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DALZIEL, Hon. Lianne

Member for Christchurch East, LABOUR

Minister for Accident Insurance
Minister of Immigration
Minister for Senior Citizens
Associate Minister of Education (Special Education & Adult English Speakers of Other Languages)

Born: 7 June 1960, Christchurch; Married
 

Educated Cottesmore College, Christchurch. LLB (Canterbury). Completed law degree while working as a kitchenhand/cleaner at Christchurch Public Hospital. Admitted to bar 1984. Joined Canterbury Hotel and Hospital Workers Union 1984 as organiser then legal officer. Elected Union Secretary from 1987-1990. National Council member of the FOL then the NZCTU. Active member of the Labour Party. Christchurch Central Labour Electorate Committee from 1985-88. Member of the Labour Policy Committee on Employment Industrial Relations and Regional Development from 1988-89. Elected as Member for Christchurch Central from 1990. Appointed associate spokesperson on Justice 1990-93. Was spokesperson on ACC 1992-95. Was spokesperson on Health 1993-97. Member of Privileges Committee from 1997-1999. Member of Social Services Select Committee since 1997. Member of Womens' Caucus Committee since 1990. Enjoys music and reading. Majority: 11,162.
 
 

• What is your own perception of the Asian populations in New Zealand ?
• The original Asian population, a lot of them were from China and settled in the goldfield areas of New Zealand. They came for the gold rush, settled in the main. So I think many New Zelanders grow up with New Zealand born Chinese classmates in school. So, the Asian ethnic people have been a part of our population for many many years. It is in the late 80s and early 90s that there is a significant increase in the Asian population, I am maybe looking at the Indochinese refugees of course, that came through, and of course, we’ve got large Indian population which have again expanded over many generations, we’ve got three, four generations of Kiwi Indians in New Zealand. So there has been a lot of interaction with Asians in New Zealand, probably because we are at the bottom and we are kind of linked into the Pacific. So we are very much in that Asia-Pacific region. But it has been in the 1990s that we have quite a significant increase in the number of people coming in from Asia and there was an issue around infrastructure support in Auckland, and a lot of political milage of antagonism towards Asian people which is terrible, horrible and so, often that had a real impact on the numbers coming to New Zealand at a time from Asia. The number dropped radically, because there was a response to what was political radicalism. But apart from that, they are generally well settled, and hard-working, not always seen as a totally integrated population, but they look after themselves.
• The presence of the majority of the Asians in New Zealand is the result of the government’s immigration policy. This is the case of Asian overseas students and business immigrants, who bring immediat benefits to New Zealand. This policy seems to be economically a success. But before each election, Asian immigrants become a topic of heated debate within New Zealand. Do you think that Asians are well-perceived in this country, and if enough explanation and information were given by the government about their presence in New Zealand?
• [About the Business Immigration] ..that would be true of the arrivals of 90s, but it would not be true of the area population, because a lot of, for example, Indian population comes through families and occupational qualification, the General Skills qualification coming to 1991. So it’s true to many of the Asians who came in the 90s but it’s not true of the area well-settled population. [About the Overseas Students] Education is a good export dollar earner, and it is true that it is growing and we are looking towards it being a billion-dollar-industry, but we have also recognised that in having other countries children in our country that we have to offer them safety and protection, and so we are shifting to a system where in the past, the school and the tertiary providors have had to sign up to a voluntary code of practice. Now that’s going to be mandatory, which means they are going to have to ensure their homestays are safe for children and young people, and also that the environment just generally within the educational institution and their home within which they live is one that is positive in support. It is not just about money, it is about looking after them. [About the debates on Asian population] It was only in 1996, I was not the minister – I was the opposition spokesperson on immigration at the last election and I didn’t get that feedback that there was a lot of race issues being raised. That was the case in 1996. In 1996, Auckland did experience a bit of a boom. Population growth was very high. We approved the highest number of people coming into this country ever, in one year, and there was pressure on schools, house prices were going up in Auckland and it was easy to blame Asian migration, and a populist politician, Winston Peters, used it as a laucnchpad for his party. It was horrible horrible things that he did.
• Do you think that immigration policy is now better explained to population?
