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

I want to make some remarks about partner visas. Now, it is a fact of life in modern Australia that Australians fall in love with people from other countries and they may get married here or overseas. It's only natural then that people want to bring their spouses or partners here to build a life, and often there are children involved too. Our country has seen this and benefited from these relationships for many decades, but I want to air my serious concerns about the growing backlog and the delays in processing spouse and partner visa applications under this government.

There are now over 90,000 Australians whose family lives are stuck in limbo. They are waiting, waiting, waiting for years for their wife, husband or partner to get a visa. The queue and the processing times have been growing steadily for years, and this is a growing scandal. I see it every week in my electorate office. Some weeks, I see it every day. I open the emails in the morning and there it is—another case. These are people who can't get an answer, who can't understand why it takes so long. Many are separated from loved ones and children. They're running down savings, hopping between countries, unable to establish a household, unable to accept employment and unable to get on with their lives. Thousands of others are living in Australia just hanging out for years on bridging visas.

The issue, for once, in the department is not a shortage of resources, because people now pay $8,000 for a partner visa application. It appears that spouse and partner visas are being deliberately held up because the government has imposed a legally questionable limit on the number of places. This year, the government again cut the number of partner visa places to 39,799. That's a cut of 8,000 places from the previous two years. It's harsh and it's cruel. That's a separate argument, though. For most of the family migration program, and this is important, the minister has a clear legal power to cap and queue the number of places. Except, under the Migration Act, spouse and child visa applications are different. They're supposed to be processed on a demand driven basis. Indeed, section 87 of the act, which has been there for decades, explicitly provides that the minister's power to cap certain visas does not apply to spouse and child visa applications, so there's a genuine legal question over the minister's behaviour.

In 1989 the Hawke government introduced legislation seeking a power for the minister to cap annual spouse and child visa numbers. That didn't get through. In 1996 the Howard government again sought such a power for the minister, yet on both occasions this parliament rejected the legislation. The Senate then did not want the minister to be able to cap the number of spouse visas issued. There was a view that Australians should be free to settle here with their spouses. I'll quote Philip Ruddock, who was the shadow minister in 1989 and then later became the immigration minister. He said:

I regard it as absolutely unconscionable for a government to say half way through the year, 'We have enough spouses in now … no more husbands and wives …

I've been told that the department has had legal advice, year after year, for many years, that what the minister is doing breaches the act. Yet the queue continues to grow. Why? Well, because the government is hiding behind their annual planning level to cap the number of spouse visas issued every year, which is contrary to the intention of the Migration Act—the law.

To explain: the Minister for Home Affairs loves to trumpet, at the moment, his so-called cut to migration. Remember that? He tells us now he has a ceiling of 160,000 places for 2019-20. He's cut migration to suck up to Pauline Hanson. But, within this, the government counts 39,799 partner visas they say they'll issue. But this whole cut to migration is a sham. It's a scam for a cheap headline to try and fool Australians and suck up to One Nation. There is no cut to migration, because more than 216,000 people now are just hanging out in Australia on bridging visas; most are waiting for their substantive visa to be processed. So he has cut the number of permanent visas, like partner visas, spouse visas, and he's just forcing them to wait for longer and longer in the community, so he can run around saying, 'I've cut migration,' when he hasn't. This includes tens of thousands of husbands and wives of Australians waiting for their partner visas.

The delays are not about integrity. Of course dodgy applications should be weeded out. But the refusal rate has been about the same for a long time, at about 10 per cent. The delays are political. The government is deliberately not processing spouse visas, just to manipulate the headline migration number for their own political purposes. I'm reliably advised that the government knows this may not be legal. They quietly removed the child visas from the cap in 2016. They didn't say much about that. The child visas are not subject to an annual limit now, but spouse visas still are.

