community Law Centres. The services they provide throughout New Zealand—those 24 centres—provide access to so many vulnerable New Zealanders. As we heard also, they gave over 27,000 education sessions in their last year. They give access to justice and to information that people require. New Zealand First supports this bill as very much a tweak so the funds can be accessed more. It also shows New Zealand First’s commitment to sensible and cost-effective solutions to improving service delivery. It’s about using funds that are there and not using taxpayers’ money. I commend this bill to the House.

This is a split call. I call Tamatha Paul.

Tēnā koe e te Māngai o te Whare. Nō reira tēnā tātou katoa. E tū ana ahau ki te kōrero e pā ana ki tēnei pire, ko te Legal Services (Distribution of Special Fund) Amendment Bill.

Ka parakitihi ahau i tōku reo rangatira, te reo o ō tātou tīpuna. E mihi ana ki ngā kaiwhakamāori reo Māori i roto i tēnei Whare. E mihi ana ki tōku kaiako reo Māori, ko Devon Wikaira tōna ingoa. Ko Whītiki te ingoa o tāna kaupapa.

Ko te Legal Services (Distribution of Special Fund) Amendment Bill te ingoa o tēnei pire. He whakaaro nā te Pāti Kākāriki ēnei kupu. I te pānui tuatahi o tēnei pire, i whakakāhore mātou i tēnei kaupapa. Ko te mea tuatahi o te whakakāhore nā te whakaiti o ētahi pūtea mō te legal aid funding ki ngā community law centres anō hoki.

E 24 ngā tari o te motu o te kaupapa o community law. I te komiti whiriwhiri, e tautoko ana a Community Law Centres of Aotearoa i tēnei pire. Arā kua whiti i tā mātou whakakāhore, kua whiti i tā tātou pōti o tēnei kaupapa, o tēnei pire.

Kua tautoko mātou i te pire ināianei, i tēnei pō. I tēnei pō i te pānui tuatoru o tēnei pire, e tautoko ana mātou i tēnei kaupapa. Ko te kaupapa o tēnei pire, ka toha i te pūtea ki ngā hapori o te motu ki te tautoko i ō rātou tāngata me ngā mahi ture.

I te wāhanga 298 o te Lawyers and Conveyancers Act i te tau 2006, ko ngā ture ki te toha i aua pūtea e noho ana i roto i te special fund, ka whakautu i te Secretary of Justice i ngā tāra nā te special fund. Ko te mahi a te special fund ko te koha pūtea ki ngā tari o community law o te motu.

I te wāhanga 94 o te Legal Services Act i te tau 2011, e kōrero ana i taua wāhanga e pā ana ki ngā tikanga o ō rātou kawenata. Ko te mahi a tēnei pire, ko te Legal Services (Distribution of Special Fund) Amendment Bill, he mahi whakapai i te Legal Services Act i te tau 2011 ki te whakaae i ngā kawenata nā te wāhanga 94 o taua ture. Ko te kaupapa o taua wāhanga ko te mahi tahi, ko te mahi tahi a ngā tari e mahi ana i ngā mahi ture.

So āe, arā kua whakamana i tēnei pire, kua tautoko ahau i tēnei pire. Nō reira ngā mihi ki ngā kaiwhakamāori i tēnei Whare Miere, kia pai tō koutou wiki-mutunga. Kua ea tāku kōrero nō reira tēnā koutou e te Whare.

[Thank you, Madam Speaker. Therefore, greetings to us all. I stand to speak about this bill, the Legal Services (Distribution of Special Fund) Amendment Bill.

I will practice my noble language, the language of our ancestors. I would like to thank the Māori language interpreters within this House. I acknowledge my Māori language teacher; his name is Devon Wikaira. Whītiki is the name of his programme.

The Legal Services (Distribution of Special Fund) Amendment Bill is the name of this bill. These words are the thoughts of the Green Party. At the first reading of this bill, we opposed this initiative. The first rationale of our opposition was the reduction of some funding for legal aid funding for community law centres.

The community law initiative has 24 national offices. At select committee, Community Law Centres of Aotearoa supported this bill—i.e., it made it past our opposition, and it made it through our vote of this topic, of this bill.

We are now in support of this bill, tonight. At the third reading of this bill tonight, we support this initiative. The purpose of this bill is to distribute funding to the communities of the nation to support their people and their legal activities.

In section 298 of the Lawyers and Conveyancers Act 2006, the legislation for the distribution of those funds sits within the special fund, and the Secretary of Justice pays the dollar amounts for the special fund. The purpose of the special fund is to grant funding to the community law offices of the country.

In section 94 of the Legal Services Act 2011, that section speaks about the provisions of their covenants. The purpose of this bill, the Legal Services (Distribution of Special Fund) Amendment Bill, is to improve on the Legal Services Act 2011 to endorse the covenants in section 94 of that bill. The purpose of that section is cooperation—the cooperation of the offices that work on legal matters.

So yes, we have supported this bill, I have supported this bill. Therefore, I would like to thank the interpreters in this Beehive; have a good weekend. My speech is concluded, so greetings to you all in the House.]

Thank you, Madam Speaker. One of the select committee recommendations was to change the starting date of the Act, because the original date has already passed. Therefore, it’s important that we get this bill passed this evening, and I commend it to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I rise also to support this bill, as we said we would throughout the speeches this evening. It’s true that it is a very simple bill to understand. I think the two key questions that we’ve been asking through the committee stage are whether clarification is really needed, which is the first one, and our view is that it wasn’t—our view is shared by Community Law Centres Aotearoa—and the second question is: even if clarity was needed, is this the most important work that the Government should be doing for the people of New Zealand? Again, the argument was that, no, it could well have been part of a Statutes Amendment Bill, it could have been part of work that I mentioned Sir Geoffrey had suggested in terms of the review of laws that should be repealed that are on the statute book, but we are going to support it none the less.

I did notice through the course of the speeches that, on this side of the House, we had a number of people stand up and speak to their personal involvement with community law, whether it be volunteering or as members of staff or as members of the board, and it is a fantastic thing to do in terms of contributing to our community. [Interruption] I didn’t quite hear that from the Government side, so just some gentle encouragement that it’s not too late—lawyers or non-lawyers, there are plenty of things you can do to contribute to access to justice.

Where I started my speech on the second reading was a comment on why we’re in urgency. I do think that’s relevant here at the third reading as well. I was recently contacted, as I’m sure many of the other members were, by a group called Improving Urgency, who have a set of recommendations that they’re arguing for. They’re doing it precisely at this moment in time because, as we all are very familiar with, our Standing Orders are under review and this is the time when parliamentarians across the House will get to decide whether those provisions relating to urgency are good, or perhaps where something ought to be done so that we avoid the situation that we’re currently in, where we see ourselves in urgency to clarify a law that community law says doesn’t need to be clarified.

