Metropolis Plus Forum

Introduction
It is a pleasure to be here this afternoon, addressing you in my capacity as Immigration Minister. Unfortunately, I was unable to attend the Metropolis conference in Melbourne last week but I understand there were good discussions on immigration at the international level.

This is an important forum for many reasons – establishing international connections, sharing knowledge and ideas, and capacity building.
The themes of the conference are: New Zealand’s immigration policy in an international context and Immigration: Identity and Innovation
Building on those themes, this afternoon I am going to focus on New Zealand’s immigration programme and the types of initiatives which are making an important contribution to New Zealand’s place within the international community. These include the Immigration Change Programme, recent policy changes in regard to investor migrants and families, and our settlement strategy.

Firstly, let’s consider the vision the New Zealand government has for New Zealand’s future.

We are of course a nation shaped by migration. As Minister Chris Carter said this morning, New Zealand’s identity is evolving as we move into the 21st Century – we are a modern multi-ethnic Pacific nation.

Immigration plays a vital role in the government’s goal of transforming New Zealand's economy to a dynamic, knowledge-based economy and society, underpinned by the values of fairness, opportunity and security.

Immigration also brings with it other resources for transformation: capital, technology and skills transfer, and access to international networks.

To sustain the economy and the growth we want, we need the skills, investment and the international connections that migrants can bring.

And to maintain a society and an economy that will continue to allow a decent lifestyle for people of every age group, we need to maintain and grow our working-age population. This can be achieved, in part, through immigration.

Immigration is not a panacea from the problem of an aging population, on the drive to a high-skill economy. However, in our view it is a necessary component of solutions to both challenges.

Unfortunately, immigration’s contribution is not automatic. It requires an immigration policy that is not passive but active; that goes out and recruits the people we need most.

This is not easy; New Zealand is competing with many other countries for high-skill, high-value workers. I am sure the issue of international competition for skills would have come up in discussions at Metropolis last week.

Like many other nations, we are short of the workers and skills we need. Immigration is one way of addressing the critical skills shortages we are currently seeing in many professions from IT professionals to trades people. In fact, one third of small businesses tell us that labour shortages are their biggest barrier to growth.

We need to ensure we have the skills, talent and labour we need for economic transformation.

We are committed to addressing skill shortages and have put in place a number of active measures to do this. These initiatives fall into three categories: creating and mobilising more skills onshore, targeting skilled people offshore, and working with industries to provide higher quality workplaces to attract and retain staff.

The Immigration Change Programme will assist us to get the skilled workers we need to contribute to achieving our goal of economic transformation.

Immigration Change Programme
The Immigration Change Programme will deliver three S’s – skills, security, and settlement.

We also need to ensure that those people who do come to New Zealand integrate well into society. These competing priorities form the backbone of the Immigration Change Programme.

There are three pillars to this programme – the Immigration Act, Immigration Policy Framework and Immigration Business Transformation. These three pillars form a cohesive, integrated Change Programme. This programme has three components:

•developing a strong legislative foundation
•repositioning the policy framework, and
•implementing a new model of service delivery.

We are confident that this programme will deliver New Zealand the skills, security, and settlement we need now and in the future. In fact, we are already seeing some positive results.

We have had good feedback from employers of skilled migrants which shows that 81 per cent of employers were impressed with the performance of their skilled migrant staff. Our research also tells us that 90 per cent of skilled migrants were either "satisfied" or "very satisfied" with their lives in New Zealand.

We have also made excellent progress in security. When the Labour Government took office in 1999, we inherited a situation where the previous National administration had appointed just one immigration fraud officer after nine years in power. In contrast, we now have a fully-fledged investigations unit with 18 staff including a manager, investigators and support staff. Their work resulted in 55 successful prosecutions in 2005-06 and 31 successful prosecutions in the 11 months to 31 May 2007, compared with one in 1999.

The other part of the programme is settlement. We are doing some tremendous work in this area. Attracting and retaining skilled migrants is crucial to the Labour-led Government's vision for this country. But I think we sometimes forget that migrants need support through the settlement process. I’ll come back to our settlement programme later.

Immigration Bill
Underpinning the Immigration Change Programme is the new Immigration Bill which is currently before the Select Committee.

This Bill will replace one that dates back to 1987, the last time the All Blacks were world champions. Although, I don’t want to draw two many comparisons between the All Blacks and the new Bill given the current climate!

The Bill is framework legislation that modernises and simplifies the immigration system. It will give New Zealand a more robust and accountable system that will create and hold public confidence. It also ensures compliance with New Zealand’s immigration related international obligations in a more transparent way.

We have also proposed a single independent appeals tribunal to establish a robust, independent single-appeals system, based on a new Immigration and Protection Tribunal.

The Bill supports the New Zealand workforce - through facilitating access to skills and labour and contributing to output, productivity and economic transformation. The Bill will also allow us to tighten the security at our borders at a time when we are seeing heightened risks and terrorist acts internationally. The integrity of the immigration system is vital to the security of our country.

We are proposing a visa system that provides for greater simplicity and flexibility in managing non-citizens’ travel to, and stay in, New Zealand.

We are also proposing a new integrated international protection determination procedure. This would ensure that all claims for international protection are assessed together to provide for a more efficient and fair determination of our obligations.

