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

It was the great Victorian Premier Steve Bracks who said that there is nothing more Australian than a migrant, with the exception, of course, of Australia's first peoples. Representing an electorate where more than 50 per cent of people were born in another country, the highest declared percentage of any in this parliament, I can attest to that sentiment. I have 157,000 people in my electorate, yet only about 90,000 or 95,000 people are on the voting roll, in many cases because of these non-citizens—future citizens—who are contributing to our country.

At citizenship ceremonies in the city of Greater Dandenong and the city of Monash, I do my survey of love, which I will mention on this Valentine's Day. We survey the crowd as to who came to Australia for love. Some will have come as refugees or as business or skilled migrants, but there are always a few who put up their hand as having come here for love. I pay tribute to them on this Valentine's Day. These are my opening remarks. I have only two life regrets. One is that I have never lived or worked overseas, because my daughter was born young and I have always been tied to Melbourne. The other is never learning a foreign language to fluency.

With that as context, I was pleased—not as a member of the committee but as someone with an enormous interest in and passion for Australia's well-targeted migration program—to read this report. I was pleased at the outset to see a positive summary of the economic and social benefits of migration. There are many positive outcomes, as the report outlines, from a well-targeted migration program, for the labour market as well as for the public purse and our economic development. Young skilled migrants in particular are incredibly valuable. Their home countries have paid for their health care and their education for two decades, then they come here and pay large sums of money in many cases for their tertiary education, so we have paid nothing for those expensive years of their life and then they may stay and contribute to 40 or 50 years of wage earning, tax paying and economic development. What a return for Australia! Shame on the member for Warringah for his populist nonsense in recent months with his good friend, his dear friend, Senator Hanson, saying, 'If we cut all migration, the world will be better.' This report rebuts that and rebuts it clearly. Of course the migration program should fall or rise according to economic conditions, as it does overall.

I was pleased to see this thoughtful discussion at the outset, but settlement in a foreign country has challenges, and, to realise these benefits, people need support. Without support, people can struggle, and we see many negative impacts and costs to the community in terms of us not realising those social and economic benefits. Successful multiculturalism in this country is no accident. We don't just plonk people in the suburbs—we don't have a set-and-forget mentality—as, I might say, some European countries have done. There are parts of France and there are parts of England where there has not in any way been the same kind of support as there is in Australia, for years, for people from different cultures to settle in, to learn the language, to get involved in the community and to find employment. It takes care, effort and investment.

When I read the report, I thought, 'Oh, this is good. We're dealing in facts here, not assertions. That's kind of old-fashioned, particularly for this government.' But it's a disjointed report. Many of the recommendations, as the previous speaker, the member for Blair, said, are well reasoned and well argued. There are important recommendations about settlement support and language proficiency and employment and integration and so on. The previous speaker said that the 14 recommendations in the first six chapters are pretty sensible—that he'd sign up to them. But the report then gets kind of weird. It feels like someone has stapled the last two chapters, and they got them a bit mixed up at the photocopier. They're the kinds of chapters that are in a law enforcement committee report or a completely different inquiry. They are utterly disjointed. There are pages of minutiae at the outset in the seventh chapter and anecdotes, almost, of crime statistics in Victoria, including analysis by Andrew Bolt, the media commentator. It may be right; I'm not, in any way, saying that I've gone back and checked the figures. But it's a curious approach for a serious, thoughtful parliamentary inquiry to quote, in serious terms, various random media comments that have been made on the issues at hand.

So I draw attention to page 123 and 124 of the ABS report, which includes statistics on offenders between 10 and17 years of age who were formally charged by police between mid-2015 and 2016. It talks about the number of youth offenders having increased by less than one per cent. It then goes on to talk about New South Wales crime—with that Liberal government!—increasing by three per cent, while Victorian crime decreased by four per cent. That's the ABS, so let's take that as reliable.

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