Don Randall (Canning, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Local Government) Share this | Hansard source

I am very pleased to speak on the Migration Legislation Amendment (Student Visas) Bill 2012 because this bill seeks to amend two pieces of legislation: the Migration Act and the Education Services for overseas Students Act 2000. In 2010, this government appointed Michael Knight to review the student visa program. On 20 June 2011, the report was completed and presented to the government. Almost a year later we are now at the point where we are looking at implementing the recommendations, because on 22 September 2011 Minister Chris Evans and Minister Chris Bowen announced the government's response and accepted all of the 41 recommendations of Michael Knight's report.

Interestingly, a Senate committee is currently reporting on this bill. The committee is due to report on 18 June this year. It is a bit surprising that the House could not work in with the Senate committee's report so that you could have a complete assessment of this situation rather than jumping the gun and, in effect, ignoring what the Senate committee will come down with after we pass this legislation today. Except for a few issues, the coalition will not be opposing this bill; however, it would have been nice to have seen the recommendations from the Senate committee.

This bill has been introduced to enact 24 of the Knight recommendations to remove the automatic cancellation regime that is currently in place for students holding visas who breach academic and attendance or progress requirements. Currently, under section 137J of the Migration Act the automatic cancellation of student visas is triggered when a student receives a notice of a breach. The student has 28 days to comply with the notice or attend a departmental office to make a submission about these breaches. If these things fail to happen, the visa is cancelled and the student excluded from applying for further visas for up to three years. In addition, any family or dependents would have their visas cancelled also.

This bill proposes that instead of applying these blanket rules a case of noncompliance would be examined in the context of the minister's discretionary powers. The discretionary powers of the minister is an area that the coalition has some concern about, because it takes away, in effect, some of the more established processes for looking at breaches. Any discretionary powers in the minister's hands, in some respects, are reasonably fraught with difficulty. When Minister Evans was the migration minister, he made it clear that he did not want to involve himself in ministerial interventions to the same extent as had been the case previously for that reason: he saw them as a bit risky. But this bill is going to give greater discretionary powers to the minister, which is a problem because, when you see the numbers that I will reveal shortly, you will understand that a huge amount of bureaucratic support will be required to provide the minister with any clear discretionary powers to intervene on individual visas. Under the shambolic migration regime that the Gillard government are running, the migration department's bill has blown out by well over $1 billion in this budget alone. Since Labor have been in government—that is, since 2007—billions and billions of dollars have been assigned to cleaning up the mess that they created by going away from the coalition's solutions, which had been working very well. If you recall, of those people who came by boat, there were only four people in detention, and there was a transparent and orderly migration system in this country.

The coalition do not oppose this bill, but we should not be in the position of having to clean up the government's mess. Also, the bill needs further clarification as to how the minister will define whether a student visa breach has been made. I hope that the minister or his representative will clarify how he is going to come to these decisions under discretionary powers. The circumstances under which possible compliance action will be taken are not at this stage clear. Whilst an education provider will be still be required to report a visa violation, it is not clear what mechanism or circumstance will trigger an investigation or prove severe enough to prompt visa cancellation. These questions are hanging out there now. They have not been addressed, I understand, in any of the explanatory memoranda which accompany this bill. I hope that we have not opened the door for the use of ad hoc discretionary powers by the minister, which, as I said, could be fraught with danger.

Student migration, particularly in the area of education, is a very important income source for Australia. I understand that more than $4 billion annually comes from students who come to this country from overseas to study. There is an outstanding opportunity for us not only to gain this sort of income but also to prove that Australia is a valuable and high class destination for overseas students to come and study in. Many of us would be aware of the number of subcontinental students in Melbourne. If you catch a taxi in Melbourne, there is a good chance that you will meet one of them as they earn a few dollars to support themselves while they are trying to study. The previous minister for migration, Senator Evans, made some errors in both his comments and the moves that he made on the question of subcontinental students to the extent that the source of students coming to Australian universities from the subcontinent started to dry up. He then had to go and do a rescue mission in India to try to tell them that we still loved the Indians, that we wanted more of them to come to Australia to study, that we wanted them to feel safe and free to study here and that we did not have any problems with them coming in the numbers that the were coming in before. So there again we saw a shambolic approach from the government to a very good income source for Australia.

