James Stevens (Sturt, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

It's my pleasure to address the House on the New Skilled Regional Visas (Consequential Amendments) Bill 2019, which is fundamental to the government's population policy agenda that we announced back in March, before the election. We are, of course, honouring the commitments from that campaign. This is part of implementing what is a fundamental principle of our approach to population policy in this country, which, first and foremost, is that we simply cannot continue to have a one-size-fits-all approach to population growth and immigration in Australia. We are a big country, an entire continent, and it is not the reality that we have a consistent population growth occurring across the major cities and through to the small towns of this country—far from it. As a South Australian, which I'll touch on a little later in my remarks, I think there's a very stark difference between the challenges of population growth in somewhere like South Australia versus other parts of the country. Clearly, in our major cities, particularly Melbourne but also Sydney and the south-east corner of Queensland, population growth has been very, very strong over recent years and for quite some time. A lot of pressure has been created around that, frankly, because the sorts of investments that needed to occur around infrastructure in particular, simply weren't keeping up with the growth rate.

In a state such as Victoria, I reflect on the fact that, unfortunately, for most of the last 20 years there's been a Labor government. They've had this high rate of population growth, and an enormous pressure created around that, because they haven't been investing in the kind of infrastructure that's needed to support and sustain that growth rate. Thankfully, in New South Wales the Liberal Party were elected in 2011 and then in 2015 took a very aggressive infrastructure investment package to subsequent elections. But they are playing catch-up, frankly, and it is very difficult when it comes to population pressures and the infrastructure required when you're not planning ahead—not around electoral cycles, not around pet projects in key seats—but actually around the kind of fundamental infrastructure we need to be planning ahead for many, many, many decades into the future.

That's why, of course, we've got the congestion-busting agenda that we took to the election. This involves investing in some of the major choke points across the country. In my own seat of Sturt, we are lucky to have three very significant projects that are going towards busting congestion and helping relieve the kinds of pressures that we could see coming from increased migration into Adelaide, were it not for us planning ahead and identifying the kinds of choke points that need to be invested in. I've got the Magill and Portrush roads intersection, the Glen Osmond and Fullarton roads intersection and the Fullarton Road and Cross Road intersection. Those are all being funded by the Morrison and Marshall governments working together to make sure that, as we grow the population in South Australia—which we absolutely support and intend to do—we're not being left with infrastructure bottlenecks of the kind that would have occurred if we weren't making these decisions with foresight. Through an independent process, we're identifying the kinds of choke points in our cities and towns and across our state that we need to be investing in.

South Australia has very poor population growth and has had for a very long time, and there is a great amount of risk if we don't seriously address this—not just in South Australia but across a whole range of communities across our country that are seeing low rates of growth. The purpose of this new approach to increasing regional migration is to address the fact that there are parts of the country that have very low population growth rates. The impact of that is going to become very significant in the years and decades to come if we don't do all we can to address that. As a government, that's exactly why we're undertaking policy prescriptions like this: to put an emphasis on growing the population in the parts of the country that need it, whilst undertaking an overall reduction to reduce the pressure in other parts of the country, particularly the major cities, that have not been able to match the high levels of population growth with the kinds of investment in social infrastructure, in particular, that's been required.

There are two new visas being created. This legislation consequentially addresses both of these visas, which give people a pathway to permanent residency in this country via living in a regional area for a minimum of three years and satisfying some other requirements.

We hope, of course, that by undertaking a policy like this and creating these two new categories we'll see people taking up the opportunity to live in regional parts of Australia, including Adelaide, which is absolutely considered, within the government policy framework, part of this regional classification because it's one of the parts of the country that desperately need population growth. These two visa categories, we hope, will see large numbers of people—up to 23,000 people a year—being accepted into this program and living in those areas for three years, and then, through their pathway to permanent residency, we hope, of course, that they will have developed deep ties to the community and stable employment outcomes and they'll continue to live in regional areas well beyond that period of time.

South Australia, like many other areas that are classified as regional, has had a very poor population performance for a long, long time. We're growing, on recent figures, at about 0.9 per cent now. It's been 0.8 per cent for a very long period of time, compared to the national average over the last 10 years, which has been 1.6 per cent. So we've been growing at half the national population growth average for an extended period of time. We've tended to be about seventh out of the eight jurisdictions—the six states and the two territories—for more than 10 years now. Interestingly, whilst other jurisdictions have at times moved quite significantly from different categories within that league table, we've sat consistently at No. 7 for the whole period of time. The Northern Territory at the moment is eighth, but a few years ago it was first. So we have had a very long period of low population growth.

