Graham Perrett (Moreton, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Education and Training) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the New Skilled Regional Visas (Consequential Amendments) Bill 2019 and the amendment put forward by the member for Scullin. I thank the member for Fowler for his contribution. I want to make a few particular points about Griffith University and the Gold Coast, but I'll come to that later.

I just have some general comments about immigration policy as contained in this piece of legislation. Basically, what's happening here is that the Morrison government has announced a reduction in the permanent visa migration ceiling from 190,000 down to 160,000. This bit of information has been put out by the government in a number of ways. I want to particularly bell the cat and suggest that this reduction in numbers reflects one thing that is troubling, and that is that the best and brightest in the world, the people that used to line up to come to Australia, are no longer choosing Australia. They're going to Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom or other countries rather than Australia. The fumbling, bumbling minister responsible for this, Minister Dutton, has then tried to window-dress the fact that the Morrison government has seen a reduction in demand for Australia.

You might say: 'Well, what's that about? If they don't want to come here, that's no loss to Australia.' Well, it is. It is a great loss to Australia. The jobs of the future, the jobs that my children and my grandchildren will have, will come from expertise. Obviously agriculture—growing stuff and exporting two-thirds of it around the world—will always have a role in Australia. We're great farmers; we know that. We will be affected more and more by drought, and that will have impacts on our agricultural output. We are also some of the best miners in the world. We will always have a role in exporting products we dig out of the ground. We'll do that. I understand that. But the high-end jobs, the jobs that show a skilled nation, the jobs of the future, will come from expertise.

If we are unable to attract those top brains of the world, if that decrease from 190,000 to 160,000 is indicative of the fact that we are no longer attractive when it comes to the best and brightest in the world coming here, that is a problem. It actually, I would suggest, goes to the heart of the productivity that has been delivered by the Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison governments—that is, we have not seen an improvement in productivity under this government at all. That's the first one. I'm happy to put a spotlight on that. The legislation before the chamber, as part of the announcement, includes this decrease from 190,000 to 160,000.

Accompanying that has been two new regional visas. You might be misled by some of the information from the government. We heard it in question time today. They said that this is—what did they call it?—congestion busting. They said, 'We are sending people to the bush and that is congestion busting.' That is a classic ploy from the advertising man who is now in the Lodge—to actually send more people to the bush and say that, because those people are not settling in the city, that is congestion busting. The ACCC would go after them for passing off if they were in the business world. This is typical. They have a slogan and an advertising campaign but not a policy. This is the CV of the Prime Minister. Where the bloody hell is he when it comes to actually rolling out infrastructure? Where the hell is he when it comes to actually having a national vision, whether it be on droughts or on infrastructure in cities? He's missing. But he will come up with a glib line and some cheap visuals that he'll send out to people and say: 'Look, we're doing something. We appear to be doing something.'

I'm all for having more people reside in the bush. I would say that upfront. I particularly say that to the minister at the table, the member for Parkes. I do recognise that the bush has challenges associated with drought and also just the basics of mechanisation. Where you used to have 10 shearing gangs in a region, you might be flat out having one nowadays. Where you would have had two or three families on a property, now you'd be flat out having one because of mechanisation. That has challenges for the bush. I think Australia is a better nation when we have as much employment in the regions as possible. So I do recognise that side of it.

The government's aim is to change the geographic make-up of visa holders by increasing the number of people settling outside the major cities, perhaps to make up for the fact that they're not going to invest money now in shovel-ready projects like the Cross River Rail and the Coopers Plains rail crossing in my electorate. That will have extra congestion now because of Cross River Rail that the Queensland government is rolling out. They're not actually investing in infrastructure. They've got a big-ticket item in the budget, but it'll be two, three or four years before they actually start putting a shovel in the ground and a few years after that before they cut a ribbon and we get the benefits of such infrastructure.

For the purpose of these visas, regional Australia is defined as not residing in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth and—this is the interesting one—the Gold Coast. As I flagged earlier, I wanted to particularly come to the Gold Coast because the only university in my electorate, Griffith University, has a campus on the Gold Coast. This will have significant implications for Griffith University. Griffith University has a campus in the electorate of Griffith, the electorate of Bonner, the electorate of Moreton, the electorate of Rankin and also on the Gold Coast. The Gold Coast will be significantly impacted by this change saying that the Gold Coast is no longer in regional Australia.

These two new types of visas, subclass 491 and subclass 494, are all about putting people into regional Australia. That's the plan. In the future, of the 160,000 places—there's been a reduction from 190,000 to 160,000—23,000 will go to regional Australia. But I don't think those opposite have actually done the hard work. Despite being in their seventh year of government, they have not done the hard work when it comes to these visas.