Improving urgency suggests that we look at a set of criteria that would be applied to determine when urgency is needed: the presence of a genuine emergency, imminent deadlines that are linked to international commitments or legal obligations, and when the issue requires immediate legal action to prevent significant financial or reputational damage—this is what they suggest in terms of where we could go. If you are fond of reading this fantastic book McGee, you will also get some direction in terms of what urgency ought to be—the suggestions in there are legal reasons, emergency or unforeseen events, and political situations—so it does allow for the fact where you campaigned on an issue and you are wanting to move that quickly through the House. But, again, I’d just suggest that the stretch of the use of urgency is getting a little bit ridiculous.

I do worry: a few people have said to me, “Urgency will end at midnight, and at least that’s a limit on it.” In fact, we could, if the Government wanted to, go into extraordinary urgency, which, as the members on the Government benches will know, I will have a lot to say about that as I know my colleagues will on the next bill. I have certainly had a steady stream of coffee throughout the day. If we were to go into extreme urgency, as I’m sure the members will want to know in advance before they make this call, the House only breaks between 8 a.m. and 9 a.m., so we’ll, essentially, be going all the way through to 8 a.m., which will potentially be quite entertaining and perhaps we could see if the speeches on that side get longer, or if they get any shorter, if that’s even a possibility.

I do want to acknowledge community law. They are an extraordinary service, and they did a study when I was there with them, back in 2018, that looked at value for money. Even back then, they had a return on investment of $50 million of free legal services each year. It cost $11 million but it was said to deliver $50 million, and that’s because issues were resolved at a very, very early stage, which is fantastic. I did also want to speak to one issue, which I do think is one the House needs to continue to be mindful of—

Extraordinary urgency ends on Saturday.

It does end on Saturday, as Mr Seymour has said.

We finish at midnight anyway.

That would be true for today. The opportunity is lost for this week, but why do I suspect that urgency is in our imminent future, again, but moments away? Perhaps the public can watch and see whether that might be the case, in preparation for the next lot.

I did also want to just acknowledge the history of the Lawyers and Conveyancers Act in 2006. When I was going back to the Hansard to look at that bill and the changes made, I came across this beautiful quote from Nandor Tanczos. They were considering the percentage of money that the banks kept, and it looks like the select committee interrogated, even back then in 2006, whether the banks should be holding as much of the percentage of money as they are—of course, currently, it’s 40 percent on law. I will make the point that I understand that negotiations have happened with a number of banks who are looking at reducing that margin voluntarily. My view is very strongly that that should be reduced in statute. Nandor said, “The bill as it was introduced originally sought to amend that provision so that the banks would retain 45 percent, and community law centres would receive 55 percent,”.

The only amount that they managed to negotiate that down to was 5 percent, and they got it down to 40 percent in community law, retaining 60 percent, but he also made this point: he said, “The question of the true cost”—

I woke up and she was back on the bill.

I’m very much on the bill, and I’m quoting Hansard into Hansard about an issue that is very relevant to the bill. This is so good. He said, “The question of the true cost of the service has never actually been resolved to anyone’s satisfaction. This is the service that the banks provide in setting up and maintaining those accounts. I am moving to amend the proportion the banks would now retain from 40 percent to 30 percent. The concern about that proportion is that if we get it wrong, the banks may cease to provide the service.” He was acknowledging that it couldn’t be too low, that it shouldn’t be too high, and that even at that stage, they hadn’t truly analysed what that appropriate amount was. I do think that that’s a matter for this House to consider at some stage, because what we know is that, at the moment, there isn’t sufficient free legal advice and certainly not free legal representation for people who need it, so it’s something we should look at.

I did want to acknowledge one more time Te Ara Ture, which is also a community law centre initiative trying to help address that gap where pro bono lawyers assist community members with legal issues. An interesting fact from last term was that Chris Bishop had a member’s bill that attempted to allow lawyers to provide free legal services without necessarily that funnel, if you like. Our view was very firmly that community law plays a very important role in terms of directing that capacity to precisely where it’s needed. The other interesting service that they started was the legal information bot, where people could type in questions and have those answered, which is fantastic, especially for young people.

Many people have been acknowledged today, and names dropped and such. I did want to mention one more in closing, Piers Davies, who’s been a significant part of the community law movement and who in one week’s time will step down from the YouthLaw board. He told me about 10 years ago that he was going to step down, and he’s really pushed and done everything possible to ensure access to justice, but especially for young people, so to all our heroes in community law, but today, especially to Piers Davies, I commend this bill to the House.

Madam Speaker, happy Tuesday! Where else would you want to be on a Tuesday in urgency, Madam Speaker? Isn’t that great? I wish to wake the House up after that 10 minutes of nothing. This will be refreshing. Extraordinary urgency? Well, that sounds exciting, so I say to the member Vanushi Walters, “Bring it on!” This bill, the Legal Services (Distribution of Special Fund) Amendment Bill, is a great piece of legislation, great for our community law, and therefore I am going to commend it to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker, for this opportunity to speak on the Legal Services (Distribution of Special Fund) Amendment Bill. This is not a bill that I’ve participated in before now, so it has been interesting to hear the debate on this third reading.

Of course, I was a lawyer for one part of my life and was very much involved with the ins and outs of the trust fund. As David Seymour said before, this is a very important function that law firms hold, because, of course, if you are doing a conveyancing or a much bigger transaction and your lawyers hold your funds for you, if the lawyers do something bad, that’s going to end badly. That may have happened in the past, so one of the things that we’ve been doing in New Zealand for a long time is using some of the money that’s made from those funds, as David Seymour said, to fund community law. We know, also, that community law centres are great organisations that help people in need.

I want to pause on that for a moment, because now I am not a lawyer and I am a constituent MP. The phenomenal work that the Dunedin Community Law Centre does is just so helpful to so many people, and I want to commend all of them for the work that they do. Be it on immigration cases or when people are having civil disputes and need a little bit of help, community law is there for them, so it’s very important for many of our citizens that community law is able to operate as effectively and as helpfully as possible.

I’m also the member for a university town, which, of course, has law students, and many of them volunteer at community law centres, or they certainly did in the past when I was a younger lawyer and would help at Dunedin Community Law Centre. It turned out that somebody who’d studied a lot of trade regulation and international environmental law and the Resource Management Act wasn’t that helpful! Luckily, most of my colleagues had done things like family law and more property law papers, and they were much more helpful than I ever was. I do want to make that shout-out to community law.

We’ve heard from the various speeches that the drafting of the current law could be read to be very narrow and not include costs such as the lease for the premises that, of course, these community law organisations have to operate out of. Everyone is agreed that it’s good to fix it. It says in the bill: “Where the Special Fund cannot be used to meet costs, Crown funding is required instead.” Noting that I haven’t been part of this bill, that does look, to me, like this is a move away from Crown funding for any community law functions and that this is another way to help the Government’s books by, really, more levies. We’ve seen that with the waste levy for instance: that it gets used for a whole lot of different things.

