Anne Aly (Cowan, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Article 34 of the Refugee Convention states:

The Contracting States shall as far as possible facilitate the assimilation and naturalization of—

refugees—

They shall in particular make every effort to expedite naturalization proceedings and to reduce as far as possible the charges and costs of such proceedings.

According to its recently updated website—updated since the Federal Court determined, as early as last week, that delays in citizenship processing were unreasonable—the Department of Immigration and Border Protection claims to process the majority of citizenship applications within 10 to 12 months. However, according to a report by the Refugee Council of Australia that involved interviews and surveys of 188 people, the average waiting time is not 10 to 12 months or 80 days, as previously stated; it is 215 days for those who have completed their the citizenship test and 357 days from the time of their application. The three longest waiting times have been 603, 623 and 682 days.

The evidence collected in this report suggests that the delays are disproportionately affecting those who arrived in Australia by boat and it also suggests that the large majority of people experiencing citizenship delays arrived from Afghanistan. Importantly, these delays appear to have commenced after September 2013—that is, since this government has taken office. Also important to note is that all the applicants who have or are experiencing delays have already passed rigorous security assessments by ASIO and have already established their identity and claims to refugee status. One would presume that ASIO knows its stuff and that their assessments can and should be relied upon. One would also presume that, given such rigorous assessments have already been made, there would be no need to duplicate the process, no need to waste time and resources and no need to further complicate the bureaucratic process.

We are talking here about people who are already living in the community and already contributing in many ways to our Australian society. Since I was elected, I have been contacted or visited by several community members—not all in my electorate, I might add—who have come to me in absolute desperation about their ongoing citizenship delays. Without exception, every single one of the people who have approached me is gainfully employed, has lived within and amongst the community peacefully and has satisfactorily completed every step of the immigration process—every single one.

One of these is the case of 'A' who lodged his application in March 2015, four years after he was granted an onshore protection visa. He was called for a citizenship interview in July 2016, but it was cancelled and rescheduled for a later date. The interview was more like an interrogation, where 'A' felt that he was being treated like a criminal. I reiterate that this is despite having already passed rigorous tests and checks on his identity in order to be granted his refugee status. The interview lasted for three hours, during which time he was extensively questioned and had comments made to him by officers that he would be deported or imprisoned if his verbal story did not check out with his original documents already submitted nearly a year ago. I might add that never at any time leading up to the interview was he informed that the interview would be a further check of his identity. The Refugee Council has also heard from lawyers and migration agents saying that a few people have had their permanent refugee visas cancelled and subsequently have been redetained after completing an application for citizenship and attending an identity interview. In another case in my electorate, 'R', another person who arrived as an unauthorised maritime arrival, applied for the citizenship in January 2015 and his application still remains undetermined.

Since the abolition of the White Australia policy, both Labor and Liberal governments have maintained a bipartisan policy of non-discriminatory immigration, and that is something which we as Australians should all be proud of. But we have seen this Minister for Immigration attempt to bring in a visa revalidation bill that would have given him the power to require revalidation checks of whole groups of people under a certain visa class, beyond the proposed ten-year visa. This government keeps going. It keeps trying to undermine our non-discriminatory immigration system in underhanded ways. It keeps trying to introduce ways to implement policies and procedures that effectively discriminate. (Time expired)

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