Auckland District Law Society – Immigration and Refugee Committee dinner

Good evening ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for the opportunity to speak tonight; it's a pleasure to be here. I had to seek permission from Judith Tizard to attend tonight; she can be very parochial, as you'll know. Anyway, permission granted, and she sends her regards. I await now with baited breath her request for a visitor permit to the wild West Coast.

So yes, it is a pleasure to be here, but also somewhat daunting. In my line of work, I've fronted angry farmers, irate nurses, desperate doctors and aggrieved constituents. But the frustration of these groups is not typically directed at me personally.

This evening I face a room of people who've likely taken my name in vain; people who've burned the midnight oil for a client in need, only to have some politician going by the name of Damien O'Connor tell them what they don't want to hear.

But enough of that; I'm not here to apologise for the past or any of those decisions. I'm here to try and give you some understanding of what it's like from my end and how I go about the process of reaching some of those decisions.

I was asked by the Committee to talk about a day in the life of the Associate Immigration Minister.

This threw me into a bit of a spin. Could a day in my life possibly be of interest to a room of esteemed legal practitioners? Wouldn't my deliberations over what tie to wear bore you? Would you all have nodded off by the time I got to my third officials' meeting and second cup of coffee? As for select committee duty, if I couldn't stay awake during it, how would you?

I was also given a second option. You asked me to come up with some, and I quote, "different immigration cases that had given me satisfaction".

But again I had problems, I think for two reasons. One, because while making determinations about individual cases brings to mind several adjectives, "satisfying" is not the first.

Daunting, difficult, complex and sometimes heart wrenching is more how I'd describe having to make the call whether to allow a visitor to remain in the country or whether to allow the reunification of a family.

The second reason the request for "different, satisfying cases" flummoxed me was because it's very hard to identify "different" cases. Taking different to mean unique or unusual, you could say all the cases that come before me fall into this category. No two are the same, and most have some outstanding feature that renders them completely incomparable to others I've dealt with.

In fact, (although I could be asking for trouble here), I'm sure every one of them would qualify for the front page of the Sunday Star Times. I live in perpetual fear of that happening.

There was the Pacific Island rugby player so reluctant to face a removal order that he cleared his fridge of its contents and climbed inside when the Immigration Service came knocking. I understand a suspicious pile of slowly wilting cabbages eventually blew his cover.

There was the man who jumped out the bathroom window to avoid removal. Dogs and helicopters were required to track him down.

And then there's the continual string of Kiwi Romeos, desperate to have their newly acquired foreign Internet brides granted entry. Although, as I said, there's always a little something that sets one newlywed apart from another.

I suppose it never occurred to me that by becoming a politician, I'd end up in what's effectively the role of a judge – hearing two sides of a story, both often utterly convincing, and making a decision that impacts so hugely on someone's life.

They say the job of Associate Immigration Minister is given to rogue MPs - those that need to be kept out of trouble. I take this as a compliment of course, and I can see what they're getting at. Because along with difficult and heart wrenching, my role is incredibly time consuming. Over 60 cases a week land on my desk, and each requires a huge amount of thought and deliberation.

Long after my parliamentary colleagues have barked "Courtenay Place" to the taxi driver and disappeared off into the night– often I am at my desk, wading through my pile of pale green immigration files. But I guess the long hours are not that uncommon for many Ministers.

But it's late at night that I tend to get into what I can only describe, (in a very millennium manner), as "the zone". The phones have stopped ringing, the office is quiet and I can really knuckle down.

But I'm sure I'm preaching to the converted. People in your line of work are no strangers to 7am starts and 15-hour days. I must add a plug here for my immigration private secretary Nicola Bull, who is also in the office first thing every morning and often late into the night.

But if satisfying doesn't immediately spring to mind as a means of describing my associate immigration role, it does nonetheless apply. Because I suppose we don't do something unless there's a degree of satisfaction in it, do we? Well we find a way to make it satisfying; no matter how laborious it may seem at first.

My job is to do justice to this country's immigration policy, which I believe is a very robust one and one that's intended to be fair to all applicants.

The focus of that policy for the past four years has seen a shift from a passive, defensive approach, to a more pro-active one. As a government, we now like to think of ourselves more as a kind of recruitment agency than as a gatekeeper.

Ensuring our officials mark work in the same manner is not always so easy, simply because they're the ones facing the daily grind. But changing the culture of immigration right across the board is something we're working on and committed to doing.

Along with our emphasis on attracting the best of the world's skilled migrants, New Zealand is committed to delivering on its international responsibilities in areas like refugee settlement and I'll briefly mention that in a moment.

A total of 20,638 people in 10,691 applications were approved for residence in the first six months of 2003/2004. Although it sometimes doesn't feel like it, most of these were processed in the standard way and did not require the intervention of the Associate Minister.

Broadly speaking, cases only come to me if they fall outside policy, and when some sort of ministerial discretion is required. That discretion as you will know is quite unique and something every Minister respects. While almost absolute, precedents set by decisions outside policy will always come back to bite you if made for anything other than the best of reasons.