That is a negative, but we’re trying to focus on the positives here, because, as the member before me, Tom Rutherford, said, it’s Tuesday night in Parliament’s time and Friday evening in other people’s time. I wanted to pick up, though, on some other points that were made in the discussion of this bill—

Tell us about it.

David Seymour is asking me to tell him about it, and I’ll tell him about his speech. He said something along the lines of, “If the Opposition speeches were clearer or shorter, then perhaps the Government would put up more agreeable bills.” We are seeming to be in agreement tonight, so I’m wondering if that is a promise that—

Unfortunately, the member hasn’t qualified.

The member hasn’t qualified for being unclear or clear?

She could improve her average performance if she sat down before time.

Well, I’m wondering about this statement that David Seymour has been making about the Opposition speeches and if there is some sort of promise here that, rather than taking us into urgency time and time again and looking at bills in all stages, this Government will commit to the sorts of bills that all members of this House can agree on. I’m hoping that that is what he is saying. I can’t quite hear him.

No, of course it’s not.

Oh, I’m hearing that it’s not what he’s saying. Well, a challenge to you, Mr Seymour—

The member’s time has expired because that is the end of the speech.

E te Māngai o te Whare, tuatahi e mihi ana ki te mema o te Pāti Kākāriki mō tāna kōrero i te reo taketake mō te wā tuatahi. E mihi ana ki a ia. Ka rere te reo o te whenua i tēnei Whare, ka piki te ora. Ahakoa ko tēnei te kupu hou mō mātou i tēnei pō: “whakaupa”.

[Madam Speaker, first I would like to acknowledge the member of the Green Party for her speech in the indigenous language for the first time. I congratulate her. When the language of the land flows in this House, we feel better. Despite that, this is the new vocabulary for us tonight: “prolong”.]

“Whakaupa” means “to delay, prolong, or protract”, and I shall do none of that. I commend this bill to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. It’s a pleasure to be able to take a slightly longer call—a full call; I only had a part-call in the last reading. Community law is a very interesting subject matter, and I did touch on some of my experience in community law. I volunteered there. I was also on the management committee of the Wellington Community Law Centre before the community law centres were merged into a national body, which is a change of structure. I did go back to volunteer as a lawyer in community law once that structure was in place.

The issue, really, is that this is an extremely special and important part of the way that we provide legal services and legal advice to the community. I think it’s the people who work in community law, like my colleague Vanushi Walters, who was heckled somewhat during her speech—I think we need to acknowledge that Vanushi Walters studied at Oxford University and is a qualified lawyer, and instead of going to earn the big bucks at one of the major firms, she ran YouthLaw for many, many years in community law centres and has done more pro bono work than, I think, probably anyone in this House who’s legally qualified. She has made a massive contribution to community law and also to the spirit of free legal services and access to justice. I just wanted to acknowledge that, Vanushi, because you are an exceptional lawyer and an exceptional citizen in the sense of your commitment towards access to justice. It’s important for us to remember that and also your long experience with community law and your contribution there, too.

I do agree with some of the speakers on the other side who acknowledge the way that community law is funded. It is, as we’ve traversed, a very interesting funding mechanism, where all of the very, very wealthy trust accounts—I don’t know whether an account can be wealthy, but anyway, they usually have a lot of money in them. That’s because lawyers hold money on trust for a number of different important transactions, and that’s to ensure that they get paid on time. It’s also to ensure that they’re safe, and it’s to uphold different contractual agreements. For whatever reason, sometimes your personal money can be held by your lawyer in their trust account, and there are lots of rules associated with running a trust account. As qualified lawyers, anyone who’s ever gone through that process, there’s a lot of training and education that you have to go through in order to be able to legally manage one of those in a responsible way. These are significant functions of the way that our legal services are provided.

One of the ways that the legal community and, in fact, Governments of the past and successive Governments have decided to utilise the function of that is through allowing the interest that accrues on those trust accounts, rather than just being kept by the bank—although there is a percentage which is kept by the bank, and this has been mentioned a few times, and I’ll just park that there for now while I finish explaining how the trust account works—that money then, or 60 percent of that interest, goes to this community law funding. We’ve got 24 community law centres throughout New Zealand. I visit a few of them, certainly not all of them, but I do know—

Wairarapa?

I haven’t been to the one in Wairarapa, but I’d love to attend the one in Wairarapa. I think all of them that I have visited have been incredible services, and I mentioned it very quickly in one of the contributions that I made, but I think it’s worth saying again: members of this House will know how useful community law centres are because of the number of times they refer their constituents to those services. It could be that they refer them to attend and see a lawyer, or it could be that they refer to their very excellent community law guide.

Before there was a plethora of legal information on the internet, this was, really, the one free area that you could find very, very good, solid legal advice. This community law guide is kept in most public libraries, I think, still today. It’s usually distributed for free and updated, and it’s a hugely important resource that community law provides and has done for many, many years. That is an example of something that community law does. I think that would fall within the current definition without this bill, and the reason I say that is that, if you look at the Legal Services Act, the definition of legal services actually covers education. I think that particular area would probably be fine without this change, and that’s reassuring, because that has been something that has been funded for a very long period of time.

I think community law could do more, and I think the frustration with this bill as it’s gone through the House is not that there is huge disagreement on what this bill does but that there is disagreement as to whether it’s necessary or whether it’s the best use of Parliament’s time or whether, in fact, the due diligence has been done to ensure that previous spending of community law centres has been for the right cause. I think the frustration has been that, actually, the potential for our community law—and when we look at the funding, which is the subject of this bill, this doesn’t fundamentally change the percentage of interest that goes to community law. This could have been something that could have been looked at in this bill. I know that’s a policy area perhaps for the Government or an incoming Government to look at, but certainly I think there’s more that community law could do and more that they could provide. I think there’s an appetite for that. I think there’s also a need for that, too.

My own experience of working in community law was that, a lot of the time that people would come in and seek legal advice, often they were wanting common-sense advice, and to be that first person there when they come through the door and have a problem and to be able just to point them in the right direction is something that you can do as a lawyer. You don’t necessarily have to be a lawyer, and that is why I think it’s great that, within the suite of legislation that this bill is a part of, we allow law students to work at community law centres, and it forms a part of their training as well. I’ll use one example from my time providing advice in this particular type of circumstance. I had a woman come and see me. She said to me, “I’ve been sacked.” I talked to her about it, and she wasn’t going to go into work the next day because she was so upset about having lost her job.