• Yes, I think things have changed because we are doing everything we can to try, I guess, remedy some of the ill feelings that were created over that period and also to encourage New Zealand employers, businesses, industry, and community that people from all backgrounds have got something to contribute- people choose to come and live in our country and be new Kiwis- They have our support. So we do think their support is very important about migration to New Zealand. It is hard for lots of Asian communities because we are an english-speaking country. Certainly, we have Maori as another official language, but it is not a spoken language in normal commercial daily transactions, except among certain parts of Maori community. So the language is English. Although a lot of Asians now study in English that is very helpful in terms of coming up to speed, there is this issue around the accent. I always tell groups of migrants one thing: - "Remember this, New Zealanders think they don’t have an accent." And people always laugh, then I go: "- I am not joking, they don’t, most New Zealanders." Because we are a tiny country at the end of the world. The truth is that the vast majority of New Zealanders don’t travel round the world. The young people go off for their OE (Overseas Experience) and come back. Most New Zealanders don’t know they have an accent. And so when they hear somebody from a non-english speaking background, they can hear their accent, they can hear difficulty in understanding, so that they stop trying. And that’s where we need to have really good education programmes for people from non-english background, so that they learn a bit more about how Kiwis communicate, but also for Kiwis to understand that we have not only to talk a little bit slower because we’ve got a habit of talking very fast, but also that we listen slower as well. We’ve got a wee way to go. It is not easy because I believe it is English speaking, I don’t think it is anything else. I think that’s the fact that we’ve grown up in a very monocultural society, that the tragedy of that has been the suppression of our own indigenous people, or first nation people, the Maori, and that is through Maori renaissance that is coming back, but the real issue for the rest of our population is that we haven’t done very well about understanding people from other cultures.
• Do you think that New Zealand population has a vision of New Zealand as a multicultural society?
• I think they do actually. We are a multi-ethnic society within the framework of a bicultural nation. Because the Crown, the Queen of the day, signed the Treaty with the Maori who are our first nation people, just like the American Indian population, and the Aborigines in Australia. I mean there are people who were there first, they were conquered by a colonizing force, that’s the history of New Zealand, that’s been the history of many countries around the world. I mean, sometimes, we forget the colonizing nature of big chunks of a country’s history. I mean I was talking to someone from Korea recently, and I’d forgotten actually that the Japanese had occupied Korea for something like nearly 40 years, that’s a generation, and they learnt Japanese and they were talking Japanese, so their own culture language was suppressed and that’s the history of lots of other countries. So I think that the fact that we have a treaty with Maori makes us a bi-cultural nation but we have a multi-ethnic society or multi-cultural society. And I think that most New Zealanders will now accept that definitely.
• There have been cases of immigrants swindled by immigration consultants. What are now the required qualification and ethics in maintaining the professional standards of immigration consultants?
• We are still working on this. There’re only really a relatively small number of people who are active immigration consultants in any year, so it is difficult to pin it down in terms of how much it’s going to cost to each one to maintain a register for a professional body. What we are going to do is we are going to be telling people that if they want to use an immigration consultant – which they don’t have to but if they want to - that they should look to see if this immigration consultant is bound by a professional code of conduct and ethics, as you say. So the New Zealand Association of Migration and Investment. There is a new institute that has been set up as well. Those both have professional codes. And so we are looking at just warning people that they should use those people ahead of somebody that’s not signed up for a professional oversight. In the meantime, we are working on developing enforceable standards for immigration consultants now.
• What do you think of the Cambodian community in New Zealand?
• I have not much to do with the Cambodian community in New Zealand. A lot of Cambodian community came in New Zealand as refugees....in the 50s? early 60s? Do you know how many came? I think a lot have gone to Australia because the population is so much bigger there. The difficulty with the refugee process is that we are such a small country, we bring small numbers of refugees, and often the populations are too small to create communities that people feel, you know, not connected. They feel a lot more in comfort within the context of their own community, within a wider community. When you look at Canada, they call it a mosaïc where different populations live in different parts of town, there is a huge community that support the (refugee) community whereas in other countries it is kind of spread. But New Zealand is such a small population anyway that people can feel quite vulnerable so I do believe that not only Cambodian but also the Vietnamese refugees, also, once they have their citizenship, move to Australia where they can find a bigger population. You should have a talk to Tim Barnett who’s MP for Christchurch central. There was some research on Christchurch about the refugee population and whether they had moved on. But I think they have come up with some statistics on Cambodia and Vietnam on how they have moved to Australia.
• What do you think remains to be done for a better refugees settlement support?
