Agenda: Immigration Minister Unsure of Fraud Cases

Immigration Minister David Cunliffe is not sure what or where New Zealand’s 384 cases of suspected immigration fraud are.

But on TVONE’s Agenda today Mr Cunliffe said he had not been briefed on each individual case;

“I am not going to speculate”.

Asked if he knew whether the cases were being monitored Mr Cunliffe said he did not think the majority of the cases were “highly sensitive”.

He said a “special swat team” had been assigned to clear the backlog of cases and this “team” would ensure there were no gaps in investigation.

Mr Cunliffe agreed this process could be improved.

“We will be quite transparent about how we will be doing that. For the next few weeks we are going to be putting an update on the internet so people can read for themselves.”

Immigration Minister Wants More “Civic” Classes In Schools.

Immigration Minister David Cunliffe would like to see New Zealand schools teach more “civic” values to immigrant and local children in schools.

On TVOne’s Agenda today Mr Cunliffe said the “civic” lessons in the current curriculum were great;

“I am a big supporter of civics in schools. I don’t think we should leave it just at citizenship but more and better education about how our systems of Government work and about issues for the future of the country.”

When asked if these “civic” lessons could include political leanings or ideology, Mr Cunliffe said: ““There's a big difference between educating people about some of the key structures of society and dealing with it in a party political sense, the last thing we need is party political nonsense in schools.”

However Mr Cunnliffe said New Zealand’s bi-cultural history was “strange” and no longer relevant to contemporary New Zealand.

“New Zealand is no longer the scion of Mother Britain. We are no longer a white outpost in the South Pacific with a strange – not strange but unique bicultural history, more and more we are turning into part of the Asia Pacific region”.

When asked how New Zealanders could learn to accept a multi-cultural society, he used the example of West Auckland electorate, where the annual New Lynn Festival of Cultures was held.

“I think, ‘how many countries in the world are you going to have the Hindus, Muslims, Baha'is and Christians all coming up and swapping their tucker’”.

Mr Cunliffe said this made his eyes “misty”.

British Tory Mp Warns Against Announcing Policies Early

Visiting British Tory MP Andrew Tyrie thinks that announcing detailed policy pre-election is a “dangerous game”.

On TVONE’s Agenda Mr Tyrie warned that if the policies are good, they’re immediately “filched”.

“If they’re bad or if there’s just one tiny error in any of them it’s the error that will be highlighted by a government…”

Mr Tyrie used the 1979 British Tory election victory as an example, saying Margaret Thatcher did not come out with any detailed policies.

Mr Tyrie also said that the traditional rhetoric of the political right has been forced to change in the past century.

“What's really happened is that the old politics of the left have got defeated and they’ve now occupied rhetorically and to some degree in policy much of the ground… that the Conservatives were sitting on.”

“The Conservatives have had to reformulate how to express their values, their values of freedom, personal responsibility, emphasis on patriotism, for the 21st century and that’s been a big job.”

RAWDON This week the government announced significant changes to New Zealand's Immigration law, designed to make it easier to attract the people we want and to get rid of the ones we don’t. Minister of Immigration David Cunliffe describes his programme of legal and operational reform as a major overhaul, but even if we do attract the people we need are we doing enough to keep them. David Cunliffe joins One News' Political Editor, Guyon Espiner.

GUYON Well David Cunliffe let's start with that Immigration bill that Rawdon talks about there, it provides the greater use of classified information and makes it easier to deport people, is this largely a result of the Ahmed Zaoui fiasco?

DAVID CUNLIFFE – Minister of Immigration

Not at all no, Ahmed is one case which has got to be resolved on the track that it's currently on, and in one sense is quite irrelevant from this bill, this bill is a once in 20 year rewrite that res….. much longer term trends of what's going on.

GUYON But surely that endless appeals process that has gone on with a number of cases, that is part of what this bill is about isn't it, cleaning that up?

