Julian Hill (Bruce, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Australian Citizenship Legislation Amendment (Strengthening the Requirements for Australian Citizenship and Other Measures) Bill 2017. I will say at the outset there is no doubt, as more detail of this emerges and, indeed, as submissions to the Senate inquiry become clearer, that this bill to attack Australian citizenship is a truly appalling piece of legislation. Even for this Minister for Immigration and Border Protection it's a shocker, and that is a big call. It attacks viciously the egalitarian ideals that have underpinned Australian citizenship for decades—the notion, the hope and the promise that migrants we select can come, settle as permanent residents and gain citizenship to build a life and contribute to enhance our permanent settler multicultural society where people speak many different languages.

If passed, this bill would introduce a university-level English language test at a level so high and difficult that I bet millions of Australians would not pass—we now have expert advice to the Senate committee that that is not an assertion, but it is fact—including many in this parliament. It would massively increase the period that permanent residents need to be living in Australia before being able to apply for citizenship. There is no evidence of why this is needed; apparently it is just a good thing. It would condemn hundreds of thousands of permanent residents, tens of thousands of whom live in my electorate, to a life as an underclass, living here, working, running a business, paying taxes, raising families but not able to pass a grammar test and be counted as full members of our diverse Australian community. How on earth does that make us a better society? How on earth does it make us a more cohesive society, a more secure society?

We have every right to expect that permanent residents who have been here take the pledge of allegiance sooner rather than later. That's a good thing. The minister's overblown rhetoric of this being some national security initiative was shown very quickly to be false. There was no advice from national security agencies. It is just a scare.

This matters to me a lot as the member of parliament who represents the electorate with, I think, the highest percentage of people born overseas. Around 55 per cent of people in the Bruce electorate in the last census said they were born somewhere else. And this includes many skilled migrants, business migrants and refugees. Interestingly, I have 157,000 people in my electorate, but there are only 95,000 on the voting roll because we are such a diverse community and include many noncitizens. I feel it's my responsibility to represent all people, not just voters.

At a recent public meeting in Springvale that the member for Isaacs, the member for Hotham and I hosted we had over 500 people turn up on a dark and stormy night to express their outrage and opposition to this legislation, to urge us to take a stand and not back down. I note that these were not all noncitizens who turned up. Indeed, the majority of the meeting, I'm absolutely confident, were citizens: people associated with family and friends, many just insulted, others simply worried about their community cohesion and fabric. In my view, from what I have seen, the government has seriously miscalculated politically and should quietly hope the Senate buries this terrible bill.

But I'm also here as a citizen born here who passionately believes, as I said in my first speech, that Australia's human diversity is an enormous strength for this nation. The different cultures enrich us, but it's also of great economic import. Welcoming and valuing people who speak other languages and who bring other cultural understanding and networks has been shown time and time again to underpin trade and investment growth, particularly as we forge our way in Asia in the coming decades. And this nonsense undeniably will deter thousands of the brightest people from coming here. There's nothing wrong with highly skilled migrants, researchers and so on coming here aspiring to Australian citizenship, but many of these people will never have the time to learn to pass an IELTS 6 English grammar test.

I will start with the worst aspect. The English language testing provisions I can only conclude are deliberately over the top. We need to be clear what's actually proposed, because the government is engaging in spin. An IELTS level 6 test that the minister calls 'competent' is not a test for everyday English. It was designed for university admission. It's interesting that in the last few days submissions from the Senate inquiry have emerged. I'll read a couple of quotes from the University of Melbourne's language centre, who have said it is unsuitable for establishing readiness for citizenship and the proposed level is too high.

Of course no-one disputes learning English is important, but the current citizenship test is already in English and this conversational English has served Australia well for decades. Particularly embarrassing for the minister is that his very own appointed multicultural advisory council has written that this standard 'is too high and above that needed to achieve the aim of integration.' That's the minister's own hand-picked council telling him he's got it wrong. There are tens of thousands of people in my electorate who would not pass this test, yet they're great Australians. They run businesses, they work, they create wealth, they pay taxes and they raise kids.

The government also implied this is somehow to bring us into line with other countries as if that's a reason in itself for our somewhat unique context as such a multicultural nation. Nevertheless, again the submissions show that this is a complete and total fiction. This test, if introduced, would be by far the highest standard in the world. The conspiracy theorists would say it's deliberately so by the minister to force the parliament to reject this kind of extremism as some kind of dog whistle to certain groups of voters. But look at the facts. The United States requires people to read and write a sentence. New Zealand requires a basic conversation in English assessed by an official. Canada's level is just speaking and listening at a much lower level. The UK, Germany, the Netherlands and Spain do not use these university-graded IELTS at all.

In truth, what the government is saying to migrants from non-English-speaking countries with this legislation is that, if they had their way, they would rather you were not here at all. It's deeply offensive to every migrant for whom English is not their first language. There are passing assertions from the minister that the world has changed since European migrants arrived. They're just facile. Of course that's true. Change is a constant. It's kind of a fortune cookie in that sense. But this has nothing to do with the level of testing proposed. University-level English grammar is not necessary to be a good Australian. That was true decades ago, and it's still true today.

Refugees are our most entrepreneurial migrants. Research from the ABS some years ago showed that. They're more likely to start a business and generate wealth from nothing. In the year 2000, five of Australia's eight billionaires at that point had come to this country as refugees. Many arrived with no English. They get some conversational English and they make their way in the community.