So what's the legal basis for this? The Department of Home Affairs is very secretive about this and what's really going on, but FOI documents have revealed that the government stops and starts processing to manipulate the numbers. There's an email to overseas staff processing partner visas—I will quote one; there's a whole bunch of them—that says: 'Effective immediately, there are to be no further grants in the family stream until I come back to you with the number of places left available to grant before 30 June 2018.' They're including the spouse visas, illegally, in this cap. The government also told staff not to tell applicants that their visa was ready to be granted, to cover up how they were manipulating the queue.

The human impact of this is profound. I represent one of the most multicultural electorates in the country. Migration is the biggest thing, every day, that comes through the door of my office—not Centrelink; not the NDIS mess; not the aged-care mess the government's made; it's migration.

The legality of this is highly dubious. The minister may claim it's just a planning level or a queue, but if it looks like a cap and it sounds like a cap then it's a cap.

Even if this is somehow legal, as a matter of decency in policy more places should be made available. Australians love who they love. The Howard government at least had the decency then to admit that spouse visas could not be capped, and the then minister, Senator Vanstone, went to the government when the queue got too long and got extra places allocated to the program to meet demand and let people love who they loved.

But it's unsurprising, given these legally dubious caps, that the processing times for spouse visa applications have also increased significantly. Despite paying $8,000, most onshore applicants are now waiting two years or more, and offshore applicants are now waiting more than 18 months. But basic mathematics tells you that, unless the government changes their approach, the only outcome there can be is that people will wait longer and longer: two years; 2½ years; three years; 3½ years; four years; five years—it's the only trajectory that's possible. It's a function of maths.

The government, of course, is not focused on any of this—any of the real problems in the migration system. Their current focus is their outrageous privatisation of the visa processing system—the billion-dollar tender that's out, still waiting. The Prime Minister has had to excuse himself from consideration because one of his Liberal Party mates, Scott Briggs, is in the running for the tender. The government should give away their privatisation plans and focus on fixing the system.

I also want to remark that the persecution and treatment of Julian Assange are unconscionable. He's an Australian citizen who has the same rights as you or me, and the Australian government's ongoing failure to speak out against his extradition to the United States and demand his return is shameful. It's wrong. It's immoral. And it's offensive for the Prime Minister to say that he should 'face the music'—as if this is any ordinary case! It is not. It is entirely political. It corrupts our alliance with the United States when our government is too scared and too cowardly to defend our own. It corrupts our democracy when our government refuses to fight to defend Australian citizens just because they don't agree with their political philosophy. The precedent that extradition would set would dangerously undermine our sovereignty and have a chilling effect on journalism and the media's ability to hold power to account in this country and across the world.

We need to be very clear-eyed in this House as to what extradition would mean. One of our citizens, an Australian, would face what is effectively a death sentence. The current charges would see him confined in extreme isolation for 175 years. Indeed, it's possible in the state of Virginia, which has the death penalty, that more charges will be laid once he's extradited that would see him killed. Australia has a long history of opposing extradition—a proud history—wherever there is the risk of a death penalty.

If that's not enough, there's the torture which has been inflicted on him. It's an astounding phrase—'the torture that's been inflicted upon an Australian in the United Kingdom'. It should not be said lightly and must never become acceptable. The United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture, Nils Melzer, investigated Julian's case. He said he shows 'all the symptoms for prolonged exposure to psychological torture' and his health conditions are so dire that his life is now at risk. When the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture reports on one of our citizens, surely the Australian government should speak up and demand his return. There's nothing but silence from the government. It doesn't matter whether you agree with him, it doesn't matter whether you disagree with him, it doesn't matter whether you like him, it doesn't matter whether you dislike him; he's an Australian and he's entitled to the protection of the government.

Of course, if the death penalty or torture are not enough to spur this government to action, there are broader important principles at stake; there is a lot more to this inherently political case. Let's be clear. He's been persecuted to punish him for exposing war crimes and the misuse of state power. Those who committed the war crimes have never been prosecuted. He's been persecuted to silence him forever in his WikiLeaks project and to scare others into silence. I note that we've had a power failure.

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