DAVID Well we get literally hundreds of refugee claims each year and it's certainly true that one of the problems is the potential for people to make multiple claims, what the bill provides for is that you are able to make a full appeal on the law and the a humanitarian appeal and a final recourse to the court if you need it and then once that process is over you cannot start again and make a fresh claim and do it again and again and again, so you're here for ten years and then you're well settled, that unfortunately has happened too much in the past and that’s not appropriate cos the Kiwi taxpayer ends up picking the cost up.

GUYON Okay that’s about making it easier to get rid of people who you don’t want to be here, but how good have we been at actually keeping those people out, because a recent report by the Auditor General said that you’ve got no training systems, you’ve got no actual plan to detect immigration fraud.

DAVID I don’t think that’s a direct quote, I think he did say that there were systems but he said that they could be improved and I want to be quite frank they can be improved and are being improved. I think of Immigration as a system and I've said since I became Minister that we need to think of it as an end to end system. One of my ambitions if you like with this portfolio is that we depoliticise it from the issues of the day and we build the foundations stronger …

GUYON Let's just have that though on that Auditor General's report because basically one of the big problems is the backlog of fraud cases, 384 cases waiting, half of which are high priority.

DAVID Which have now all been assigned and I have a special swat team if you like clearing that backlog and ensuring that there are no gaps.

GUYON Where are those people now?

DAVID Where are those people?

GUYON Yeah where are those people who may have committed immigration fraud?

DAVID Well I haven’t got a briefing with me on each and every one of those cases and I'm not gonna speculate.

GUYON But are they being monitored, are they just in the community?

DAVID Oh well I think we have to accept the likelihood that most of those cases will not be highly sensitive most of them …

GUYON But you don’t know do you, you don’t know who they are.

DAVID Well look I can't speculate Guyon on something that I haven’t been briefed on and it's long since that I have decided to make things up on cameras, so you'll forgive me if I say I'm having to get back to you on that question, but I haven’t got a briefing on the 384.

GUYON How confident are you in your department, I mean it's six years since the world changed in September 11 and this priority went up and up and up, and you get a report saying that you haven’t got the processes in place to determine the validity of the people who are coming into New Zealand.

DAVID Let me be clear there are processes in place but they could be improved and they are being improved and we've stated that we will be quite transparent about how we're doing that every two weeks we're gonna be putting an update on the internet and people can read for themselves, so looking at the team we've got on that job and looking at what's being delivered through this Immigration bill to help such as the power to have biometric identifiers that will make it literally impossible for people to achieve immigration fraud, I think we're definitely heading in the right direction, but I still want to be you know honest with the public, the system's not perfect and it hasn’t been perfect for a long time and it is very important for the health and wellbeing of New Zealand that we strengthen it and the Immigration bill announced this week is part of that long run challenge to ensure we have a world class immigration system.

GUYON A lot of people probably don’t think that New Zealand is much of a security threat but Australia you know quite legitimately could be seen as such, do you ever have any words or any pressure from the Australian government to tighten up on this?

DAVID Oh we have good liaison with the Australians.

GUYON Have they ever said to you hey look guys you'd better get some better processes in here because…

DAVID No.

GUYON They’ve never put that pressure on you?

DAVID They’ve never put that pressure on me.

GUYON Okay let's talk about the other side of the equation about attracting the people that we do want. You're taking in something like 50,000 immigrants a year.

DAVID Well more than that if you count temporaries, and we take about 50,000 last year 47,000 permanent migrants of which 60% are skilled migrants and their families about 30% family reunions and about 10% are from our international commitments like the refugee programme and others.

GUYON It's a massive number really isn't it, I mean when you look at Labour's tenure you've probably taken in something like the population of Wellington, it's changing the face of New Zealand really isn't it?