When I went through it with her, I found out she hadn’t actually been dismissed and that there was every indication that her employer was expecting her at work the next day. It had just been a miscommunication around something that she had done at work that, she’d been told, was wrong, but she’d taken it entirely the wrong way. I think that shows the value of being able to access that type of advice. She was feeling incredibly vulnerable. If she hadn’t turned up to work the next day, it’s very likely that maybe she would have ended up losing her job, but just going through “What’s happened? What documentation have you received? This doesn’t look like a dismissal to me. It looks like you’ve just had a performance issue raised with you.” was enough for her to feel much better and, within a very short period of time, go back. I didn’t see her again, but I assume, hopefully, she was able to go back to work. These types of services can provide very meaningful help and advice for people when they access them, too.

In relation to this bill, our general view is that we’re supportive of it. We wish it would go further in order to fully bolster and support community law. We think there’s probably ways that it could do that. We’re not 100 percent around the need for it, just due to the fact that it’s quite a difficult concept to think of how legal services would be able to be provided without all of these other utilities, as some other speakers have talked about, in terms of the rent for the premises, the other items that you need in order to provide advice—the photocopiers. These things, as I understand, have been paid for by community law centres under this agreement. This bill probably will clarify that, so one thing I can say about this bill is that it makes it clear that the services that have been provided to date are very well within the law due to this clarification. It could have gone further, and there could have been other things that we focused on too. It’s reassuring to know that community law centres also support this bill.

I thank the Government, really, for allowing us to discuss the important work that community law centres do, and I would encourage them to think about the really amazing contribution that it makes to the community and what we collectively as a Parliament can do to support that important work moving forward. I think it helps not only us as parliamentarians in our job, it helps the members of the public who access those services. There could be even more benefit if we were to truly fund and support community law within New Zealand. I do appreciate the opportunity to speak on this bill, and I commend it to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. It’s a pleasure to be, technically, the last person to contribute on this bill. Speaking of technicality, I think it’s very important to clarify, because there’s been some interesting opinions, from the other side, that the current law is unclear with respect to whether the special fund can cover indirect costs. What we’re doing here is clarifying this discrepancy. I commend this bill to the House.

Madam Speaker.

Scott Willis—you were very quick off the mark that time.

Thank you, Madam Speaker; it is very much appreciated. It’s my pleasure to be able to take the last call on this bill tonight, and certainly nice to have the little bit of angst from opposite as well, or the gaslighting that we typically get, because it does indicate that I think the members opposite are feeling a little bit angsty. They want something else.

We want to be here. We appreciate this opportunity—[Interruption] We certainly appreciate this opportunity—

I can’t actually hear Mr Willis. I don’t know if he’s speaking to the bill or not because I can’t hear him. We’ll have some quiet so I can hear what he’s saying.

Thank you, Madam Speaker—because politics does not have to be adversarial. [Interruption] This bill, as minor as it is, is something that we are all agreeing on—we’re agreeing on. Really, the amount of heckling I’m getting for agreeing to a bill is quite surprising, but not so surprising, really, when we consider the nature of the Government on the other side because we do have a Government that is pushing and has desired to push such a minor bill through urgency. Sir Geoffrey Palmer has called the extreme use of urgency “a shambles”—a shambles.

We’ve heard the value of community law. We’ve heard from Rachel Brooking—I did not know that Rachel had volunteered in the fantastic Dunedin Community Law Centre, but I do know that this is a great place for people to contribute. We’ve heard about the need to think about how to best resource community law and this bill is doing a little bit there, but really not very much. I’m really in support of the Hon Dr Duncan Webb, Vanushi Walters, and Camilla Belich that we look at a review of how that funding works in the future, because this bill isn’t really going anywhere near far enough and it’s not doing anything very much.

Those are things that we think are valuable and we shouldn’t just stop here. Given we’ve got this sense of bonhomie, when we’re all getting on, why don’t we look for other places where we can actually make some progress? Why don’t we look for some other places where we can actually make some progress because the bitchiness might come with fatigue, but it is not necessary.

It’s good to hear that we’ve got students involved. One of the things that I’ve particularly enjoyed with community law, or understanding in community law, is the many kaupapa community law services designed by Māori for Māori. They are really important to give Māori decent legal advice to help fight the Crown on land and Te Tiriti issues, for example. Particularly important at this juncture of our Parliament—we certainly need to give assistance to people who are concerned if Te Tiriti rights are being ignored. This is really important—there are a whole lot of things that are happening in community law that we don’t necessarily see, but it’s the type of thing that really gives confidence to people to be able to take their concerns to somewhere they can get some professional advice, and it doesn’t cost the earth.

This bill is a minor bill, and we should be mindful that we don’t waste Parliament’s time on minor bills. However, given the opportunity to speak on bills while we have the luxury of being in Parliament—and we are grateful to the Government for keeping us here—we want to make sure that this bill moves forward but we want to also make sure that there’s not the use of urgency for little purpose. That is our equal concern because we have seen, from this Government, a shambles of process which really limits Parliament’s ability—

The member’s time has expired. The question is that the motion be agreed to.

Waste of time.

Who spoke during voting? Don’t do that again.

I present a legislative statement on the Judicature (Timeliness) Legislation Amendment Bill.

That legislative—[Interruption] Quiet. That legislative statement is published under the authority of the House and can be found on the Parliament website.

I move, That the Judicature (Timeliness) Legislation Amendment Bill be now read a second time.

I would like to begin by acknowledging the Justice Committee for their examination of this bill. My appreciation also goes to the submitters who took the time to participate in the select committee process and for their contributions. This Government is committed to reducing delays in the courts system. We are very conscious of the fact that many New Zealanders are waiting too long to achieve justice and get closure through the courts. That is why this bill is so important.

The amendments in the bill are necessary to support the efficient, fair, and timely resolution of court proceedings for all court parties and participants. The bill increases the cap on the number of High Court judges, enabling two additional judges to be appointed. More judges will help the courts better manage the growing workload.

One thing that has been heard through the select committee process, and other comments on the bill, is that the increase of two additional judges may not be enough to meet the demand for judicial resource. The Minister of Justice has, therefore, introduced an Amendment Paper to be considered at the committee of the whole House stage, which will enable the appointment of a further three judges. This will bring the total of potential new judges to five so that our senior courts can more effectively manage the workload.

The court system is complex, and more judges alone cannot address the timeliness challenges. That is why this bill also improves various court processes so the courts can run more efficiently. The bill makes changes to improve pre-trial case management so there is less duplication, it ensures appeals are heard by the most appropriate court, and it gives judges better tools to manage proceedings that plainly abuse the process of the courts. It also allows coroners to close certain inquiries when it is no longer appropriate to conduct these.

