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

The largest pile of paperwork in my office now is the pile of letters waiting for temporary ministers to respond. Ministers have given up writing back. They've given up pretending to govern. This government is disappearing up its own black hole.

The most common letters that I have are from Australian permanent residents waiting for their citizenship applications to be processed. But finally, on Monday, the truth of what is happening was revealed by the Auditor-General. The government's claims have been exposed as lies. In an utterly scathing, damning report, it was revealed that 244,000 Australian permanent residents are now stuck waiting. That's a 771 per cent blowout. There's no need for colourful phrases. The report speaks for itself:

Applications for citizenship by conferral have not been processed efficiently by the Department of Home Affairs.

It says:

Applications have not been processed in a time-efficient manner.

And:

Applications have not been processed in a resource-efficient manner.

There is 'an underlying decline in processing performance', and:

Significant periods of inactivity are evident …

There are literally piles of paper sitting around the department for years, not being looked at.

I say to the permanent residents of Australia and your families: you are right to be angry. Many in your families are citizens already, and this is a shocking lapse in administration. It's careless and deliberate. The government's claims are untrue. The Department of Home Affairs have been caught blatantly misrepresenting the facts to the parliament. In October 2017, they advised Senate estimates:

… the case load complexity is rising as we are seeing a flow-through of previous humanitarian entrants.

Well, the Auditor-General found:

… the … complexity of the applications lodged has decreased. Growth in demand for citizenship in recent years was driven by people with good supporting documents who arrived in Australia on a skilled visa.

The Liberals have also tried to claim that the delays are because of a surge in applications, which has also been exposed as rubbish. In fact, lodgement rate has been steady, but 'the rate of decisions taken has been declining, falling far behind the lodgement rate'.

The government's ridiculous claim that delays are caused by boat arrivals has been exposed as a lie. The Auditor-General found that, in fact, applications from the humanitarian stream 'decreased by nine per cent' over four years from a low base. Indeed, 'former illegal maritime arrivals'—their language—account for only 0.7 per cent of lodgements in 2017-18. The 'boat people' claim is as ridiculous as the minister's claim that this is about national security and saving us all from criminals. If these people are so bloody dangerous to our community, why are they permanent residents of this country already?

The report also reveals the ongoing risk of the Department of Home Affairs breaking the law by unreasonably delaying applications. The Federal Court found in December 2016 that the department had broken the law in this way, and nothing has changed. The assessment revealed that there have been applications sitting around for 25 or 26 months with nothing done.

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