In 2011 the Auditor-General found that there were more than 250,000 students who had failed to comply with visa requirements and been issued with a non-compliance notice, an NCN. This is equivalent to the entire number—250,000—of student visas granted in 2010-11. None of the NCNs had been dealt with. In the first three months of 2011, more than 30,000 new NCNs were issued each month. The Knight review found that around 35 per cent belonged to the higher risk categories. So this area certainly needs a fair bit of policing.

The changes to the current legislation will mean that an administrative backlog of more than 350,000 NCNs created by Labor's shambolic mismanagement will be wiped out; in other words, they will not even have a decent look at them. Drawing a line in the sand in this way allows them not to have to deal with the backlog of 350,000 that they already have. This is an administrative mess. Also, DIAC's visa cancellations, when they were challenged in the courts, were upheld only for a five-month period between May 2001 and December 2009. More than 19,000 students were affected, and many of these left Australia prior to the cancellations being overturned.

The ANAO concluded that a number of DIAC's key administrative structures and processes were not sufficiently robust to effectively meet the challenges involved in achieving the government's objective of balancing industry growth and program integrity in the student visa program. This is not a conclusion reached by the opposition; this a conclusion reached by the ANAO, the Auditor-General's Office. We believe on this side of the House, and we demonstrated it in government, that we upheld the integrity of our migration program completely; we did not allow it to become shambolic in a whole range of areas. We all know about these areas. There was the blow-out, and, in a question on notice, shadow minister Morrison this week indicated that the government had expected that by the end of June something like 5,500 people would come here by boat, yet by May that number of people has already arrived. So, with two months to go, the government's figures are wrong again. That demonstrates the problem that this government have created for themselves by walking away from a solution which gave integrity to our borders and to our migration system. The ANAO also noted problems with the enforceability of mandatory visa conditions relating to students maintaining satisfactory course progress and attendance and the working rights allowance of 20 hours per week. The ANAO suggested that this requires careful review. This has brought a certain amount of media attention. For example, on 1 June 2011 an article in the Australian says:

The Gillard government is struggling to manage the international visa program, failing to keep track of hundreds of thousands of potential visa breaches.

The article, by Miranda Rout goes on:

The Australian National Audit Office has found the Department of Immigration's key administrative structures and processes "were not sufficiently robust" to ensure the "integrity" of the program, while student numbers have soared.

It goes on to say that the audit found the department was 'struggling to cope'—in other words, another blowout because it is lacking in resources. It said further that Auditor-General, Ian McPhee found:

… it was "not feasible" for the department actively to monitor if all 400,000 students had breached their visas—including whether they had worked more than 20 hours a week.

In an article on 23 March this year the Adelaide Advertiser said, under the heading 'Student Visas Rule Change': 'Currently course providers have to intervene to help international students who have failed more than half of their subjects who have not attended at least 70 per cent of their classes.' We know that is one of the benchmarks of breaches. So they have failed more than half their subjects—in other words, they have come here for a lifestyle and an opportunity to get a visa but they have not done the work at school or have not turned up. It goes on: 'The review found this system gave education providers extraordinary power over students. Some providers use the system carelessly or maliciously.'

Based on an electorate-wide survey in my electorate, one of the biggest concerns for Canning voters is the protection of borders. They know that the integrity of the migration system has been reduced since the Gillard-Rudd government have been in power. This is another example of an out-of-control program run by this government. In a recent article in which the MRT was involved, we were told that those assessing whether entrants are legitimate humanitarian entrants were told to start pushing through the visas more quickly to reduce the backlog. When they cancelled them and went to the MRT, the MRT was overturning previous assessments without a clear basis for having done so.

We also found out that allegations of fraud have come out of the office in Islamabad. There are a whole range of issues in terms of migration. We are helping the government in this area to clean up the student visa program because it is actually a positive program for Australia if run properly. But we know that there are going to be resourcing issues, as has already been pointed out by the Auditor-General. In trying to support the government to help clean up their mess, we hope that they get on with it so that they do not reduce the clear opportunity for students to come to Australia to study properly in some of our great educational institutions. (Time expired)

See this speech in context