Andrew Laming (Bowman, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is encouraging to hear the response from the opposition to support, in the main, all of the schedules that we are discussing tonight. It leaves me with very little to do apart from echo the overview of the bill which the opposition spokesman did so well. These are very important measures that are strongly supported by the Australian public. Of course, many of the finer details of the Migration Act are not well understood by the man and woman on the street, so it is important in these examples—where in many cases the law has been tested and taken to the highest court—that, where the policy intent has not been followed, it is only appropriate that we should be making clarifications today. Obviously, there are huge and seismic changes in immigration policy, but this piece of legislation is an example of how we will be making the day-to-day operations—for those people that are either seeking visas or seeking adjudication on their eligibility for a visa—to be done in a more streamlined way, and in a way that concurs with the original intent of the legislation.

To very briefly touch on those points again: schedule 1 makes very clear that individuals who have been previously refused a visa should not have the active consideration of a subsequent visa refused, unless that refusal has occurred since their most recent arrival in Australia. In simple points, this means that if you were refused a visa in the distant past on a previous trip to Australia, that is not to prevent you from returning to this country on a different visa, being accepted, and being able to stay. That is, I think, an important clarification.

Schedule 2, which I think is also of enormous public interest, addresses the clash between section 195 and subsection 198(5) in the act. This is about ensuring the correct operation of removals policy intent—I guess on every street corner there are stories about people who apply to come to Australia, arrive, are refused, go through to the highest courts, and exhaust all their options for approval and for review, only then to be able to thwart the system by applying for a second bridging visa, or a subsequent bridging visa—and about finding opportunities or ways, within the very generous legal system that we have available to them, of frustrating or preventing their return. And so this schedule removes that ambiguity, and puts beyond doubt that if a person has applied for a protection visa and either that visa has not yet been refused or the person is still under the reviews and appeals process, they cannot be removed. But once that process has been completed, they cannot make spurious claims to new bridging visas in an effort to continue their stay.

The recovery of costs question in schedule 3 was very controversial. In 2009, from the government of the day, it seemed like such a compassionate thing to do: to remove what were sometimes enormous costs from individuals who were often innocent parties in the process—but we know that that is, in the main, not the case. It was then that those amendments removed the liability for people, and for liable third parties, to reimburse the Commonwealth for the costs of transporting them while they were in immigration detention. I am glad that the opposition spokesman has made it very clear that this does not apply to asylum seekers. That would have been a very tempting piece of misinformation to promote around the nation, but it absolutely is not the case. This predominantly applies to convicted people smugglers or to illegal foreign fishers, who are detained under particular elements of the act. The specific concern that is being addressed today—the loophole that is being closed—is that there were some provisions that actually impeded the recovery of those debts.

The examples that have already been tested in court are cases of people who were not initially detained because of section 250, but who might well have been detained under other sections, which made it impossible to reclaim those debts. They may well have been granted some other form of visa. An example of this is a criminal justice stay visa, where it is in the public interest to complete a court process and potential prosecution of an individual, but in that case and in many instances where that occurred, the individual on that visa was also able to escape reasonable cost recovery. Lastly, of course, is the situation where an individual is not in immigration detention at the time of their conviction. This was a massive loophole, given that now around 27,000 of the 30,000 in Australia are not in detention, also making large numbers of people immune from debt recovery. The overall concern in schedule 3 was a simple one: to create a disincentive; sending a very clear signal to these persons who are participating in people-smuggling and in illegal foreign fishing that there will be significant costs if they are caught, and that the costs of that detention and transportation will accrue to them.

In schedule 4, on authorised recipients: this addresses a fairly complex area where, with respect to someone who is authorised to receive written documentation and written communication from the government, it will now be very clear what those individuals' obligations are to government and vice versa. Under this schedule, there is no obligation on the government to share with the authorised recipient any oral communication, because that person's role is specifically restricted to documentation, but it also makes clear that these authorised individuals cannot move into other forms of activity on behalf of their client beyond receipt of documents. And obviously, these authorised recipients need to get the individual's consent if they wish to cease to be an authorised individual; they cannot simply refuse to do so, or withdraw that consent without the individual knowing.

Lastly, schedule 5 addresses the Crimes Act, and specific information that is collected under Crimes Act search warrants. It would seem utterly reasonable to the Australian public that that should be germane to administrative decisions under the Australian Citizenship Act 2007. Australians would like to know that all possible evidence that has been legally collated should be available to a minister or a department in making those citizenship decisions.

These are relatively small issues. They are issues that have gone, in many cases, to the highest court in the land. As a result of these decisions, should this bill be passed, some of the more ambiguous elements of this legislation will be corrected tonight. It is good to see that there is bipartisan support to ensure that that indeed occurs.

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