DAVID I don’t think it's out of line with what other developed countries are doing but what we are seeing around the world Guyon is a global race for talent and we certainly have to be part of that otherwise we will simply bleed to death because of course a lot of enterprising young Kiwis want to have some time overseas sure, three quarters of them come back, they’ve always done OEs but New Zealand does have quite a high diaspora of people off shore, we have to get in talented scientists, doctors, business people and they bring not only their own skills but they bring networks, contacts, markets, and it's part of our lifeline.

GUYON I want to talk more about the economic equation in a second but there's a big social question there isn't there?

DAVID Absolutely.

GUYON You are massively changing the makeup of New Zealand.

DAVID Massively is a loaded word, I mean this happens slowly it's really important, I agree with your presumption but it's important that this happens at a rate that society can absorb that these folks can integrate.

GUYON Do you think we are or do you think that we're gonna create some social problems here and that there's a concern. I'll just throw a number at you, by 2020 670,000 Asian people in New Zealand, that worries some people doesn’t it?

DAVID Well it doesn’t particularly worry me, I come from New Lynn my electorate and that has the second highest Asian population in New Zealand of any electorate and we have a jolly good time, and those folks make a really good contribution to our community, so if you get your head around multiculturalism and you start valuing every human being for what they can contribute and their skills and talents irrespective of their country of origin then you're gonna find the country stronger not weaker…

GUYON That’s a controversial word in itself though multiculturalism isn't it, especially with Maori. Maori are concerned about this.

DAVID And fair enough because they are tangatawhenua, they are the first people of this land and their position was is and should always be special but I think in New Zealand we're smart enough that we can get our heads both around our unique bicultural heritage and our necessarily multicultural future, the combination of those two will define in generations to come what it is to be a New Zealander, but think about the long run transition. We are not longer a scion of Mother Britain, we are no longer a white outpost in the South Pacific with a strange – not strange but unique bicultural history, more and more we are turning into part of the Asia Pacific region and our future depends upon us being able to maximise the value of our historical links with the west and at the same time develop new and powerful links with the east. Now because those are likely to emerge as two separate trading blocs and we need to be able to trade openly with both, we need the networks in both, we need to be able to speak a range of languages and we need committed New Zealanders of a range of ethnicities to help us with that.

GUYON And you're largely using immigration too as an economic tool aren’t you, I mean it's a pretty critical part…

DAVID I make no apology Guyon for saying immigration has to work in the streets of New Zealand, it's gotta be expression on our national interests, it's not some warm fuzzy thing that we do just to make ourselves feel good, of course we uphold our international obligations but we do it to benefit New Zealand and we have every right to be choosy about who comes here, we ought to get people in who lift the average.

GUYON It's a double edged sword though isn't it because with the number of immigrants coming in creates inflationary pressures, puts pressure on the housing market.

DAVID Oh well that can be easily overstated, I mean the numbers aren’t huge.

GUYON But you yourself just reduced the band of immigrants from 45 to 50 thousand just recently part of which your concern was inflation wasn’t it?

DAVID It is true that in the last year we ensured that we focused on quality, our total permanent residence flow came in at the bottom end of the range we had previously announced, and we've reduced slightly next year's range but still you know within the kind of numbers that we go this year our net migration on permanent is around the five to ten thousand mark and I think that’s actually quite a good healthy small net positive, certainly not too much for the country to absorb and I think it's a good way to be, so I think we're about where we need to be but we're watching very carefully to make sure that we neither undershoot and starve ourselves of skills, nor that we overshoot and get too much gas under the pot so that it boils over.

GUYON Some people perceive that immigrants are putting pressure on the housing market and driving up housing prices, is that a fair concern, is that true?

DAVID Not in a situation where you have a small net positive around five to then thousand, I just think it's likely to be insignificant, obviously we track it really carefully but we don’t think it's a big problem in the wash.

GUYON What about the focus on Auckland, if you look at Asian immigrants, something like 65% of them end up in Auckland, is that putting too much pressure on the infrastructure.