The Justice Committee has made recommendations that clarify and refine the bill. This includes changing the commencement date to 1 February 2026, enabling an order that deals with plainly abusive proceedings to be made on the papers, and ensuring consistency across the Coroners Act. I support these recommendations, which will help improve efficiency in the courts. Justice delayed is justice denied, and this Judicature (Timeliness) Legislation Amendment Bill goes some way to addressing this. I commend this bill to the House.

The question is that the motion be agreed to.

There are a couple of truisms in the justice system. One of them is that you can’t hide the bodies, and the other is that whatever else you try and do with crime statistics, look at what happens in the courts, because that also tells you the truest story. When I look at this bill, there are two things I look at. Yes, we do need some more High Court judges. There’s no doubt about it. We certainly agree with that. But you’ve actually got to look at why we need more judges. Yes, we need to speed up things, but, actually, have a look at the cases that are going before the court where the increase is. The increase is actually murder, attempted murder, and manslaughter, which are category 4 offences.

Now, we often hear—and every Government’s guilty of this—the Government talking about how it’s great we are doing well on crime. Often, it will involve a different way of looking at crime statistics, and they will always be presented in a manner which makes the presenter look best. I always remember visiting New York at the time of all the reforms over there, the Bratton reforms, and that was when, all of a sudden, each city looked at what New York had achieved, and they had a thing called CompStat, and it was where they actually started counting the crimes. They made each precinct actually responsible for the crime that happened in their precinct. This caught on right around the States, and it exposed a few things. One of them, Philadelphia, was the city that had these wonderful results—“Boy, hadn’t crime gone down?”—and in every category, it looked like they had basically solved the problem for ever of crime, except for the murders, because they couldn’t hide the bodies.

That’s why we have a look at the statistics. We have a look at what’s happening in our courts, which, of course, is what this bill is about. Rightfully, every speaker should be concentrating on the bill. I’ll promise you, Madam Speaker, that’s exactly what I will be doing.

That’s exactly right, Mr O’Connor.

That’s why this is a very good idea that we actually do increase the number of judges. How high? I’ve actually got a tabled amendment. It’s interesting that here we are again. Many of our speakers tonight have spoken that we are very, very late on a Tuesday night, speaking about this. We actually wonder why we have to come back here to increase—in one of the provisions of this bill—the number of judges by two. I have a tabled amendment that says, “Let’s have a range of judges so that, as crime goes up and down and as the number of bodies perhaps go up and down, we can actually have some flexibility in the system.” Of course, it being a second reading, I won’t spend too much time on that tabled amendment. I look forward to about, perhaps, 11.30 tonight when we’re in the committee of the whole House on this bill. It will be a shame for anyone to be wasting some good sleeping time.

This comes to the second part of this bill, in particular, where we actually talk about the cases. There’s been some sort of—I won’t say playing with statistics—obfuscation around the statistics. But one thing that is clear is that the cases that are coming to court are actually taking longer to resolve. They’re more serious. You can put that down to something. I spent some considerable time as a detective. In fact, I trained detectives. I look, now, at the sort of evidence that comes before trials compared to, perhaps, when I was training detectives. I look at, I suppose, the complications. Things like DNA weren’t available. Cellphones weren’t available. CCTV wasn’t available. These are all the things now that, if you go and sit through any serious trial—certainly any serious criminal trial—you’ll very quickly see that that’s where the first of the evidence is. For any detective and any police officer going to a crime scene, the first thing they do is look for a phone. The first thing they do is look for CCTV. The first thing they do is look for DNA. As you can imagine, these are a little more complicated than things like fingerprints, a little more complicated even than perhaps getting a confession or other ways and means of taking cases before the court.

You’ve got this combination where you’ve got more serious crimes, more, as I say, murder, attempted murder, and manslaughter category of offences going through. They’re all taking that much longer. Again, these are the things that are putting considerable pressure on the criminal justice system, and, very sensibly, this will attempt to resolve some of those issues. Again, it’s not going to, because the other thing you do need, of course, are courtrooms. None of these things by themselves will work, because the bottleneck in the criminal justice system is almost invariably the courts. Periodically, you’ll see that police, for various reasons, will be taking action on any particular sort of crime, and it might be several months down the track, but the bottleneck will occur when they all need to go through the criminal justice system.

An attempt was actually made to solve that. In fact, the National Government in 2012 introduced a system called tag and release. It was, actually, quite an interesting system where they actually had a strategy of reducing the entries into the criminal justice system by 19 percent in a year. Well, that just meant that the bottleneck was moved from the courts back to the police station, so as people were arrested, they would come through, and they would be tagged and released, pre-charged, and warned, and they would never be in the system again. There would be very little paperwork involved, and they’d be back out to do their deeds again. It worked quite well for about two or three years until, very quickly, the offenders cottoned on to the fact that it was a risk-free occupation to go and play up on a Saturday night down in the local city centre, because, at worst, it might cost you a couple of hours sitting in the watch house or sitting in a cell. You’ll be very quickly back out. There’ll be no court appearance in the number one court on Monday or Tuesday morning, and so you very quickly realise it was consequence free.

When we introduce any new strategy, it’s almost invariably about three or four years down the track before you really do understand the impact of it. We’re in sugar-hit country; we’re in politics, so, often, we’re all looking for some new strategy that is going to solve everything from the common cold to AIDS, and we’ll stand on every mountaintop and talk about it. Any of these new strategies that come in—again, I’m looking at strategies like this that we’re talking about in the bill here, Madam Speaker, which you, rightfully, are looking at me to make sure that I am referring back to the bill—

You haven’t strayed too far.

Well, I’m just making sure that you didn’t feel any need to actually point me back to the bill there, Madam Speaker.

No, you stayed on tag and release for a while, so I knew you were on the bill.

I know what an extremely difficult job it is to sit to where you are, Madam Speaker. You’re doing a fine job.

So, anyway, coming back, I may have just lost my train of thought there as I went through that. I’ll just moved through this—I do notice the time has moved on a little. Another important part of this provision, too, relates to the coroner’s court.. Now, this is also something that very much relates to what I was talking about before, because the coroner’s court traditionally is that which reports last in the whole process. Again, typically when there’s a homicide, it will be the job of the detective who’s in charge of the body—one of their jobs—to go along and open the inquest. That will then carry on through the trials, and way, way down the track, finally, it will be closed by the coroner. The best thing you can ever do is get a certificate as to cause a death, which means that the coroner doesn’t need to be involved. Often these deaths do go into the system, and having an off-ramp for the coroner, where new evidence becomes available, that precludes the need for what is often a very expensive and complicated process of having a coroner or having an inquest. Again, it’s quite a sensible provision. It’s hard to see where it would be used. The initial thought would be that, perhaps, it’s used for where it becomes obvious that there may be a self-inflicted death. That’s actually not the case. Self-inflicted is one of the exclusions to this. Self-inflicted deaths will always go through the system.