Let's have a look at what's happening. We've already seen that Minister Dutton is not processing people who have a right to reside in Australia, people who are living amongst us and are keen to be Australian. These are people who are keen to take the oath and affirm that commitment to Australia and become a part of that great Australian story, like the seven million who have arrived here since World War II and who call Australia home, but they are just unable to be processed. It's policy by bottleneck. Those opposite couldn't get their policies through the parliament, so Minister Dutton sneakily sacks people, cuts back on services and then has a bottleneck on desks, with people who want to become Australian citizens, people who are keen.

Every MP would see this: on Harmony Day, Australia Day or any day where you normally have citizenship ceremonies—guess what?—there have been fewer and fewer people becoming Australians. These are people who are keen to become Australian citizens since Minister Dutton has taken office as the immigration minister. But obviously Minister Dutton has to speak to those extreme right-wing nut jobs—not just the ones in his caucus room, in his party room, but that part of the electorate that they used to dog whistle to but they now pull out the dog trumpet to speak to. These are the ones that say, 'No, no, there are fewer and fewer people coming to Australia,' particularly in the last few years.

For the last 230-odd years, the No. 1 source of people coming to Australia has been the United Kingdom. But in the last couple of years, as soon as we had an increase in people coming from China and India and those countries became the No. 1 and No. 2 sources of new Australians, suddenly Minister Dutton had to recalibrate. How did he do it? By cutting the number of staff in immigration, by jamming immigration into this Home Affairs monster and by cutting back on the number of people who are being processed to become Australian citizens.

As we've seen with many of this government's migration policies, what will actually flow from this visa decision remains unclear. I do want to point out again that I'm happy for people in the bush to receive some of that labour. I do worry that this won't actually deliver it, and I want to call out the suggestion that somehow increasing the number of people in Australia is going to bust congestion. That term should not be connected in any way with these visas. If you've got more people coming and you do not build the infrastructure to support them, that is a problem. If there are fewer jobs available in the country, either because of drought or because of mechanisation, then guess what: people coming on those visas and going to country areas will then displace people, who will then move to the city, and there will be more congestion in the cities.

The government still needs to support people in regional areas. Whether it be the subclass 494, where the skilled employer sponsors the person coming on the visa, or the subclass 491, where skilled people are nominated by state or territory governments or sponsored by an eligible family member, I know it can work. There are plenty of opportunities. There are plenty of places I've seen in Queensland. Toowoomba does it well. Up near Cairns they've done it well. They bring in people, like the Hmong people up near Innisfail, to various communities. If you bring in the support, perhaps have the schools, the language and the religious establishments that provide support to people, you can then enliven an area.

I want to go to part of my shadow portfolio area, which involves looking at education and at higher ed students in particular. Let's look at what's going on in regional universities. Regional universities have struggled to increase their offerings to international students, unlike universities such as Melbourne University, where, perhaps problematically, nearly 49 per cent of the student body are international students—full-fee-paying students, if we want to call them that. The regional universities have nowhere near those numbers. I met recently with the University of Southern Queensland up in Toowoomba; they don't have anywhere near those numbers. With the nature of the visa process, I guess if someone in Brazil, India or China is shopping around for where to go to university, they don't necessarily think of Bathurst or Toowoomba or even Darwin or Rockhampton as places where they want to go to university. So these regional universities need a bit of a helping hand. They don't have the same pulling power, obviously, as a Melbourne, a Sydney or even a Brisbane.

I think you need to look at that mix. Obviously, if you've got 49 per cent of your students from overseas, with a significant chunk of that, a significant percentage, coming from one nation in particular, that could be problematic—especially if that nation is able to turn off the tap for international students with one decision. We know that even with students from democratic nations there can be issues, as we saw back in the late noughties when there was an incident down in Melbourne that had implications for the Indian community. The number of students coming from India diminished significantly overnight, just through the actions of one evil person. So, with things like this, you want to have a good mix of countries from around the world supplying your international students.

Regional universities in particular need some help here, and I don't think the government has done the consultation. Of the nearly 900,000 international students last year, only three per cent of them actually went to the bush—to regional Australia. It's our third-biggest export, with $36 billion coming into the Australian economy, and some of the great jobs of the future will involve our ability to retail education to, perhaps, our ASEAN neighbours, to Indonesia and the like. With all that money coming into Australia, we do have to get that balance right.

Labor will support this legislation, but we're concerned that the government has failed to understand the complexity of the issues that must be considered when making even minor changes to visas that affect Australia's international education system. I ask the government to have another look at what they're doing as it applies to Griffith University and the Gold Coast. I know that the mayor of Gold Coast, Tom Tate, has raised this, and I hope the education minister and the immigration minister will listen.

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