DAVID I think you’ve got an interesting question there and I'm certainly one of those who believes that the immigration process ought not stop at the border, that immigration's got to understand those impacts and it's gotta have the back end settlement that is required to ensure that people are happy and I guess productive members of the community they come to, it's a two way street, we want New Zealanders to appreciate the benefits, we've done some survey work, some interesting facts that people would be interested in, one a migrant's less than half as likely as someone born in New Zealand to draw a benefit, pretty interesting, that around 90% of employers who take on a migrant are thrilled with them, and more than 96% of migrants who come to New Zealand are really happy to be here, so those numbers aren’t too bad for a start off but hey we can do better.

GUYON We'll now bring our panel in David Beatson and Claire Harvey, Claire is our Immigration in good hands?

CLAIRE HARVEY – Features Writer, NZ Herald

It sounds like it is and I was glad to hear David's remarks about the Asian community, but Guyon's right I think in the sense that there's a large population of the New Zealand community hasn’t been brought along on that, Maori in particular, a lot of the Pacific Island community, I mean you hear some fairly shocking things about race in New Zealand and not just from Pakeha. How do you bring those people along, how do you convince them that this is the right thing?

DAVID Well I guess it's for me a combination of top down leadership and also bottom up community empowerment, I'm speaking for a moment as a local MP from West Auckland. We have a thing called the New Lynn Festival of cultures that we organise each September October where all the different migrant communities contribute their sketches dances song fashion food, we get everybody together in the New Lynn Community Centre on a Saturday, it lasts all day, two three thousand people come through they have a great time and I always get a bit misty eyed about it because I think how many places in the world are you gonna have the Hindus, the Muslims, the Baha'is and the Christians all lining up to swap their tucker, you know it's a pretty good fun day for everybody and at a local level it's walking the talk about a community that’s got a big enough heart to reach out to all and enjoy it.

CLAIRE That’s a very inner city thing though.

DAVID And it's a West Auckland thing actually.

CLAIRE But I mean is there value in getting refugees and immigrants to move you know to the country, to get rural communities integrated …

DAVID Anywhere you go in the world there's a natural tension between the desire of a new migrant to have some connections to a community that they feel comfortable with, a common language besides English and also the need not to ghettoise an immigrant community so that you don’t have acceptance problems, and as I said with Guyon it's a two way street, we're aware of that, we would like I think to see over time a greater dispersion of migrant communities around New Zealand but Auckland – as an Aucklander I can probably get away with saying this – provides something of a function of a transit camp for the rest of the country to be honest, because a lot of people will settle here initially but their children will move out or they will move out later, so it would be wrong to say that there are an hermetically sealed group of migrant communities in Auckland that neither communicate outside the community nor move on, they do, and I think that we do settlement really well in New Zealand compared to a lot of other countries, and I have to give credit to my predecessor Leanne Dalziel who in 2003, 2004 got a settlement strategy up with about 65 million of funding which now has resulted in 20 different regional settlement strategy coordinators and operations around the whole country.

RAWDON David does that mean we've got 20 different regional centres for Asian migrants because it seems to very …

DAVID For whatever migrants are present in that regions, I mean it provides information for people to get settled, it also provides a pool of information for the host community about those migrant communities and it's working pretty well.

RAWDON But Asian communities don’t tend to spread themselves around New Zealand.

DAVID Just to push back a wee bit I don’t quite know why we're particularly focusing on Asian communities, we have a tapestry of…

DAVID BEATSON – Columnist

Yeah but the balance of the population has changed and is going to change even more significantly because the proportion of Asians in the New Zealand community is now rising above the numbers of Pacific Islanders here, the mix is changing and it's quite evidently changing, and I think a lot of people are really saying how are we going to cope with this and is there a process of assimilation over a period of time which enables us really to begin to appreciate each other as individuals rather than Asians or whatever, I mean Asians what's that mean, you know bluntly, that’s a great catch all stereotype bag to put everybody into.

