PM Jacinda Ardern has sacked Iain Lees-Galloway as a minister over an inappropriate relationship with a staff member in one of the departments he headed.
Opinion
COMMENT:
Iain Lees-Galloway certainly needed to go, much before the unceremonious whack being handed-in by the Prime Minister in full public glare for what many New Zealanders see as a relationship between two consenting adults.
However, allowing him to resign would have been less saucy and therefore less distraction from the core issue of competency and inefficiency as the Minister of Immigration.
Sadly, the Prime Minister's emphasis on his position as the Minister for Workplace Relations and Safety had diverted all the attention from the chaos and failures plaguing Immigration NZ.
If there were a real reason for showing the door to Lees-Galloway in line with the expectation of ministerial responsibility in a Westminster parliamentary democracy, then it would have been his performance as the Minister of Immigration.
It is not to suggest that his affair with a staffer while being at one of the highest public offices did not warrant a disciplining, but a slap on the wrist would have been better than a full-blown whack on the bum.
Probably that's more an outcome of the contest between the two leaders so close to elections after National's leader Judith Collins walked away unscathed from a gross misdeed of one her caucus members by firing him, probably forcing PM Jacinda Ardern to bolster her own image as a strong and decisive leader.
In this regard National's Andrew Falloon's misdeeds were more abhorrent than Lees-Galloway's, requiring a stringent disciplinary action than what the latter got from her own party leader.
However, regardless of this debate around the manner of removal, it is an opportune time to reflect upon the sad state of affairs within the immigration matters facing this country.
Lees-Galloway's reign as the Minister of Immigration was one of the most shambolic and inefficient in recent memory that equally affected businesses and employers as it affected the lives of migrant workers.
For the uninitiated, under Lees-Galloway's reign the lives of tens of thousands of temporary migrant workers who were living and working in New Zealand and simultaneously engaging with the immigration bureaucracy had been held in suspension as their applications continued to be piled up in seemingly never-ending queues.
On numerous occasions, he came across as a naive and inexperienced minister to see-through the usual diversionary tactics thrown upon by a smart bureaucracy which often operates in an autonomous mode regardless of the consequences of their actions on real people.
Just as an example, throughout 2019, the partnership visa applications, even for partners of NZ citizens and residents plummeted to eight to nine months waiting time.
To resolve this crisis that was largely an outcome of a shortage of staff after an earlier closure of overseas processing offices, INZ's Mumbai office had on its own decided to act arbitrarily in their interpretation of partnership visas and started summarily rejecting thousands of applications and clearing the queues in the process.
The following months witnessed a massive outcry from those unjustly affected, followed by an opportunistic plunge by New Zealand First's Shane Jones and Winston Peters for laying the claim for driving the policy for a reduction in immigration numbers, which in reality were a mere bureaucratic outreach and a clear absence of ministerial oversight.
Following the outcry by affected New Zealand citizens and residents, and the Prime Minister's eventual intervention, the immigration system returned back to exactly the same process of assessing partnership visa applications that were being followed for years.
This all just because the minister was too naive to get his office in order and ask the right questions.
Iain Lees Galloway and Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern. Photo / Mark Mitchell
To make it worse, the changes he announced subsequently in the culturally arranged marriage visa category has been least utilised by applicants seeking a partnership based visa to join their NZ based partners - again a futile exercise.
Similarly, the wait time for applications under the skilled migrant category has plummeted from a normal few months to an unusually long 15 to 18 months.
This was much before the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic and the accompanying disruptions in every aspect of the economy, global travel and migration that we have come to live with in recent times.
Anyway, the list is long about the bungles in immigration under the former minister, which have been an equal pain for the migrants and the businesses and employers across different sectors such as exports, agriculture, dairy, residential care and many more.
This slightly over-the-top removal of Lees-Galloway and the accompanying narrative sown by none other than the Prime Minister herself who has pointed towards his position as Minister for Workplace Relations and Safety that made his position untenable clearly diverts the much-needed attention from immigration-chaos.
Incoming Minister of Immigration Kris Faafoi has a big task to clear the mess left behind by an unjustly dismissed Lees-Galloway.
* Sandeep Singh is the editor of an Auckland based community newspaper the Indian Weekender. The views expressed are author's alone.
