Kelvin Thomson (Wills, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

by leave—On report No. 145 from the Joint Standing Committee on Treaties, I concur with the remarks made by the chair of the committee. I thank the chair, other members of the committee and the committee secretariat for the work that they have done in preparing this report.

I did want to make some remarks about chapter 4 of the report, which is the agreement between the government of Australia and the government of the United States of America for the sharing of visa and immigration information. This agreement is required for the automation of the existing immigration information sharing process. This automation is expected to enable increased speed, efficiency and volumes of exchanges. The present arrangements with the United States have enabled up to 20,000 fingerprints per year to be sent for checking. In the event that there is a fingerprint match, then agreed biographic information, immigration history and travel information is exchanged with the country that had the match. Such matches have in the past uncovered identity and immigration fraud.

This is important. Frankly, the extent of immigration fraud is not widely appreciated. Indeed, there were very serious reports in August this year that visa fraud is widespread, but it is not being investigated because the Department of Immigration's investigation and enforcement capacity has collapsed. It has been reported that as many as nine in 10 skilled migrant visas may be fraudulent and that there was a Somali people smuggling cell in Melbourne, which was linked to a terrorist suspect; but the investigation into that ceased due to lack of resources. Meaningful investigations and prosecution activity of migration fraud in the Melbourne office has effectively ceased. A 2010 investigation concluded that around 90 per cent or more of 40,000 fees applications in the general skilled migration program lodged per year for the previous three years were suspect. A 2009 investigation concluded that the student visa program was failing, the general skilled migration program was failing and the falsification of qualifications was prolific.

A key problem is that since 2004 the migration program has skyrocketed that the resources of the department have not increased to keep pace with that. The permanent program has gone up from 100,000 at that time to 240,000 now and we have over one million people in Australia on temporary visas who have work rights. It is simply beyond the department to check the validity of the claims that people are making about their qualifications and work experience. It is apparently even beyond the capacity of the department to close down passport swapping scams—this is not Operation Sovereign Borders; this is operation open borders! I think we need a parliamentary inquiry to look at this. We should learn from these reports that it is better to put real effort into educating and training young Australians and making sure that we have labour market testing for employers so that young Australian graduates and young Australians who are unemployed are offered the jobs before we look overseas.

In fact, I have asked the Minister for Immigration to investigate the reports in The Age of 8 August this year, which were that a corrupt Department of Immigration official helped run a $3 million criminal migration racket involving more than 1,000 fraudulent visa applications. I have asked whether it is correct that the government has issued new licences in the past six months to migration agents who were previously identified by the Department of Immigration as having bribed employers to obtain fake work references for visa applicants. I have asked whether the government will review these licences with a view to withdrawing them. So these are serious issues. In October 2009, a departmental report made the startling finding that the Department of Immigration and Citizenship may have been responsible for granting a record number of student visas to people who may not be considered genuine students, as well as granting permanent residence to skilled migration applicants who did not have the skills being claimed. I hope that these very serious matters will be given the attention they deserve, and I think the House for the opportunity to make these brief remarks.

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