DAVID Domino theory …China and Vietnam were best buddies when they’ve been fighting each other for a couple of millennia.

RAWDON It's all very well for us to be accommodating but we've also got to be integrating.

DAVID That’s why I wouldn’t use the term with respect assimilating because it is a two way street, we expect quite rightly migrants to either be able to speak good English for most categories or learn English when they get here, they have to be able to communicate in our common language, we provide information and training when they arrive to help them understand our legal system how the country works and as you know we have ongoing settlement support in each region of the country now to provide that ongoing, and it's actually much more effective to get alongside these communities and work with them and again just some West Auckland stories, we have an ethnic board out there that’s now attached to the City Council, we have a Pacific Island advisory board, these groups of people provide some serious horsepower to the development of that city and I'd like to think Waitakere's leading the way.

DAVID B Is that really what's happening though David or are they providing some serious horsepower to the development of their own cultural influence in that city, because I think ……high days and happy days when everybody gets together and shares their culture and so on but I also see the other side of the coin which is where kids at school are forming into racial groupings and they are having little wars, and there are nasty things happening.

DAVID I wouldn’t deny that at all but kids have always forms groupings and had little wars, I had them when I was nine or ten and fortunately got over them and now I'm in politics and

DAVID B Still enjoying them.

RAWDON They do seem to be elevating don’t they. Can I also bring back – you say that there has to be a level of communication achieved to be able to come in, as to what level because the perception is I think I'm correct in that there isn't a very high level of communication.

DAVID It depends whose perception and it probably depends where you are around the country, and I agree with the question we have to bring the whole community along for the good of New Zealand and is there more that we can do and should do in terms of communicating across our community in New Zealand yes I do think that that’s really important.

DAVID B It would be nice to have a taxi driver that you don’t actually have to sort of physically direct to where you want to go because you’ve got a communication problem and they haven’t got the knowledge of the navigation.

DAVID That’s a bit harsh.

DAVID B It's true.

RAWDON Should we be teaching citizenship lessons in schools?

DAVID Oh I'm a big supporter of civics in schools, I don’t think we should leave it just at citizenship but more and better education about how our systems of government work, about issues for the future of the country.

RAWDON So there are actually citizenship lessons being put into the curriculum?

DAVID I don’t know that I would put the title citizenship but within social studies a lot of those issues are dealt with absolutely and could we do more, I would be keen to see us do more.

DAVID B Do you think the community would, because I can remember a time when you mentioned the word civics and education in the same breath and in New Zealand that said that’s politics in schools no thank you very much.

DAVID There's a big difference between educating people about some of the key structures of society and dealing with it in a party political sense, the last thing we need is party political nonsense in schools. In a way that reflects what I'm trying to do with this portfolio is to depoliticise it to use a big word, that is to emphasise what comes directly from our national interest and to build systems that are strong reliable not easy to wrought and this bill that we introduced this week is a really important part of a three layer programme of change.

DAVID B Where do you place yourself in the political spectrum of majority minority, would you say you're a majority or a minority?

DAVID I must be in the majority.

RAWDON Guyon I'll just bring you back in her for a quick summary, are we heading in the right direction?

GUYON Well I think if you look at the politics of this David Cunliffe used the word depoliticise a lot and I think that that has happened to a degree in terms of the politics of who's coming in, one of the big factors there is Winston Peters who's been such a populist on this issue is really sort of in the government so he's not creating a problem there, in terms of the legislation that the Minister introduced this week to make it easier to deport people he could have that passed, probably more than 100 MPs will support it so there's no real problem there. If he's got a political problem I think it's with his department, with those immigration fraud cases and I just wonder whether Immigration is in the right place under the Department of Labour and whether there might need to be some actual structural change there.

RAWDON Yeah it is slightly strange the Department of Labour being responsible for Immigration.