So I realise that there will be other opportunities, later on tonight during the committee of the whole House, to talk about some of these issues. Again, we won’t know for three or four years down the track whether some of these things have worked, because it is a grindingly slow system, the justice system. It does get there at the end, but really evaluating the success of things like this is usually where, say, a five-year review would be a good idea. We’re commending this bill to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I thank the previous speaker because, again, I think that the previous speaker, Greg O’Connor, is absolutely spot on when talking about the fact that we seem to be in this sort of sugar rush in the sense that we keep on chasing what is the short term as opposed to seeing some of the longer-term impacts that we have on some of these matters. But in terms of the Judicature (Timeliness) Legislation Amendment Bill, the Green Party does support this bill because it does make some good progress in that sense, towards both timeliness and also access to justice, and also in terms of addressing some of the issues within our court system.

I want to first just address probably one of the more significant sections of this bill, which is the increase in the number of High Court judges from 55 to 57. But I think it’s also really important to acknowledge as well the Minister of Justice’s Amendment Paper 443, which further increases that number, from 57 to 60, and I’m sure that this is something that we’ll be discussing in the upcoming committee stage.

With that being the first major section of the adjustment made in this bill when it comes to the Senior Courts Act 2016, the other significant part in the other half of this bill is the changes to the Senior Courts Act, which are around plainly abusive civil proceedings. This is the sort of functioning that we’ve seen with a few of these bills coming through the House. It’s from a court perspective on, for example, vexatious litigants, etc., and this is very similar to that in the sense that the registrar is able to inform or is able to refer the plainly abusive civil proceeding to the judge, and the judge will have the power to make orders and give directions in respect of plainly abusive civil proceedings.

This is something that the Justice Committee did flag to officials on this bill, mainly because of the fact that it is unclear what the plainly abusive civil proceedings would entail, and then whether that is going to inadvertently prevent or deprive areas for some of the genuine issues that we’re seeing, or for people who are scarred—for example, who are either from disabled communities or who are neurodivergent, who may simply not understand some of the nuances in terms of vexatious litigation. However, I think that overall, during the select committee stage, this was something that was discussed, and additions were added into it as a sort of safeguard, and I wanted this to be mentioned. That is an area, which is the new section 164B(2A) in clause 7, which also covers some of these in terms of what judges have to record and how judges will be able to make some of those rulings. That’s the first major part of this bill.

Actually, before I move on to the second half of the bill, regarding the Criminal Procedure Act and the Coroners Act, it’s also important to mention some of the submissions process as a part of this. In terms of the select committee process, we could see that there were not as many submissions as we thought for a bill that increased the number of judges, which does have, I guess, a budgetary implication. Again, this bill was one of the bills that was brought to the House under urgency in May, and we’re getting around to this bill now, as well. So—

A bit of a backlog.

There is a backlog of bills, yeah. In this case, in terms of the select committee process, there were 28 submitters on this, with wide-ranging opinions, and there were broader things, as well. I think, in general, there were concerns raised by some around whether this is prioritising timeliness over fairness and how that was going to be addressed.

I do think that as we are starting to see an increased number of High Court judges, particularly when High Court judges are also increasingly more diverse—actually, in general, our senior court judges are becoming more diverse. In saying that, I would like to bring it to the House’s attention that although in the latest census, we’re seeing that there are 19.2 percent of the people here in Aotearoa New Zealand are people of colour migrants or colour, the number of High Court judges, or judges in general—not simply High Court judges, but the number of judges—who are, for example, of Asian descent is less than 4 percent. The number of High Court judges of Asian descent—which is the District Court and above—currently, I think, sits at one. So, despite the fact that we have this enormously diverse population, our higher court judge appointment processes and our higher court judge demographic hasn’t necessarily reflected that or kept up with the changes in our demographics.

It’s also important to mention that one of the things that is recommended in terms of the fact that we are looking at increasing the number of High Court judges is also to do with the simple fact that as the population is increasing, the number of cases is going to be increased and a number of cases are going to be more complex, not necessarily in the sense that there are more complex laws, but, again—like I mentioned before—the nature of the cases will be more complex. One of the things which we are, unfortunately, seeing is a reduction in funding around the section 27 reports, which is incredibly crucial when it comes to the timeliness of our judicial process.

Especially, like I said before, when the judges themselves do not necessarily have the same lived experience or share the same experience as those who are in front of the court, it does cause certain delays if there isn’t a robust cultural report or process. I do draw the House’s attention to some of the latest issues and the latest work that’s been done by, particularly, Chinese lawyers around contractual agreements within Chinese communities, which has been hugely complex and has also meant that cases become more complex, the rulings become more complex, and there are more reasons, then, for people to appeal to a higher court. I think that for something like that, in terms of whether we want to address judicial timeliness, we should also really be looking at whether some of those matters meant that we are seeing more appeals happening further and further, higher up into not just simply the High Court but also the Court of Appeal, as well as the Supreme Court. All of that tied together is one of the themes that did come through in terms of the submitters.

The other thing that did come through in terms of the submitters—and this is, again, similar to what I mentioned in the second reading of the previous bill on the Legal Services (Distribution of Special Funds) Amendment Bill, as well—was that there is this general undertone of concern that people have in terms of equity for Māori within the justice system. I think that this is also a feature that we see here within this particular bill. Again, although that particular feature may be embodied as part of the timeliness of the court system that we’re hoping to see going forward, the specificity of how that provides equity may not have been covered or addressed in this bill. That’s unfortunate, but it’s also understandable, and we’re hoping that the Government is able to bring something that would be able to allay some of those concerns that the community have in the future.

Moving on to the second part, Part 2 of this bill, it is also an equally important section, and it actually comes out from beyond, I guess, the court system, but it is also involved within it, and part of that is around the Criminal Procedure Act 2011. I want to start by addressing some of that in terms of the Criminal Procedure Act 2011, and for this particular part, one of the things that is most important is the pre-trial processes if the defendant is being charged in respect of two or more offences in different District Court offices, and how the processes will be managed for that. We will have some other questions on this during the committee stage as well, because I think this is really important, and one of the things that we did discuss was how that’s going to be coordinated and managed between different District Courts.

There is also the other one that I mentioned before, which is how the Court of Appeal judges may remit first appeals to the High Court. This, again, comes back to what I mentioned before, which is that cases are becoming increasingly complex. We do allow people the right of appeal, and it is about how that process is going, as we see, further and further into the Court of Appeal and also the Supreme Court.

Finally, we’re seeing an amendment to the Coroners Act 2006—who knew that I might be running out of time? I think that the most concerning part of this—and it may be discussed a little bit further—is the retrospective element of this. For example, as of 30 June, there are 3,240 active coronial inquiries, and so how is that going to be managed as part of this?

