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

Sure. Yes. I've got that. It's ruined the relationships of thousands of Australians. It's the failure of the government to do its job and the failure of the bloke who sits over there, occupying the Prime Minister's chair, that fraud, that fake of a man, who did not do his job for Australians when it mattered. He didn't order the vaccines. He still hasn't built safe national quarantine. That ruined the relationships of thousands of Australians separated from their loved ones. More than 40,000 stranded Australians were stuck overseas, vulnerable, losing their life savings and risking their health. It separated grandparents from their grandkids for far longer than necessary. There's the mounting economic damage that we hear about due to a shortage of critical workers. The government were telling international students to bugger off and go home. That was the Prime Minister, actually.

There's been incalculable human misery completely ignored by the government. Families have been separated because of their visa status. I have heard from dozens of people—it might sound like an exaggeration, but it's not—who have not met their own children because one partner who might have been in this country for 10 years but still happened to be on a temporary visa happened to be overseas when the borders were closed and the other parent was here in Australia. It's been nearly two years and they've still never met their own children. There's no compassion from the government. There have been desperate calls from parents, separated from their children because of the border closures. It's been nearly two years of the government ignoring hundreds of thousands of people with a stake in this country. Many of these people have been here for more than a decade. They have jobs, commitments, leases, lives and loves in this country. They pay tax and they work critical jobs, and the government's shown no compassion, no discernment and no nuance, just a blunt discrimination against them because of their visa status. It's been nearly two years of the chaotic administration of the travel authorisation system. We had the ridiculous situation where young backpackers who could claim to the government they had lived together for one year and one day could get their partner into the country but numerous people who had been in a committed relationship for five, 10 or 15 years but simply happened to live between two countries because of their life circumstances have been separated.

What does the government say to the women who I've spoken to who've lost their chance in this life to ever have a child as they are now too old to do IVF because the government has kept the borders closed with no compassion, no nuance and no exceptions? I've seen those people in my office.

Australia's a nation of migrants, and there is no argument that citizens should be the priority for return, but the government's incompetence and its callousness have hurt far more than just the stranded Australians. I represent the most multicultural council area in the whole of Australia. More than 80 per cent of the work of my office is on visas and citizenship and the black hole of the Department of Home Affairs. There are millions of Australians with their lives and their loves split across two continents and two time zones. The human impact is horrendous. Of course some pain and destruction cannot be avoided in a global pandemic, but so much of what has happened has been because the Prime Minister failed to do his job—didn't order vaccines, didn't build safe quarantine. So it's not just the millions of Australians who have suffered through the Prime Minister's lockdowns; it's not just the border closures, which has impacted on our economy, and temporary migration; it's the tens of billions of dollars that the next generation are going to be asked to repay on the national debt because they had to hand out tens of billions of dollars in economic assistance because the government couldn't order enough vaccines or build safe quarantine. Shame on the government and shame on whoever introduced this motion full of spin and self-congratulatory prattle!

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