• This is the UNHCR resettlement programme in which New Zealand takes 750 refugees a year which is tiny. They say there are 22 million displaced people in the world, so 750 people seems so small, but what we do is we have people arrive in Auckland and have them stay in Mangere Reception Centre for 6 weeks, and at that time, they get English language lessons, they get orientation lessons, they get a bank account, we make sure that they can go to the Department of Work and Income, and get an unemployment benefit so that they’ve got income coming in. They’ve been told which part of the country they are going to, they’re allocated to an organisation called the Refugee & Migrant Service, which works with volunteers in the community to help establish some early friendships for people. I think volunteers are better than paid workers because they are doing it because they want to help new migrants, because they want to help refugees. It’s not because they are being paid to. They help them to find a house, to get furniture, what are their needs, etc. So we do try to cater for those needs. I think what we have not well done is that we have not necessarily helped to look after the psychological needs of families, who are actually quite traumatized, through the refugee process. It’s very similar with other parts in the world. It’s always hard to know whether we’re doing it OK, and I always think we can do better. It’s been very much a focus of the last year and a half since we’ve been in government to try and lift the emphasis on refugee settlement outcome. Because if people aren’t happy here...You know, we moved some families to Christchurch, you know I come from Christchurch, very cold (laughs), some communities are used to cold, others are not... Some are used to heating houses, other are not. I don’t think we individualize from the perspective of getting to understand where they are coming from. Where have you come from, what are you used to, what can we do to help you understand and then translate that experience to the New Zealand experience, because it’s totally different. And often we get communities who are put in Christchurch but who end up back in Auckland, because they will gravitate back to the centre of population. [Why Christchurch?] We do spread the refugees around Christchurch, Wellington, Hamilton, Palmerston North, and Auckland, rather than having everyone in one place. We’ve enjoyed different migrant populations in Christchurch. I think Christchurch has started to become very multicultural when it hasn’t been at all in the past. And to break down some barriers, I think that barriers between people are broken down by the children. So the children in the schools with each other are the first step to integration. Because the children don’t look at the color of people’s skin, they don’t listen to accents. They like people because they like people, and that’s what we should encourage. [what about parents who don’t let their children in classes with many migrants] It’s certainly not my experience. I’ve had parents proudly tell me that there are 60 different migrants first languages in their school. And I’ve been very proud of it. I’ve been to school concerts, where they’ve got every culture making a performance from all round the world. I think that welcoming a variety of cultures into our country actually helps to increase and establish our own cultural identity as a country.
• What contribution can Cambodians bring to New Zealand?
• I hope that one of the things that Cambodians can bring to New Zealand is an understanding of what Cambodia has been through. Because I often find that New Zealand can be quite insulated and only really knows what goes in the world by what looks accross their television screen rather than studying things.The history of Cambodia, it’s a very proud history but it’s also a very tragic history. Cambodia is relatively close, and for New Zealanders to understand what can happen when somebody takes control of a country under those sorts of circumstances that the results are devastating. So, increased international understanding of tyrannies, but also the resilience of people. Cambodia has got a good story to tell too, sad story but agood one.
• In the field of education, what do you think is specific to Asian migrants?
• The key is communication. New Zealanders will change over time. It’s going to take a while for New Zealanders to understand that they have accents.(laughs) We will get there! But a lot of pressure goes on Asian students because there is an assumption that Asian students are very very intelligent and will succeed, and there is a general view that they are very good at mathematics and anything that requires logic and rational thought. But that’s actually a limitating view of Asians and a terrible generalisation because some of the world’s greatest artists [sic]...You know you can’t judge a population by a generalization about them. I do sometimes feel that young Asian children are under pressure to perform because there is a belief that they are so intelligent that they should be at the top of their class all the time! That’s not to say that young Asian students aren’t at the top of the class all the time... I was in a secondary school in Christchurch last week and had to present a prize to an international student from Asia. He had won a top prize in maths competition that covered the whole of New Zealand. He was a credit to his school. The school took great pride. The whole assembly was there for him get his award. And he did say ‘will this help me get residence?’ (laughs) I said it won’t do you any harm! That occasion made me realize that the whole school took pride in his success. (hesitation) So it’s integration again, being part of the wider school and not being just tied to the community, but to integration in the wider community. We’ve got much better chance of succeeding in that with our children than with our adult population.