The Green Party does support this bill. We do have some amendments on this that we’ll want to seek guidance on, but—

Surprise, surprise!

—they will wait until the committee stage.

Thank you very much, Madam Speaker. I rise on behalf of the ACT Party in support of the Judicature (Timeliness) Legislation Amendment Bill. The ACT Party does love efficiency, and we are backing this bill because it will bring efficiency that can be made across the judicial system. This bill will improve timeliness in the judicial system by appointing more judges, giving courts better tools, reducing duplication, and supporting our coroners. For those reasons, I commend it to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I rise on behalf of New Zealand First to support the Judicature (Timeliness) Legislation Amendment Bill. It’s probably one of those bills, actually, where if we could change the title, it would be quite good for some of the members. But anyway, we’ve got past that.

The major parts of this bill are changing the number of High Court judges from 55 to 57—a lot of that is about the complexity around cases now and, also, the obvious thing around population growth of New Zealand—striking out plainly abusive proceedings on the papers—that just makes sense; it’s no different from us striking out submissions when we get abusive language—streamlining criminal pre-trial processes, so if you’ve got a number of different trials or cases across the country, putting them all into one court or one place just makes sense.

What I do want to highlight is the coroners being able to close inquiries. That was something that was quite debated within the process of the submissions through the select committee process. Looking back retrospectively at something is, often, something that we don’t change or allow to be changed. But we’ve got over 3,200 cases sitting there; it only makes sense if we can give closure to families with some of those cases that have been sitting there for nearly up to three years.

On that, I look forward to the committee of the whole House. I commend this to the House.

E tū ana ahau ki te tautoko i tēnei pire, engari e kōrero ahau i te reo Pākehā mō tēnei pire.

[I stand to support this bill, but I will speak on this bill in English.]

I rise to support the Judicature—I’ve never seen that word before in my life—(Timeliness) Legislation Amendment Bill. We agreed to support this bill to select committee. We had some parts about the bill that we wanted to explore around the vexatious litigation element because we didn’t want there to be any provisions that dismissed claims in the court that might have been legitimate but complex, and we wanted to make sure that everybody has that access to justice.

We supported it with reservations, but now that it’s gone through that process and the select committee has happened, we are happy to support it through its second reading—yeah, woo hoo! Our main concerns were around vexatious litigation within the High Court, and we felt that these safeguards against that kind of behaviour and conduct were already in the High Court rules. But we can see that there is some merit to transferring these to the Senior Courts Act, and we’re pleased that standard discretion by judges apply. We’re particularly pleased about this given the different bills that have come through this Parliament in this term which have had a significant impact on judicial discretion, which I’ll talk about later on, if I have time.

This bill, we hope, will address the backlogs that currently exist in our courts. We know that they are quite big. We know that according to the latest New Zealand Law Society report, there were over 140,000 court appearances that were delayed because of COVID-19. We’ve mainly resolved a lot of those—a lot of that backlog now—but, still, there are delays. As everybody says—and I wonder if people have said it today—justice delayed is justice denied, which is a great saying that really encapsulates parts of this bill.

Obviously, the bill does more than amend the Senior Courts Act. It does some other things to other Acts, including the Criminal Procedure Act and the Coroners Act. Now, I’m not going to talk about the Coroners Act because I don’t know a lot about—

The law.

—the coronial inquiry. I’ve amended a law, have you?

I didn’t say anything.

Good. Anyway, back to the bill. One thing that was also raised in the New Zealand Law Society report is that the cost of civil jurisdiction within the High Court has increased over time. They’ve found that cases going through the High Court have become more complex and have taken a longer amount of time to litigate, and so allowing the number of judges to increase from 55 to 57 will really help with those lengthy cases that are really chewing up the High Court’s time. We think that it’s a good thing to have more and better judges within our justice system.

The other thing is that delays in courts are really problematic because they really erode the public’s sense of confidence and trust in the justice system, particularly for those individuals who have got cases before them that are really traumatic or personally affecting—whether they’re dealing with, say, a violent partner or someone who is abusing them or something like that. The fact that they have to wait so long due to backlogs is really not a good thing, because they’re, obviously, waiting in fear. I think that whole part around public confidence and rebuilding that back from those hundred thousand - plus court appearance backlogs is a good thing—for us to do everything we can to reduce that wait time.

Again, we could get into judicial discretion in depth, and I’m thinking in particular about the changes to the sentencing law reforms, which really erode judicial discretion when it comes to sentencing and things like sentencing discounts. Also, my colleague Lawrence made a really good point around section 27 reports and how that has also contributed to the lengthiness of the courts because the judges don’t have a full picture of the person who stands before them. Ironically, removing section 27 reports has actually made everything more expensive, because now lawyers have to get psychological assessments and drug and alcohol assessments to give the judge a full picture of the person who stands before them. I could go on and on, but sadly—

But your time is running out.

—I cannot. My time is done. Thank you.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. This is a Government that is tough on crime. In the past year, there have been 182 patches seized, 643 insignia items seized, 178 firearms seized, 856 charges for the prohibited display of gang insignia in public places, 255 finalised charges, and 188 convictions. In order to make sure the system works and that these can go through the courts, we need to make sure there are enough judges. Therefore, I commend this bill, this evening, to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. That is the kind of depth of analysis we expect from Carl Bates. It got us all the way there, didn’t it?

This bill is another “access to justice” bill. Sadly, it’s a bill that’s here because this Government seems to think that the only way to address problems in our society is incarceration. We’re tough on the causes of crime on this side of the House, and we want to address the problems and we want to “fix up” people rather than “lock up” people. That’s the fundamental distinction between our two approaches to criminal justice.

What about ram raids?

Well, someone—some young person over the other side—talked about ram raids. The fact of the matter is that we addressed ram raids, and thank you to the National Government for doing at least one thing and picking up one of our programmes, which is the fast-track programme, wrapping around families with troublesome young people.

Rather than boot camps, which do nothing and which are an abject failure, the Fast Track programme, which was to address those young people doing things like ram raids, said, “What are the problems in these families that are giving rise to this kind of behaviour?” We looked at it, and it was problems like health, problems like drug and alcohol addiction, including in the family, problems like not having enough money or even enough food, or young people not going to school and not engaging with services. Thank you to the National Government for picking up and, in fact, expanding our Fast Track programme. The reduction in the number of young people offending is largely built on the back of the programme that we started, so thank you for that. It’s one of the kinds of things that we could do that would not necessarily require an increase in the number of High Court judges.