LESSONS FROM BRITAIN

The political future of the centre right

RAWDON As both the National Party here and the Conservative Party in Britain look to return to the government benches, comparisons have been drawn between their respective leaders John Key and David Cameron, but while National is ahead in the polls the Conservatives are falling behind despite Cameron's efforts to strip away the remnants of Thatcherism in the hard right. Visiting Tory MP Andrew Tyrie was an advisor to former British Prime Minister John Major and is an expert in Conservative philosophy advising David Cameron on that party's move to the centre right. Andrew Tyrie joins me now from Christchurch. Andrew do you see similarities between David Cameron and John Key?

ANDREW TYRIE – British Conservative MP

Oh yes I think there are a lot, they're both very charismatic figures, young, intelligent, huge amounts of drive, fresh, they're not quite typical politicians I think, they look slightly different, they're facing people who have been in power a long time, both Labour Parties have won three terms, both been in eight nine ten years, something like that, I think there's a lot of similarity there, and also on the agenda, the social agendas that both parties look similar, there have been some social welfare initiatives by the National Party as well as obviously by the British Conservative Party and also picking up the environment is an issue too.

RAWDON What sort of channels exist between the two parties because we know that our Labour government does look to the British counterparts and I presume John Key's doing the same with David Cameron.

ANDREW Yes well of course there was a hug trade off during the Rogernomics period curiously which wasn’t with the National Party but with New Zealand politics generally when there were some very exciting policy initiatives coming out of New Zealand, now they're in pretty close contact, I mean we've had a long meeting with John Key and also several other meetings with other of his colleagues and we're picking up ideas all the time and listening carefully and I suspect they're doing the same too.

RAWDON You're not over here trying to find a way of trying to turn the tide back in David Cameron's favour?

ANDREW I wouldn’t get too excited by the Brown bubble, it was inevitable that when he came in we'd have this blip, the question is now whether a few months' blip becomes a few years in the run in to an election. David Cameron certainly took the initiative and I'm sure Gordon Brown recognises him as the greatest threat.

RAWDON Yes since Gordon Brown came in although it may be a honeymoon period he's faced some pretty big challenges with foot and mouth with flooding etc, and it seems that he's been at the right place in spite of the fact he should be shouldering the responsibility.

ANDREW I think those have had something to do with the bounce don’t you, he's been – I don’t want to suggest for a moment that he would have wanted those things – but he has been gifted some political challenges which tend to unite a country and unite people round the Prime Minister if the Prime Minister is capable of delivering leadership and I think he has shown some over foot and mouth, over the attempted terrorist attacks, the two biggest and most important issues.

RAWDON It seems to me that to me that the Conservative Party and our National Party have moved, well we know, centre right, and there's a lot of criticism that that means the policy isn't forthcoming, that this is all about image, is that a fair comment?

ANDREW Well two points there, first of all what's really happened is that the old politics of the left have got defeated and they’ve now occupied rhetorically and to some degree in policy much of the ground, that happened earlier in New Zealand to some degree than it did in Britain, much of the ground that the Conservatives were sitting on. The Conservatives have had to reformulate how to express their values, their values of freedom, personal responsibility, emphasis on patriotism, for the 21st century and that’s been a big job. You're saying well is that all just image what I've just come out with, I think it's more than image, I think it's worth bearing in mind that before Margaret Thatcher's historic 1979 election victory, she didn’t come out with a lot of detailed policies, coming out with detailed policies is a very dangerous game, if they're good they're immediately filched and if they're bad or if there's just one tiny error in any of them it's the error that will be highlighted by a government very well equipped to attack it.

RAWDON I mean under Thatcher the Conservatives led the intellectual debate, they're the ones who formulated those policies, so who is formulating the policies now or does the opposition become a think tank for the government?

