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

The wedge has backfired. We didn't hear anything from the assistant minister or anyone opposite about what their own senators have said of this bill. They've acknowledged that it's divisive and damaging to individuals and to people in my electorate. Some 55 per cent of people in my electorate were born in another country. This is a bread-and-butter issue for people in my community. They didn't say anything about the Senate report where government senators admitted that the legislation is flawed, and recommended major changes, but then kind of said that we should pass it anyway. That would be lipstick on a pig. There were 14,000 submissions opposing and two in favour. We're still placing bets over here on whether the assistant minister actually wrote the submission for the Australians for Constitutional Monarchy.

Honourable members interjecting—

It's a thing. The community and every expert are rightly outraged. This is an extremist bill. The truth was revealed. Its extremely ridiculous English level—IELTS 6—is university level. Every expert submission—from Melbourne University, from Monash University, from the people who understand what this test actually is—made that clear. It's elitist. I dare say that tens of thousands of people in my electorate who are great Australian citizens would fail this test. It was also made clear in the Senate committee report and in the submissions to the Senate committee that this would be the hardest, the most impossible English test in the entire world for citizenship. That's a fact. Have a read of the report.

People in my community and in many multicultural communities have said, quite clearly, that this is racist legislation. That's what's being said in the multicultural press around Australia. It's extreme. It's retrospective. Hundreds of thousands of people are affected. Even the government senators acknowledged the current trend—unfortunately like this—of legislation by media release. They've acknowledged the anger in the community and made a clear recommendation that the government back down and not make this retrospective, at the very least. They also made a clear recommendation that:

… the required standard should not be so high as to disqualify from citizenship many Australians who, in the past, and with a more basic competency in the English language, have proven to be valuable members of the Australian community.

That's your own government senators agreeing with Labor's fundamental point about this bill.

We've also acknowledged that this bill imposes unreasonable delays. To become an Australian citizen you already have to be in this country for four years. People pay tax, they study, they work, they raise a family and they fall in love—they have all the quintessential Australian experiences year after year after year. The government through all of this debate has not answered the key question: how does it make us a better, safer community to have hundreds of thousands of permanent residents living here banned from citizenship? It doesn't.

The final point I'd make is that the minister for immigration, if you ring the betting agency of those opposite, may well be the next Prime Minister—before the next election. So you would think he would be politically smart. We had a meeting in the Springvale town hall a month ago and 500 people turned up. They were not all non-citizens; most of them were citizens. Many of them were Liberal voters. They were outraged because they care about their neighbours. They're married to non-citizens that have disrupted their family plans.

In my view we should send a thankyou note because finally, from the four months of this debate, every non-English-speaking background person, everyone from another country, every migrant and even your own party members, and supporters in the meeting I held in the seat of Chisholm—and people have now quit the Liberal Party over this, people who made the mistake of helping the member for Chisholm get elected and are now helping us—now know what you truly think of them: they're not good enough to be Australians, they're not welcome and they're not wanted. At least the minister for immigration has been honest for once and given people a chance to know where they truly stand with this government.

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