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

The report is a good bit of work as far as it goes, and at the outset I want to thank the chair for the way in which he conducted the enquiry. He is a decent man, a little bit too politically conservative for me, but he takes his role and responsibilities seriously. The Prime Minister would do well to sack a bunch of the incompetent ministers in the reshuffle and promote people like the member for Berowra. He would do well for the government.

But I want to make some remarks on one aspect in particular of the report, on which I made some additional comments. That's the issue of the SHEV and TPV holders—the safe haven enterprise visa and the temporary protection visa holders, which were covered in the last part of section 4 on the committee's report. There are about 17,400 SHEV and TPV holders in Australia right now. The majority of these people arrived in this country by boat nearly a decade ago, risking their lives on a dangerous and expensive journey fleeing war and persecution. They've been living in Australia for around 10 years—nearly a decade—some even longer, and they've been accepted by our country, officially by the government, as genuine refugees. As the Department of Home Affairs acknowledged during the inquiry, their employment outcomes are excellent. Nearly 87 per cent of SHEV visa holders are in paid employment, contributing to the community, paying taxes and building a future.

But, as the committee heard, for an overwhelming majority of the people, these genuine refugees, there is no realistic pathway to permanency. A false promise has been offered by the government through the SHEV as a pathway to permanency, but for most people it is simply illusory. For a decade they have had limited access to the Adult Migrant English Program, no ability to study, and no hope of being able to actually meet the conditions for the visas that they can theoretically apply for.

These genuine refugees have been condemned by the policies of the Australian government to become members, here in our society, of a permanent underclass of temporary migrants—living here amongst us but never able to plan for their future. They are condemned to a life lived in limbo, hopping from temporary visa to temporary visa, unable to put down roots and contribute fully to Australia with the security that comes from permanent resident status.

Thousands of these people have been separated from families and children. Families are kept apart and broken, with no hope in sight. There are thousands of people in my community in this situation—literally thousands, probably 10,000 or more. I know them, I hear their stories and I witness their pain. The most common issue in my office is migration. It's not the Centrelink stuff-up; it's not the tax office or the NDIS; it's not the rorts or all the other problems that people come in with: it is migration matters. There are men who come in month after month, crying in the foyer, wondering, 10 years on, whether they will ever be able to see their children. They can't go home; they will be murdered. The government has accepted that. But still they just live here in limbo as an underclass. There is no real prospect in the short or medium term of security improving in their homelands. Are we really going to start sending these people back to Afghanistan any time soon? They are, in effect, permanently temporary refugees—safe but never secure in our country.

The committee—indeed the parliament and our nation—must ask: at what point can these people simply become Australian? Is it after 10 years, 15 years, 20 years? Is it at the point where they've lived more than half their lives in the country that we can finally say, 'Okay, you can be Australian.' The very notion of permanently temporary refugees is a nonsense. It does our nation and Australian society no credit and no good to have a permanent underclass living amongst us. How does this help us as a society? Is this the kind of country we really are—a country that's prided ourselves for seven decades on being a permanent settler society?

Resolution of these issues is a much broader problem. I agree, and we acknowledge in the report, that it's outside the scope of the inquiry into the working holiday-maker program. But SHEV and TPV holders demand and deserve serious, thoughtful, creative attention by the government, not just stale talking points about boat people. There has long been bipartisan support for tough border protection policies, and the government well knows it. Humane resolution of this issue is possible without restarting the boats, but to date it has not been politically convenient for the government to address. That is the truth of it.

During the inquiry, the Refugee Council of Australia put forward a proposal to offer permanent residency for SHEV and TPV holders who undertook a year of work in a regional area in industries suffering critical labour shortages. The committee received compelling evidence in support of this from the Australian Hazara community, for example. There is a critical workforce shortage, which government members well know, right now in regional Australia, exacerbated by the reduced temporary migration resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic. There is no single solution, as the report makes clear. Australia needs as many people as possible—Australian citizens, permanent residents and temporary migrants of all sorts—to help with the harvest and other critical work in regional Australia over the next 12 months and beyond. It is very clear from the inquiry that, with the right incentives, SHEV and TPV holders could make a significant contribution to help fill these critical labour shortages in regional Australia. I know people from my own electorate who have called me and emailed me and said that they would be prepared to move next week or next month and undertake this work if only they were assured of permanent residency or at least had a realistic pathway.

To be clear, my personal view is that it's well past time in this country that SHEV and TPV holders, as genuine refugees, should simply be granted permanency, subject to the health and character checks. This farce has gone long enough—dragging these people out when it's convenient for the minister to beat up on boat people and then putting them back into the cupboard till next time, as if they're not human and as if they don't have families and the right to build a life—and that after a decade here and multiple assessments that they are genuine refugees who can't safely return home, they shouldn't have to abandon their lives and jobs in the city or elsewhere and go and pick fruit just to prove that they should be allowed to stay. But resolution of these broader questions is outside the scope of this inquiry. In any event, I expect the government MPs—and I know, privately, some of them agree with me—would be politically constrained from resolving it, because it suits the government to beat up on refugees some weeks.

Instead, this inquiry threw up the opportunity for a creative bipartisan solution and a response that would at least help some of these people while meeting critical labour shortages in regional Australia, and give some more incentives for these people to go and do this work and make the farmers happy. There are farmers groups that support this. Public comments in support of a creative solution were made by government members during the hearings and then in the media afterwards, but the committee's final report falls short of a courageous recommendation for change. It is a pity that the committee failed to make strong clear recommendations like they did for numerous other temporary migrant groups to incentivise them to take up regional agriculture work. We could do it for working holiday-makers, international students, temporary skilled migrants and many more. But when it comes to genuine refugees, people who have nowhere else to go safely and live, so politicised has the word refugee become and so cowed and confused are government MPs, that they wimp out. They can't bring themselves to apply exactly the same policy logic to refugees—let alone a bit of humanity!

The committee's findings and recommendations do at least represent a small step—a baby step, if you like—in the right direction. I do thank the chair and government members for listening patiently to my rantings and ramblings along the way and, I think it's fair to say, shifting some of the recommendations quite significantly from where they were. I've had the Refugee Council message me and say thank you for at least where we got to. But, pending a broader resolution of the issues facing SHEV and TPV holders, I encourage the government to not just take up the words, which were a battle we could negotiate and not get in trouble with the minister's talking points, but take up the spirit of the recommendations, and provide some stronger incentives and a more realistic pathway to permanency for these 17,000 people. These genuine refugees have been in our country for a decade.

I also understand that this could be of immediate practical benefit to the agricultural industry and regional Australia. This was a potential win-win. It wasn't going to suit everyone—it wasn't going to encourage people who've set up businesses and are employing people to go pick fruit to prove their commitment to the country—but it would have helped some of these people. About 80 per cent of them are men, perfectly capable of doing difficult agricultural work, and willing to do so.

In particular, in closing, I encourage my parliamentary colleagues from the National Party to find their voice on this issue; to back the farmers and the refugees; and to have the guts to say in public, to the minister and in the parliament what they say to me in private. I've met with many of them, I've called them and I've texted them—'Yeah, we agree with you, but, you know.' Well, what? Actually speak up. Do your job. Represent regional Australia. Solve this problem and solve my problem in the city and show some creativity with some bipartisanship. The government should be about delivery and actually doing things, making people's lives better, not just making announcements. I won't recount or attribute the private conversations, but I know there are many government members who want to do more and know they should do more on this issue. I encourage them to stand up and actually make some change.

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