The risk to our economy in South Australia if we don't address this is that we're going to have an ever-diminishing percentage of our population that's in the workforce and therefore paying taxes, not just nationally but at state level and other taxes, to support—quite rightly, as we should be doing—people, particularly in their retirement, who need government services and need the ratios to be strong so that we can provide the highest standard of living in the world to our citizens. If we don't make sure that we've got a strong percentage of our population in the workforce earning an income and paying the taxes that support those services, we're going to be in a lot of trouble in South Australia.

Having said that, I note that there is some scope for hope that things are changing in South Australia, and there have been some recent developments that are quite exciting when it comes to being positive about South Australia's future not only from a population growth point of view but generally. If we're going to grow our population and increase the migrant intake to South Australia, we've got to make sure that we're growing the economy and creating jobs for not only migrants coming to South Australia but also our young people who are going through school and other qualifications now and who also need a bright future in South Australia.

Before I get to that, I think it's also very important to understand that South Australia finally has a proper, robust policy and structure for planning infrastructure investments in our state. This had not been the case for an extended period of time, until the election of a Liberal government last year with a key policy objective to establish Infrastructure South Australia, much modelled on Infrastructure Australia, which we've got at the Commonwealth level. That puts us in a position to do the kind of long-range planning for productive infrastructure for economic growth but also for population growth. If we're going to be undertaking initiatives like this legislation that will hopefully see an increase in migration into the state of South Australia, we've got to be planning effectively for that.

So Infrastructure South Australia has been formed. It has a very impressive board. It is independent, and it's undertaking a long-range 20-year infrastructure plan for the state of South Australia that will ensure that we're planning for the kind of infrastructure that we need as we hopefully are growing and increasing our population while also growing our economy. This 20-year forward infrastructure plan, which will be announced early next year, will have five-year increments, again overseen by Infrastructure SA, so that we are always in a position to invest in the kind of infrastructure that South Australia needs to support an increase in our population and growth in our economy.

The federal government have made some very important decisions in recent times that are going to see a significant increase, we hope, in demand for people to move to South Australia because the economy is growing and we are creating jobs. The obvious one, of course, is the defence decision around the capital procurement of surface and subsurface vessels. The $90 billion naval shipbuilding program, based at the Osborne Shipyards in South Australia, is for 12 Attack class submarines to replace the Collins class submarines, going from six to 12; and nine future frigates built by British Aerospace, based on the type 26 anti-submarine warfare frigates, to slowly but surely replace the Anzac class. The scale of this means thousands upon thousands of jobs—thousands of direct jobs and even thousands more indirect jobs around supply chain, and then, of course, all the other multiplier effects of that kind of expenditure in the South Australian economy. It is really, really exciting. We need to make sure that we are planning for the growth and maximising the growth from those opportunities, particularly through the supply chain, and part of that is going to be the workforce—making sure that where we have skills gaps, one of the options for us is to bring people into our economy who have got the ability to contribute to that program and make sure it's a success.

The Australian Space Agency is another example of something that is going to see jobs growth in our state and why having the ability to increase skilled migration into South Australia is going to be so important—because the Morrison government has made the decision to base the space agency in Adelaide, in the state of South Australia. This gives us an opportunity to have an ecosystem around that space agency from an industry point of view so that the space sector that will definitely grow across the planet, in all countries around the world, is equally going to grow in Australia. We've made the decision to base the space agency in Adelaide, and, as firms in the space sector, in the space industries—lots of which, I might add, come from the defence sector, which goes to show the sort of synergy around that decision—there is going to be enormous opportunity to grow a workforce around space and space related industries. So we need to make sure that we are fostering that. We've made a decision that gives an enormous opportunity to the state of South Australia, but again we've got to make sure we're addressing the workforce requirements that that announcement brings.

There are other things that we're doing that are going to grow jobs and potentially require skilled migration into the state. In horticulture, the Northern Adelaide Irrigation Scheme is an opportunity to massively grow an industry that already exists, as we increase the amount of water we can take out of the Bolivar treatment plant and open up opportunities for further investment in horticulture. There are an enormous number of jobs in horticulture, and the simple reality is that, at times, a lot of those require support through a migration program that brings workers with particular skills, or to address skill gaps, into the South Australian economy. The Adelaide Casino expansion is going to require, by its very nature, skilled migration into the state of South Australia. Whilst that's exciting and whilst there are many new jobs coming from that investment, equally, we need to ensure that we've got a migration policy in place that can provide the skill requirements—in particular, where there are skill gaps—so that the state of South Australia and my home city of Adelaide are not missing out on any opportunity that is coming our way in the near future to grow our economy.

This scheme can increase our population growth rate, and I'm confident it will. As I've said, that rate being traditionally at 0.8 per cent—0.9 per cent now—and seventh in the nation has just not been acceptable. This government wants to grow the population in areas like South Australia, to balance out the opportunity for economic growth, where for too long we've had low population growth and the poor economic outcome associated with that.

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