ANDREW Well, there's always that risk, I mean we've been proposing a border Police Force for several years and hey presto what did Gordon Brown do as soon as he came in, a border Police Force, we've been saying there's no accountability left in parliament because of the way power has been sucked out of it by the Blair apparatus in No.10 the Alistair Campbell spin doctor machinery and so we've been saying we need to reform that and reform the British constitution to make parliament more accountable and give a little bit of genuine scrutiny in British politics, and hey presto that’s exactly what Gordon Brown's now said he's gonna do. As a matter of fact there I think it's a question of image and reality, how much will we get as opposed to how much we'll be talked about, we'll have to wait and see.

RAWDON The panel are itching to ask you some questions here – Claire.

CLAIRE Hi Andrew, I'd like to ask you about another issue that sort of straddles the right left divide in New Zealand Australia and in the UK, and this is you're involved in the parliamentary committee on rendition and I know you’ve been very vocal on that issue, particularly critical of the Labour government for refusing to condemn the US's practices, it's clear now that the CIA and other US agencies have completely rode roughshod over British concerns about the way prisoners have been treated, how do countries like the UK and New Zealand and Australia and the rest of the world deal with the US when it's in this terrifying mode, what can you do?

ANDREW Well first of all it's worth just explaining to your viewers what rendition is, rendition was the American policy that they put in place or they developed after September 11th whereby they’ve been kidnapping people from around the world and taking them to places in the Middle East, Morocco, Egypt, Syria, where they can be tortured, and then many of these people have then been dumped in the illegal black hole called Guantanamo Bay. I thought that was wholly unacceptable, it undermines the values we're trying to export, it inflames moderate … and turns everybody against the west and it was a small part of a radical set of mistakes that George Bush made after September 11th, regime change, pre-emptive military strikes, all that led to the catastrophe of Iraq. How do we challenge all that of which rendition's only a small part if I may say so is the wider and more important question. Though there are three basic approaches one is to do what Tony Blair says he did which is hug them close, keep them close, never criticise them, never say anything publicly that might be seen as allowing a cigarette paper to come between us and the Americans, but privately maybe have a word, and a second approach is the French approach which is rivalry, but I think neither of those are right. The Americans are pretty hard headed they treat foreign affairs like a business negotiation, they just take as much as they can, so but I don’t think rivalry's right either because that divides – that makes the west look divided. What we need to do is have an articulate and robust debate in public about where foreign policy of the west should go and that’s exactly what Margaret Thatcher did. If you remember Margaret Thatcher took on Ronald Reagan time and again over nuclear weapons' use, over the invasion of Grenada, over the Falkland Islands, my goodness, she gave them a real roasting when they hesitated for a moment and said they might decide to be neutral.

CLAIRE But people do vote for parties like yours. The people who vote for the Conservative in Britain and the National Party here are people who are by and large and this may be changing, interested in defence, interested in security, concerned about terrorism, how do you convince those voters that actually the best thing for the country is to stand up to the US and to not be quite so closely involved.

ANDREW Well even our closest ally can make mistakes from time to time and when they do we need to be able to say so and to have as I say a robust discussion about it. I think that those voters will understand that and I hope they will. I'm sure that’s the only way we can hope in the 21st century to conduct relations. The truth will out in any case about so many of these things you know.

RAWDON I'm just gonna bring David Beatson in here because he's been scribbling madly for the last eight minutes or so.

ANDREW Well he is a scribbler by profession.

DAVID Andrew the thing about all of this is that you’ve got Gordon Brown now repositioning himself on the relationship with the United States, it seems to me looking at it from New Zealand that that’s again happening on this issue. When you talk about centre right politics and centre left politics now it's a pretty paper thin divide for the voters to actually make a choice over, are you worried about that?

