Chris Crewther (Dunkley, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Minister, firstly, I thank you for coming to the Federation Chamber today to answer our questions. The immigration and border protection portfolio is one that is constantly responding to international developments and events, and I greatly appreciate your consistent and reliable engagement with all members of parliament.

We are an incredibly diverse country in both ethnicities and backgrounds, so your work is something that is of real relevance to people in my electorate of Dunkley and right across Australia. Given that we currently have more displaced people across the world than we did following World War II, the plight of refugees is something that is constantly topical. Approximately 23 per cent of Dunkley's population was born overseas, a figure comparable to the national average.

We have a number of wonderful facilities for those newly arrived to our community, including one that I recently visited—the Sudanese homework and learning club in Frankston. This is a program supported jointly by MiCare, the New Hope foundation, the Brotherhood of St Laurence and the Woodleigh School. It is run primarily by volunteers, mostly students and teachers from local schools who offer their time after hours as tutors and buddies to Sudanese young people. The program demonstrates that through community support Sudanese refugee and migrant children are able to accelerate their basic literacy and numeracy skills, enabling them to succeed in school and form relationships and friendships which consequently have a preventive effect on youth crime and other social integration problems later in life.

It is my firm belief that this program could be used as a template for other electorates to assist in community engagement with refugees. These programs are thoroughly deserving of support from the federal government, something which I recently raised with Assistant Minister Hawke. It is critical that we support such programs and encourage engagement and integration as well as avenues that provide refugees and migrants with the best possible resources to access the many and varied opportunities here in Australia.

There has been a lot of negative press in Victoria recently about specific ethnicities and their lack of integration into the local community, so it is pleasing to be able to witness the wonderful work that is going on within Dunkley to support these people and to enable greater integration as well as mutual understanding. I believe it is groups and attitudes like these that are contributing to restoring the Australian population's confidence in our migration system. Furthermore, the order provided around irregular maritime arrivals to Australia—particularly around the stopping of people smuggling and the drownings at sea—and the coordinated refugee intake through the United Nations humanitarian program enable us to better support a greater number of refugees in most need. Per capita, this makes us the recipients of one of the highest numbers of refugees resettled through the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees program.

The objective of our refugee intake focus should, without a doubt, be on ensuring that people who are most at risk are given priority to come to Australia, particularly the persecuted minorities of women and children. The fact that we have now increased our refugee intake and that there are fewer people in offshore processing facilities than there were under the previous Labor governments indicates to me the change in approach when it comes to our acceptance of refugees. I understand that at least 17 detention centres have been closed and no children are now in detention.

The streamlining of our processing for communities has been productive overall and a great success. I would be pleased to see the success of our refugee program result in a higher but, importantly, orderly refugee intake in order to provide humanitarian assistance to more people, many of whom are suffering so much as a result of terrible conflicts that have uprooted so many lives. The Turnbull coalition government is demonstrating its commitment to providing assistance to ethnic and cultural groups who need aid the most, and is working with its international partners to proactively support and care for the world's most vulnerable people—people like Nihad, a Yazidi girl I met through my recent parliamentary delegation to the UK for our inquiry into modern slavery. Under ISIS, she was raped and, shamefully, sold as a sex slave, and also had a baby, whom she no longer has access to or can see. She is an example of modern slavery. She is the type of person that we should be helping. With these things in mind, Minister, can you provide me with the outcome of the intake of the additional 12,000 Syrian refugees? How does our refugee intake compare with other countries? Can you give an update on the US resettlement program?

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