Aspects of the Bill are also focused on streamlining processes and making them more efficient. For example, the deportation process, would become more efficient whilst maintaining a high standard of fairness.

We propose to introduce additional safeguards in cases where foreign nationals are detained under the law, including legal aid for detainees who meet criteria and tiered restriction on detention after six and 12 months. It is proposed to extend the maximum period of detention without a warrant to 96 hours. This is intended to help reduce the overall time taken for turnarounds at the border and reduce the need for detention in police and corrections facilities.

In addition to current information-sharing provisions, the Bill allows information to be shared with publicly-funded service providers who require immigration status information to establish eligibility for those services, and with employers to establish entitlement to work.

Policy Framework
In addition to the Immigration Bill, we are implementing an aggressive policy reform programme. This year I have made announcements about changes to number of aspects of immigration policy, including new Immigration Policy Framework. It is important that our immigration legislation continues to provide flexibility, so the framework legislation will be fleshed out by the relevant policies.

This includes reviews of seasonal and non-seasonal work policies, work to residence, the Skilled Migrant Category, the Investor policy, Family-sponsored policy and temporary migrant flows.

Immigration Advisers Licensing Act
Part of the Immigration Policy Framework is the Immigration Advisers Licensing Act.

In short, this Act ensures that only people prepared to meet the highest professional and ethical standards, are allowed to work as immigration consultants.

New Zealand has a strong reputation of making sound and fair immigration decisions. We want to ensure that this reputation encompasses all of those agencies and individuals who provide immigration advice – not just government departments.

We cannot afford to let our game down in this area. This legislation will deliver in four key areas:
-firstly, it will regulate individuals who provide immigration advice both on and offshore
-secondly, it will raise the standard of immigration advice across the range of immigration advisers
-thirdly, it will ensure advisers meet competency standards and are fit to practise. They will also be subject to complaints and disciplinary procedures
-and finally, provisional, limited and full licences may be granted by the Registrar.

Active Investor Migration
Earlier I mentioned the government’s goal of transforming New Zealand’s economy. In doing this we must also consider the competitive international market we are operating in.

Active Investor Migration is an area we have focused on to assist with this. We have made some very substantial reforms to previous policy in this area. We are putting New Zealand's national interests first but we are also allowing more flexibility for investors and operating on a 'real world' scale.

We have substantially shifted the investor migrant policy toward active investment in real businesses and employment. This should expand productivity and economic capacity, more than demand, while being appropriate for current economic conditions

The new Active Investor Migrant policy is firmly focused on investment in New Zealand's economy, to the benefit of all New Zealanders.

In addition to this we also have further reviews of business and entrepreneur criteria in the pipeline.

International education
New Zealand needs to be competitive while maintaining the integrity of the immigration system.

I will be making announcements shortly on student immigration policy and English language student issues which will further promote this competition and contribute to economic growth.

Family policy
However, our immigration policies do not focus solely on economic growth. On Friday I announced changes to our immigration family policy. These changes will make it easier for family members to visit their children and grandchildren in New Zealand.

From late November a new multiple visitor’s visa will allow parents or grandparents to make multiple visits over a three-year period without having to apply for a visa each time.

Changes have also been made to sponsorship of parents, adult children and siblings in the family residence categories. This includes establishing quota places for the sponsorship of parents, adult children, and adult siblings to come to New Zealand as permanent residents

These changes recognise the important role that we believe families play in New Zealand life and supporting those families is important to the New Zealand government.

Revised Settlement Strategy
We are supporting migrant families in other ways too. As I mentioned earlier, settlement is one part of the Immigration Change Programme.

Earlier this year I launched the Revised New Zealand Settlement Strategy. This Strategy provides over-arching framework for more specific national and regional initiatives. It is key to both attracting and maintaining skilled migrants.

The Government’s settlement work continues to focus on working collaboratively with central and local government agencies, non-government agencies and community groups.

We are implementing a range of initiatives in the short and long-term future. For example, we will be developing resources for teaching and learning in literacy, numeracy, and language to support people in their chosen careers and day-to-day life. We will also be supporting existing and future migrant and refugee communities by providing advice on effective capacity building within communities and promoting mechanisms for sharing good practice.

The Department of Labour has done some longitudinal research that gives us information on how, when and where migrants are settling in New Zealand. This is valuable information which will aid our settlement strategy. It is assisting us to plan for infrastructure needs such as schools, hospitals and other public facilities and programmes.

The Department also has a number of strategic research programmes currently underway including the Longitudinal Immigration Survey of New Zealand. This study will be pivotal in better understanding what contributes to good settlement outcomes for migrants and their families.

Conclusion
Immigration is essential to both economic transformation and to our national identity. We must ensure that we have an immigration system which delivers on these two key aspects whilst enhancing national security.

Immigration assists us to build a nation which has explicit values. It contributes to the type of nation we are. With immigration, as in any other policy area, there are challenges to be addressed which we are doing through many of the initiatives and policies I have mentioned today.

New Zealand is a strong and vibrant multi-cultural nation. Without immigration our uniqueness would be lost. Our immigration policies position us well to deal with the challenges and they continue the long tradition of humanitarian support New Zealand is known for. We are, after all, building a country that our children and grandchildren can be proud of.

It has been a pleasure addressing you here today. I am looking forward to building on the good relationships we have with so many of you to advance our immigration programme in the future.

Thank you.