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

Under this government, over 100,000 Australians have been waiting for years for visas for their partners. The government is using COVID as an excuse. This crisis has been years in the making. It used to take under a year, under Labor, to get a visa for your loved one, your husband or your wife. Now it's two years and climbing, or four years or more if you live in certain parts of the world. Thanks to activists, the government panicked last year and said in the budget that they would put through 72,000 partner visas. They've trumpeted this to try and shut people up. So I ask the minister: will you get to 72,000 visas, and, if not, how many visas are you going to issue in the next two weeks to meet your own target? And what do you say to the thousands of Australians who are still desperately waiting? How long are they going to have to wait? How many visas are you going to issue this coming year?

People are distraught. I'll again, one year on, repeat the case of Faniz in my electorate, who still has no visa. Her baby is turning one in July. I've written to three successive ministers about Faniz's case, but still there's no visa. Her husband, the father of the child, has never met the child except on WhatsApp. She works at a law firm. She pays taxes. She has suffered from depression. She has now written to me this week to say, 'We need a time line.' She says:

We need to plan for our life, even though Iran is not a safe country but I miss my husband and we need to plan something else … if it is taking couple of more years for me him to get here we might need to go somewhere and stay there and build our life in another country. We cannot keep on waiting for this visa. It is heart breaking how my husband missed all my pregnancy plus the whole year that our daughter was born.

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I know someone who is from UK and applied in April 2021 and visa 309 was granted within 5 weeks. They not processing it in order—

as the government claims—

I believe they are processing it by the race and this is very disrespectful and discriminating.

So I ask the minister: will you end this discrimination against people like Faniz and the tens of thousands of people around the country who happen to fall in love with someone who's not from a nice, white, English-speaking country? The facts are these. This is a map. This shows you the average waiting time, if you fall in love with someone—

Government members interjecting—

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