Dan Tehan (Wannon, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Immigration and Citizenship) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That all words after "That" be omitted with a view to substituting the following words:

"whilst welcoming moves to establish a Pacific Engagement Visa, the House:

(1) declines to give the bill a second reading because:

(a) permanent residency and citizenship of Australia should not be decided by a lottery; and

(b) Australia's immigration system should be nation-building with a key focus on the economic contribution immigrants make to our country; and

(2) calls on the Government to develop a new approach to implement the Pacific Engagement Visa."

The coalition supports efforts to engage more with our Pacific neighbours. We understand how important it is that we engage constructively, that we engage with friendship and that we engage in a way that continues to lift up the people of the Pacific. It's why we have put in place strategy after strategy to make sure that we are engaging in the right way with our Pacific neighbours.

We support the concept of a Pacific engagement visa, but we do not support this being done by a lottery or a ballot. The coalition supports a well-structured, well-planned immigration policy. Permanent residency that ultimately leads to citizenship in Australia is too important, though, to be decided by having your named pulled out of a hat. These bills, the Migration Amendment (Australia's Engagement in the Pacific and Other Measures) Bill 2023 and a related bill, will, for the first time, create a ballot process that will be able to be used not just for the Pacific engagement visa but for any future visa that the government of the day may decide to introduce. This has the potential to turn Australia's immigration system on its head. Instead of Australia's current immigration policy, which is based on attracting skilled migrants who contribute to the economy, the government proposes to introduce a lottery to decide who can become a permanent resident. That is why we oppose these bills.

What we would like to see from the government is for them to properly engage with the opposition as to how a Pacific engagement visa could work effectively and work in a way that would not only lead to better outcomes for Pacific nations but also lead to better outcomes for Australia. We are worried that the government's approach will drain skilled workers from Pacific nations at a time when those workers are needed in the Pacific.

It is very curious that the Labor Party have come up with this approach, because this approach actually goes against the national policy platform of the Labor Party. I note section 28 of that policy platform:

Noting Pacific Island nations are particularly vulnerable to the effects of climate change, and these nations have expressed a clear desire for Pacific peoples to continue to live in their own countries where possible, and acknowledging Australia's unique responsibilities in the Pacific, Labor will:

Support Pacific Islanders to remain in their homelands as the first response to this challenge;

These two bills do not support the Labor Party national policy platform. As a matter of fact, they work against it. That is just one of many reasons why we think that these two bills cannot be supported, and we will not be supporting them.

We do not want to stand by and allow a lottery scheme to take the best and the brightest from the Pacific nations in way which many of those Pacific countries are very concerned about and that is why we are opposing these two bills. Just to with clear on what these two bills are about, the first sets up the lottery scheme and the second sets up the way by which you enter the lottery scheme. You do that by paying a dollar amount to enable you to go into the lottery. I will repeat it, because what's being set up here is quite extraordinary. This will set up a lottery scheme, a TattsLotto, and the way that you enter the lottery scheme is that you pay to enter it. It fundamentally changes everything about our immigration system. I can't quite understand that we're here even debating these two bills, because there is a much better way we could've done this.

The other concern that we have, amongst many others, is that it will also break with the idea of remittances. One of the great things about the PALM scheme and why it's supported both in the Pacific and here in Australia is that it enables workers to come here from the Pacific Islands and work and send those remittances back to their families in the Pacific Islands. It also enables them to get the skills that they need here in Australia, knowing full well that those skills can be taken back and utilised in those Pacific countries. For those who win the lottery this scheme would mean that they come here with their family, they're given permanent residency and the fact that they're here with their family and given permanent residency means, rightly, that their key focus will be on supporting their family here in Australia, so you won't see the remittances flowing like they do under the Pacific Australia Labour Mobility scheme.

It must be remembered that the Labor Party, the government, are building on this good coalition initiative of putting the PALM in place. As a matter of fact, we had the minister in the House yesterday, or it might've been the day before, stating quite proudly that the government has now lifted the amount of PALM workers who are here to 35,000. We have a scheme that is working incredibly well. One of the things that we'd be prepared to sit down and do with the government is to discuss how the PALM scheme could ultimately lead to Pacific Islanders being able to get access to the Pacific engagement visa, because that way there would be a demonstrated ability of someone to be able to come here, to be able to work, make an economic contribution over time and that could be a way that we could look at how you could then be eligible for the Pacific engagement visa. We're happy to sit down with the government and do that, but what we aren't happy to sit down with the government and negotiate on is the concept and idea of setting up a lottery, and not only setting up a lottery but setting up a charging mechanism by which you would pay a fee to enter into that lottery.

The reaction of Pacific nations to the idea of a lottery and the idea that you would pay a fee to get into that lottery is interesting. Obviously, it's been mixed. I'm not saying that it is opposed across the board but there have been some very interesting reactions. In January 2023, so in January of this year, Samoa's acting Prime Minister told their parliament that the Australian government made the announcement on new visas without consulting the Samoan government. He said that this would hurt the Samoan labour workforce and lead to the loss of more skilled workers and their families to Australia permanently and that this would further drain Samoa's already strained labour workforce.

So we've seen concerns raised in the Pacific about this scheme. That is something that should be of alarm to those on the government benches, because this scheme doesn't seem to have the full support of Pacific nations. I think the more that they get to know and understand what is fundamentally the modus operandi of this scheme—the idea that people would enter a lottery and that that is how we would bring workers or bring permanent residents into this country—the more they would understand that, therefore, you could be getting people who are entering this lottery who have vital skills for those Pacific nations. That is also one of the reasons we think this approach that the government is proposing is flawed. If it doesn't have the full support of the Pacific islands, then that is a worry. I think that of deeper concern is that the more they know and understand what is being proposed here, the more those concerns will grow. That is something that needs to be taken on board.

The other aspect of it is that we, once again, begin to confuse the very skilled approach that we take to bringing skilled migrants into this country—or we look to do—to fill those workforce shortages, especially in regional and rural areas using the migration process. What this scheme does is mix the two, and it mixes them in a way which isn't going to lead to the right types of outcomes that we need from our immigration system here in Australia.

For instance, under this lottery scheme, what would happen if someone wins the lottery, is able to find a job, comes to this country and loses that job after two weeks? The government has not been able to say what will happen, and our assumption is that it will mean that that person who has won the lottery and come here as a permanent resident will get eligibility to welfare and to Medicare. The incentive to come here and work, and to continue to work, would not be there if, after a week, not liking the job that you'd come to, you would be able to have full access to welfare and to Medicare. This is of concern because, if you think about those who have come under the PALM scheme, for instance, over three or four years they have worked hard and made an economic contribution—in many instances, they play rugby, they play rugby union, they are members of the local church. They really make a contribution from their work, their effort and their community involvement.

What you're saying is that, under this lottery scheme, people could come, they could work for as little as one day or one week and then they would get the full benefits that accrue to a permanent resident in this nation. Now, that to us doesn't seem to be the right type of incentive that we should be providing to those who we want to come here and make an economic contribution to this nation. That is why we think this pacific engagement visa has serious, serious flaws to it.

Once again, I make this offer to those opposite: we want to work constructively with you. We think the idea of a pacific engagement visa is something that has merit, but it has to be done in the right way. It's rather alarming that those opposite have such cynicism, because this is something that, if there were true bipartisanship, we could work through.

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