As you'll well know, the Skilled Migrant Catagory underpins our current immigration policy. The objective of the category is to provide for the grant of residence to people who demonstrate that they firstly:

·Have the skills to fill identified needs and opportunities in New Zealand
·That they're able to transfer those skills to New Zealand and link with local needs and opportunities
·Are able to demonstrate an ability to contribute to New Zealand both economically and socially; and
·Are able to demonstrate an ability to successfully settle here.

The selection point for Expressions of Interest under the SMC currently stands at 100 points. This is a good thing. It's good because it strikes a balance between stimulation of the economy, and our limited ability to absorb migrants. In other words, it works for our advantage, without putting us at risk.

But we have to acknowledge that the introduction of the SMC has created difficulties in the market place, where the initial message from the 185-point threshold was that very high qualifications were required before residency could be attained.

Subsequent adjustments have clearly lowered the hurdle, but the message in the market place hasn't shifted accordingly. The impression of high hurdles has remained. We have to work on this and are currently improving our efforts to market New Zealand to the rest of the world and tell them that we welcome migrants to New Zealand.

Agents and lawyers tend to express frustration whenever point changes are made. While this is understandable, it also contributes to a misunderstanding of where New Zealand sits in the international migration market. In other words, it creates the impression that our system is complicated, onerous and that it is not user-friendly. We would do our best to refute this and hope that you do the same as well.

There will always be political banter about point adjustments, but the fact remains the system is flexible, it caters for the changing needs of the New Zealand economy and it's an effective way for people with genuine skills to migrate to New Zealand.

Migrants who have been selected at the 100-point mark include civil engineers, secondary school teachers, industrial designers and software engineers; not low skilled as some have claimed and we strongly refute claims that lowering the points to this mark equates to dispensing with quality.

What so many people tend to forget of course, or never grasp in the first place, is that immigration is good for this country. As long as we're approving quality migrants who'll settle well and contribute, then the whole country benefits.

Let me give you an example of public opinion. A couple of weeks ago I distributed a newsletter around my West Coast-Tasman electorate. I included with it a questionnaire, for which one of the questions was: " Do you believe New Zealand needs more immigrants?" I haven't sorted through the thousands of questionnaire responses yet, but in aid of this evening, I grabbed about 50 and took a look at the response to that question.

Over three quarters of the 50 respondents said no, we didn't need more immigrants. That's 38 out of the 50, unless you count the guy who said "no, no, no", in which case I suppose it's 41.

Although some of the nos were tempered with qualifications, such as "unless they're required in our trades and professions", this response still shows an alarming lack of understanding of the benefits of migration to New Zealand.

I'd like to talk briefly now about refugees, seeing as this is an area most of you are very familiar with.

New Zealand as you know has been accepting refugees for resettlement since the end of the Second World War. We are one of only 10 out of 185 United Nations member states who've established annual resettlement quotas above and beyond our acceptance of those who just turn up at their borders.

Our refugee quota programme allows a maximum of 750 UNHCR identified priority refugees a year. As well, refugees accepted in this category are able to make application to sponsor family members to join them in New Zealand.

Our refugee policy reflects the government's commitment to fulfilling its international humanitarian obligations and responsibilities. And it's through this policy that we contribute to the global community's efforts to assist refugees in need of settlement.

We aim to ensure that the quota system - which has been maintained at 750 places for several years - remains targeting to refugees in desperate need of resettlement.

Of course to distinguish between genuine asylum seekers and those simply wanting a better life is a phenomenal challenge. Luckily the bulk of the work is left to the Refugee Status Branch and the Refugee Status Appeals Authority; two very able bodies who do fantastic work. On occasion, however, I'm asked to make the final call.

There are inevitably cases for which the word marginal takes on new meaning. And I'd like to point out that in these instances, the media's involvement doesn't help. It doesn't help me; it doesn't help you as lawyers and subsequently, it certainly doesn't help your client.

Some immigration lawyers see the media as tantalisingly advantageous to their cause. Likewise a juicy immigration case to the media. But there is much at stake here, including principles of natural justice, fairness and integrity and of course privacy.

Just the other day, I received a copy of an email sent from a well-known newspaper reporter to an immigration lawyer. The reporter understood one of the lawyer's clients was facing a lengthy process in her attempts to gain a permit.
The reporter asked the lawyer if some "media profile" might help speed up that process.

Well my answer and the answer is no, although I doubt that's what the lawyer told her. The client in question was going through the same fair and robust process as any other applicant, and no amount of haranguing in the public arena is going to alter that.

At the end of the day, no Minister of this government is going to make a decision based on the threat of, or the pressure generated by, sensational media coverage. In too many cases, media involvement only serves to cloud the issue and to in fact skew the truth.

And I think that no matter how much New Zealanders seem to fall for such a good sob story, once they know the facts (if they're lucky enough of course to have access to them), they share a fairly realistic and pragmatic approach to immigration.

If lawyers or the media are relying on public sympathy, I think the results of my electorate survey are a good example of how that sympathy only stretches so far. Post 9/11, New Zealanders have a new appreciation of the need for vigilance when it comes to our borders; and the majority appreciate our vigorous approach. Our approach to immigration is and shall remain on the whole, cautious and conservative and of course fair.

And this brings me to the end of my address this evening. But it by no means excludes my exposure to your wrath. Against my better judgement, I'd now like to open the floor to questions.