ANDREW No, I find that the electorate can see very clear distinctions between the parties, but on the crucial issue about how we handle redirecting western foreign policy which has gone I think badly off the rails and now needs to be put back together again, we have a fractured western alliance, we have a Middle East more inflamed than we've had for a very long time, we have difficult relations with the Muslim world now which need to be repaired, for all those reasons I don’t think we should see this as part of partisan advantage, what we've got to do is think about what the right actions to take are, articulate them clearly to the electorate and hope that they will support us in doing so, and what I've found is that a huge proportion, Claire I think it was, was just mentioning a moment ago that traditional Conservative voters worry more about defence, well that’s absolutely true but what I found when I refused to support the war when I voted for the amendment in February that said that the case for the Iraq War had not been made, I went back to my constituency my electorate thinking that I might find myself given an absolute grilling by a group of retired military officers and I had an absolutely packed room to address and I found that a retired Rear Admiral came forward shook my hand and said congratulations Andrew well done I know that it was a difficult decision for you, and I realise how strongly that part of the electorate feel about these issues.

RAWDON Andrew, thank you very much for joining us this morning.

FINAL THOUGHTS – GUEST COMMENTATORS

PIHA DEVELOPMENT?

RAWDON So Claire do you go to Piha for a bush walk or a coffee?

CLAIRE I wouldn’t mind going there for a coffee actually, although one thing I thought could solve everyone's problems would be a wind farm at Piha, David would that be okay?

DAVID I think you’ve got a problem, you think pylons in the Waikato are gonna be a row, I can assure you that a wind farm at Piha….

RAWDON So should they be trying to defend what they have had or should it become you know would coffee shops work, I mean is it inevitable.

DAVID I really don’t care quite frankly, I'd rather leave Piha to the Piha people because it is a quite unique little community, the values that have made Piha interesting are not the values of the coffee shops and they're quite right, bush walks and beaches and the Piano movie, that’s made Piha, the surf, that’s it. Now the Piha people better just sort of sit there and protect the patch I think.

RAWDON But it's about the Resource Management Act as well and what it allows what it doesn’t allow.

DAVID Well I think the Resource Management Act generally has a lot of people being able to say no more easily than yes and I think there'll be a lot of no saying going on at Piha to anything that looks like you know Parnell type development.

CLAIRE There's also a bit of controversy at the moment about filming restrictions at places like that, I mean today the Piano movie might not be able to be shot if the new sort of regime has its way.

RAWDON Any activity involving more than 50 people I think it is.

DAVID Well, yeah fine, I guarantee you that if you went with the right movie proposition you'd still be able to shoot a movie at Piha, you know they're not that resistant to that kind of thing and they know that the Piano made a hell of a difference in terms of real estate values out there anyway.

CLAIRE Provided it didn’t star Mac Ellis.

RAWDON No he'll be too busy because they're gonna need the coffee shop to provide for the film crew. But I mean you know the big baches that’s hardly something new is this something that Piha should be kept for its own sort of entombed as an historic centre or is it just inevitable.

DAVID I'm in favour of entombment, I think that’s a very good word Gordon, entombment yes, I think it should be sealed off and kept and preserved as a piece of New Zealand history and culture and if you look at the Coromandel there's areas in the Coromandel that are like that and they're not interested in really changing too much.

CLAIRE But isn't this about not wanting to share it with the rest of Auckland and the rest of New Zealand, I mean isn't this about wanting Piha to remain a very closed little village where people don’t really come?

RAWDON And on the subject of not wanting to share if we just look back to a slightly broader issue which we were looking at today which is immigration, is that about not wanting to share as well, I mean the restrictions and the constricts being put on immigration when economic sense would say we need to make it more accessible.

CLAIRE Well certainly at the moment a place like that, regional communities like that are lovely but they're so different from the rest of the country, they're so different from Auckland you know.

DAVID I would like to put a big capital are they really, or are we saying for New Zealand with the immigration law what the Piha people are saying to the rest of New Zealand, like sorry we want the best bits for us thank you very much and you just you know we'll let you in if and when we think you're fit. You know we live in a global society now and we can't shut the world out.

RAWDON David, Claire, thanks for that.

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