On skilled migrants, I will take the example of university researchers who settle in Australia—global talent. We are in a competition for global talent. This increases our wealth as a society. Brilliant research scientists come with functional English, but they would never pass an English grammar test as proposed. But we're seriously saying with this bill that we don't want them here anymore as citizens. Somehow, because Minister Dutton's introduced this bill, we don't want those people in our country anymore—or are we saying,' We want you to take a couple of years off your world-breaking research and go and study English grammar, and then pass a test, and then you can stay'?

On business migrants, I used to run the business migration program, as a public servant in Victoria. It's an important and valuable economic contributor. People bring capital. They invest. They create wealth. And this is particularly significant for Chinese business migrants, although not only those. They come with functional English, but where on earth are they going to get time while they're running multimillion-dollar businesses in Australia and China to spend two years studying grammar? There is no answer. The community sees this as clearly anti-migrant. It is a clearly anti-Chinese measure according to the Chinese community, but I don't accept that; it's an anti-migrant measure more broadly. Fundamentally, they feel lied to, they feel misled and they feel cheated by this government.

The other significant change, of course, is at least four years of permanent residency in future to apply. The minister's line is that this has increased from one year. On the face of it, you might think that sounds reasonable, but it's spin. The current law already requires an applicant for citizenship to have lived in Australia lawfully for four years, including one year as a PR. So the Prime Minister and the minister are, frankly, misleading people in the way they explain this change.

What it will actually do, as the submissions to the Senate inquiry now make clear, is introduce perverse and damaging distinctions depending on which visa class someone happened to come to Australia in. If you came here and settled on a visa that granted you PR, permanent residency, from day one, fine—there is no change. But if you came and settled here on a temporary visa, and then later you got PR, then you have to wait years more, and again this affects the highest value migrants to this country. PhD students who've come here, paid for their masters and done their PhD to world standard at our universities will then have to wait years more before they can apply for citizenship. We should be making it easier for these high-quality migrants to stay in Australia and pledge their allegiance, and yet we're making it harder to the point of being impossible.

You'd suspect stakeholders had slammed this measure in their submissions to government, but we will never know, because Minister Dutton's secretive black hole of a department has eaten the submissions and won't show us. But the submitters to the Senate inquiry spoke out against this measure. I will read two quotes. The Australian Human Rights Commission said:

The differential treatment based on visa class does not advance the Government's stated objective of integrating aspiring citizens into the Australian community.

The Federation of Ethnic Communities Councils Australia said:

The proposed amendment … will have a detrimental effect on community harmony, social cohesion and weaken the capacity of migrants to be empowered and integrated into Australian society.

It will have an impact also, I note, on Commonwealth government Public Service recruitment. Translators, with skills that we need, can no longer work in the public sector without citizenship in many parts.

The bill comes on top of growing concerns about the integrity of how the minister and department are administering the citizenship function, and integrity, of course, is critical in applying the law and in determining who gets citizenship in the administration. It must be an effective process, free from politics.

This House debated this very topic a few months ago: the growing and inexplicable delays in processing applications, delayed for years with no explanation. A Federal Court case last December exposed the scale of the problem: over 10,000 so-called complex cases, no resources and signs, the court found, of 'a deliberate shameful policy to manipulate the queue'. It may sound like an academic debate or a numbers game, but it's not. It has a very real human impact. I see the pain in my office each week—in fact, most days—when my staff deal with grown men crying at the front counter. There are mental health impacts of living in limbo for years and years, because nothing comes out of the minister's black hole of a department except the same crappy standard letter. They're stuck: unable to travel to visit dying relatives, unable to complete their studies overseas or to take jobs that require citizenship.

Of course only in 'Turnbull land' could such an incompetent minister be promoted. It's a bit like the Prime Minister and the NBN, I guess. Then again, the Prime Minister doesn't even seem to run this circus of a government anymore this week. And so it's in this context that proposals to give this minister more and unchecked powers are so deeply disturbing. I would note in passing that it is pleasing that the Auditor-General has decided to put administration of the citizenship function on his audit list for this year, so perhaps we will get some better insights into what is really going on.

I note also that this bill purports to effect these changes from 20 April, despite the fact that this is just a proposal before the parliament. The department, shamefully, has been turning people away who are trying to lodge their application, saying they don't want them now if they haven't had four years as a permanent resident—even though it's not the current law. The current law of Australia is as it stands, not as this bill proposes. This is not a tax bill where retrospectivity is an accepted form of introducing a new measure. It is a policy bill. Why is it retrospective? What possible reason is there for this? My office, and others, have been advising people to mail the hard copy to the department, keep the record and when this legislation fails they will hopefully be in the queue and processed.

Of course, it's not just business migrants. I had one family in my electorate who came to me in tears because they were due to be eligible to apply a week or so after 20 April. They'd been hanging on because their mother—I think it was their mother—was dying in another country. She had a few months left to live and they'd held off going to spend those last few months of her life with her, waiting because they were desperate not to lose the number of years of residency to get to that four years, with their year of PR, and they are stuffed now. They feel misled. It's a terrible and unspeakably cruel policy.

As with other legislative amendments in the immigration portfolio of late, this policy case has not been made. And there is a pattern of this with this minister. This minister is power hungry. Pretty much every piece of legislation seeks more power for himself. Every problem must be criminalised and securitised. His lust for power was recently evidenced by the home office department. There is no evidence or case that it will make us safer; it's just a powder grab in the government, battered through a weak Prime Minister. Members should really watch this minister.

In closing, it's not our job to unpick and try and fix up legislation that is this bad. The Senate inquiry will do its work. If there are parts of the legislation that are sensible, other parts that I haven't spoken about, then the government should bring them back as a different bill with grown-up justification and evidence so that we can do our work properly. But in the meantime, the only sensible course of action with this bill is to reject it outright. Thank you.

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