Craig Kelly (Hughes, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am pleased to rise this morning to speak on the Registration of Deaths Abroad Amendment Bill 2016. Firstly, it is interesting to look at the great increase in the number of Australians travelling overseas. If we look at 1976, the first year the Australia Bureau of Statistics took records on this, less than one million Australians took overseas trips. So for every 14 Australians there was one trip. Fast forward to last year and that number has a zero on it. Last year, Australians took 9.7 million short-term trips overseas. That is a tenfold increase with our population. A citizen of our country is more than five times more likely to travel overseas today than they were back in 1976. The member for Canberra, who previously spoke, often likes to rise in this parliament and talk about the growing inequality across our nation, but I put it to you that the rich and famous have always had the opportunity to travel and today we have five times as many Australians with the opportunity to travel overseas. The ability to travel overseas is one of the great opportunities in our lives. Experiencing different cultures and seeing the wonderful sites of the world is available to a greater percentage of the Australian population than ever before. This completely debunks the idea of a growing inequality. When it comes to overseas travel, there is a growing equality for more and more Australians.

If we look back to 2005-06, we had 4.8 million Australians travelling overseas—in that last decade there was a 100 per cent increase. What is also good is that we are seeing more young people travelling—we are seeing some of the biggest increases in that age groups. There are also more elderly people travelling overseas, which brings us to the point of this bill. There are so many Australians taking the opportunity to travel overseas, because our country has become more wealthy, more prosperous and has given our citizens more opportunities to travel, that unfortunately we are seeing more deaths overseas. In fact, in 2014-15, there were 1,282 Australians who died overseas, most—648—were due to natural causes but there are an increasing number who die due to accidents—168—murder 64, and natural disasters. The most deaths overseas are recorded in Thailand, the Philippines and Indonesia.

That gets to the purpose of this bill. The amendments correct an anomaly in the Registration of Deaths Abroad Act 1984 which has left some applicants in a procedural limbo, unable to register the deaths of family members overseas. The nature of the anomaly is as follows. The ACT Registrar-General was originally appointed as the Registrar of Deaths Abroad under the act. However, the act requires that the Registrar of Deaths Abroad be engaged under the Commonwealth Public Service Act 1999. Since 1994, the ACT Registrar-General has been employed under the relevant ACT legislation, not the Public Service Act. When this anomaly was discovered in 2015, the ACT Registrar-General ceased exercising his functions under the act. This anomaly is corrected by this bill.

Travelling overseas is truly one of the great things any Australian citizen can do. This bill reminds us that it is sometimes risky, that it is sometimes dangerous. The safety and security that we sometimes take for granted are not available in many other countries around the world, so we take this opportunity to remind the more than nine million Australians that make overseas trips to take care and to look after themselves. With that, I commend this bill to the House.

See this speech in context