I’m not begrudging a High Court judge the amount they get paid. I can’t remember the exact number, but it’s hundreds of thousands of dollars. That’s actually not the cost of a High Court judge, because, on top of that, you’ve got to accommodate them, you’ve got to give them an executive assistant, you’ve got to give them a judge’s clerk, and you’ve got to give them all of those other things that go with. It’s well over a million dollars, and if you think of that million dollars, in terms of what you could do elsewhere in the system, it’s worth thinking about. Having said that, I want to be clear that we want to make sure that our justice system is properly resourced. For that reason, we’re supporting this bill. It’s important to note that there’s no obligation to appoint the number of judges set out, and maybe there should be a minimum number of judges to make sure we’ve always got enough. The last thing we want is the executive nickel and diming the judiciary by not appointing enough judges. That hasn’t happened to date, but it’s a protection that we might want to consider.

Lifting the cap is appropriate. Having said that, I also want to look at the other things that are in this bill, which some of the other speakers have skimmed over. In fact, National Party members skim over everything, because the backbenchers—I mean, at least their Ministers engage with the issue, but the backbenchers aren’t actually engaged with the very tricky issues that present themselves. If you look at, for example, the powers given to registrars and judges to dismiss out-of-hand claims on the basis that they are an abuse of procedure, it’s actually kind of both conceptually and practically challenging. If we think of some things that have happened recently, there is a real danger that someone comes up and presents themselves and they don’t present themselves well and they are a difficult person and they present themselves and present their case in intemperate language. They may even do it in a way which has all the hallmarks of not just an annoying person but a person who’s a little bit—I want to be careful with my language—not balanced. That doesn’t necessarily mean there’s not something to the allegations they’re making.

When we come to say that a registrar can refer a matter to a judge on the basis that it is plainly abusive, we need to exercise real caution. There has always been a power for the court to dismiss matters which are an abuse of the process of the court. It’s always been there, but there have been protections there. The protections have always been: if you file a case—and it’s inevitably a lay litigant, and they could have a claim which is not well formulated, not put in legal language, and it might have all kinds of things in it, some outrageous allegations and some language which is not appropriate, but sometimes in the middle of it, deep down, if you look hard enough, there’s a kernel of truth. That gets tested in court, and it might get thrown out at the first instance, but there’s a right of appeal. You can go upstairs, go to the Court of Appeal, and you can argue it there, but here, if you look at it in this case, this gives the power to judges to throw out, essentially, proceedings which they think are plainly an abuse—and this is important—without hearing from the person who filed that claim. They can look at something and go, “Oh, that’s got nothing to it.”

The general test for an abuse is that it has a collateral purpose: that it’s not brought for the legitimate purpose of vindicating some legal right but is, in fact, brought, for example, to harass or to damage the reputation of another person. They are classic collateral purposes. Many a time, it’s often said that there are many open and shut cases which are not open and shut. There are many cases where there is no reasonable defence where, all of a sudden, there is a reasonable defence. I guess, when we come to look at this in committee—and the select committee report rightly reflects these views—we need to approach this with real caution. We talk about access to justice and, at the same time, what this does is limit access to justice by giving the power to the court to shut down without a hearing a claim that they consider, that the court considers, that the judge considers to be plainly abusive. We just need to be really cautious there. As it happens, it’s an issue; vexatious litigants are an issue that I looked at closely: the number of times, with vexatious and abusive litigants, where their behaviour is appalling but the acclaim has something to it, and it’s easy to conflate the two. It’s easy to conflate poor behaviour, appalling behaviour, appalling language with the fact that underlying it all is a genuine grievance that deserves to be heard.

I guess my point, as we come to this bill, rushing it through the House, of course, as is the wont of this Government, when the courts come to exercise this power is always to pause. One of the kinds of practical things is this: vexatious litigants in particular don’t go away easily. In fact, one of the hallmarks of them is that, when they are turned away in one sense, in one forum, they will open up another litigation in another forum. There are few useful strategies to address this problem, but one is to actually give them a fair hearing, to follow the rules, to listen and to give reasons. One of the challenges of the framework proposed in this bill—and I’m not saying we shouldn’t do it, but we should exercise it cautiously—is that that is not the case. You don’t give a hearing, you don’t hear from the person involved; it’s done on the papers. Think about it this way: if you were a difficult person who felt you had been aggrieved, what would most wind you up? Your claim being dismissed out of hand, never having the chance to eyeball a judge and say, “This is what my problem is.” and being talked to respective respectfully by a judge.

That’s what people want. That’s what we’re denying. That’s why, in respect of that abuse of procedure, we need to be very cautious indeed.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. Indeed, this bill does deal with a number of changes. For me, one of the main ones I’d like to highlight is that after the amendment is passed, we’re going to be getting, hopefully, five more judges. On this side of the House, we don’t give $2.75 million to the Mongrel Mob, who provide meth to destroy families; we actually get judges there so that we can get our victims heard. I’m so proud of the fact that under our Government, there are 38,000 less victims, and we look forward to making that number even higher. I commend this bill to the House.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. Thank you for the opportunity to also take a short call and say a few words about this Judicature (Timeliness) Legislation Amendment Bill, which I always thought was pronounced somewhat different, and when I say always, my whole life I’ve been pronouncing it incorrectly—at least since when I first was aware of it, which dates right back to about first reading.

Labour is going to support this bill because we do believe that New Zealanders deserve a justice system that doesn’t leave victims waiting years to have their day in court. But we do need to be honest about the bill. Adding more judges is essentially the legislative equivalent of putting out the buckets when the roof is leaking. It’s necessary, for sure, but it’s hardly some bold system-strengthening approach—and certainly not this bold approach, this silver bullet, this big fix that the Government likes to pretend it’s taking.

This is what happens when the Government confuses being loud about crime with being serious about crime. They can talk about cracking down until they’re blue in the face, but without the workforce, the rest of the workforce and the infrastructure and the basic supports to actually move the case through, nothing much changes.

I thought it was interesting, my colleague Greg O’Connor talked earlier about the category 4 cases and how that now makes up 76 percent of the High Court inflows, and that’s, you know, clearly not just a flip; that’s actually a structural shift. We heard that trials are longer, that they’re more complex, they’re also more frequent. So, you know, yes, increasing this cap is appropriate for now, but it’s hardly bold and it’s the very least this Government could be doing to get to the bottom of this problem.

More importantly, I think the Government also owes New Zealand a bit of an explanation, as my colleague the Hon Dr Duncan Webb just said, for why the most serious violence cases are spiking and why they’re not doing anything to actually address the drivers of crime. If you’re going to brand yourself as tough on crime—“law and order Government”, as has been branded in the contributions to date—you actually need a bit of a plan to stop harm from happening in the first place, not just react to it after it does happen. That’s a little bit half-baked—half-baked at the very least. The Government can keep pretending and absolutely put their head in the sand.

Well, after two years, the Government has made a very small change to try and address a problem that they claim to be a big change. It’s a little bit hypocritical that they’re here making a big deal about it. You certainly don’t clear a backlog by ignoring the people—all the rest of the people that run that system, do you?