Andrew Wallace (Fisher, Liberal National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Migration Amendment (Australia's Engagement in the Pacific and Other Measures) Bill 2023 and the Migration (Visa Pre-application Process) Charge Bill 2023. I acknowledge the vital importance of Australia's role in the Pacific and our relationship with our great family of nations.

When I was on the Joint Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade in the previous parliament, I was part of a group that received a delegation of the missions of all of the Pacific island nations. They came into the parliament, and we engaged with them in a meaningful way. One thing that they told us loud and clear is that they are very thankful for the work that we do with the Pacific island nation countries—our friends and our family. That is the nature of the relationship that we have; it is one of friendship and it is one of family. It is not one of dominance. We engage with our friends in the Pacific. We don't tell them what we want them to do or how to do things. That's what any good, responsible government should try and do—it should engage with its neighbours as peers, not as some party or country that sees itself as dominant in a particular region. This government needs to tread a very, very careful line when it comes to this migration program, and I'll unpack that over the next 13 minutes or so.

Locally, the Sunshine Coast has a long and enduring connection to the Pacific islands, spanning some 150 years. Today, through the University of the Sunshine Coast's Australian Centre for Pacific Islands Research, we're working with and learning from Pacific islanders about marine protection, coastal adaptation and sustainable fisheries. In twinning with the Western Pacific University, UniSC is offering a collaborative, academic and cultural exchange for academic leaders. Through the Centre for International Development, Social Entrepreneurship and Leadership, the Sunshine Coast plays host to Indo-Pacific leaders for training and postgraduate research. These people-to-people links are about empowering Pacific island partners to build their communities, to grow their economies and to strengthen their national institutions for the long term. These ideals should be at the centre of Australia's national approach to engaging with our Pacific partners.

It was Liberal Prime Minister Robert Menzies who said, just before World War II:

… in the Pacific, Australia must regard herself as a principal …

Our relationship has moved beyond that of a principal. We see ourselves as a partner with our Pacific colleagues. In World War II, Australian men and women held back the tide of aggression which reached not only our shores but also those of our Pacific island neighbours. When the war was won, we didn't abandon the Pacific; we stayed to rebuild.

Again, in the throes of the Vietnam War, Liberal Prime Minister William McMahon said:

We share a common purpose for peace, security and progress in the South Pacific Region and our destinies are permanently linked in many ways.

In the 50-odd years since he made that declaration, the bond between Australia and the Pacific islands has deepened beyond neighbouring nations into a family of nations. By and large, this has been on the coalition's watch: through multilateral bodies like the Commonwealth of Nations and the Pacific Islands Forum; through overseas development assistance, with 43 percent of our 2021-22 aid budget directly targeting PNG and the Pacific; through trade and exchange programs, like the New Colombo Plan, the Pacific Agreement on Closer Economic Relations and the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership; and through the defence and security ties like AUSMIN, the Quad and now AUKUS. It's those defence and security ties which are of the greatest importance to us in performing our primary role as parliamentarians—that is, to protect Australians and their interests.

China, under its communist regime, is set on dominating our Pacific region. Make no mistake: they want to seek a permanent military presence in the Pacific. They want access to the Pacific's natural resources. They want to control critical trade routes. In the Chinese Communist Party's quest to become a global superpower and to quash Western democratic order, communist China will stop at nothing. They make bold promises. They seek to corrupt national governments. They build shiny new infrastructure, and, in the end, they entrap whole nations in economic, defence and diplomatic bonds. We've seen this even on our local shores, where they have sought to entrap Victoria through the Belt and Road Initiative. But it's not just the Belt and Road Initiative and debt-trap diplomacy. The Chinese Communist Party poses a threat to every element of Australia's security and the security of the Pacific region.

As to the Chinese Communist Party—or the PLA, the People's Liberation Army—their land, air, sea, cyber and space defence postures are formidable. Their naval power and maritime militia have grown exponentially. That's why, in government, the coalition's Pacific Maritime Security Program supported 12 Pacific island nations with patrol boats.

The Chinese Communist Party's cyber capabilities, and the PLA's cyber capabilities—in particular, their ability to procure data through seemingly innocent means—are, thankfully, but concerningly, becoming clearer by the day. It was only last year that Chinese attackers bombarded government agency employees with phishing emails containing a link to a fake news site, to steal information relating to the South China Sea. TikTok is the perfect example of how they gather intelligence en masse and from unknowing victims. With an international submarine cable, connecting Australia with Guam, just outside of my electorate, running along Australia's Pacific coast, the protection of our critical infrastructure—and, particularly, digital infrastructure—has never been more imperative.

Ensuring that Australia nourishes our great family of nations is vital. It was the previous coalition government which led the Pacific step-up, to take an even more active role in protecting and shaping the future of this region. As part of this, we took steps to encourage more permanent migration from Pacific island nations. We launched the Pacific Australia Labour Mobility, or PALM, program, by streamlining the Pacific Labour Scheme, the PLS, and Seasonal Worker Program, the SWP, to ensure a more efficient and safer scheme. Thanks to our decision in government, the program has grown from 12,500 people to 35,000 workers. We encourage this federal Labor government to maintain the program and to set their eyes on even more ambitious targets. In doing so, they would have our support.

Labor claims that the Pacific engagement visa will grow Australia's Pacific and Timor-Leste resident populations, enhance soft-power links and boost economic relations. Now, these are admirable goals. Under the previous coalition government they were real outcomes. Under this government, they are nothing but a pipe dream.

These bills provide for a visa pre-application process which does not currently exist in the Migration Act. For the first time, this Labor government wants to 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.

Permanent residency that ultimately leads to citizenship in Australia is far too important to be decided by having your name pulled out of a hat. This has the potential to turn Australia's immigration system on its head. Our migration system, as it stands, is built on an ambition to attract skilled migrants who contribute to our economy and our community. Instead, this Labor government want to sign applicants up to some ludicrous visa style lottery. They want to take their chances instead of thinking, consulting and legislating commonsense immigration policies. That is what Labor have done time and again for the last 12 months. They make bold promises and realise they can't deliver on those promises, so they come up with a half-baked idea, throw it to the parliament and hope to flesh it out with some oratorical flourishes. It is policy on the run once again from an incompetent Labor government.

One has to ask why our Pacific island partners would want to sign up for the program. Under these bills, they would risk haemorrhaging skilled workers as 3,000 working-age citizens—indeed, whole families—leave the region each year. They would lose the direct financial contributions through remittances, as Labor's plan will see families pack up shop and move to Australia, removing the incentive for remittance or reinvestment in their countries of origin. As it turns out, we don't have to ask why Pacific island partners would sign up for the program; they don't want to. Just a couple of months ago, Samoa's Acting Prime Minister told their parliament the Australian government made the announcement on new visas without consulting the Samoan government. He said this would hurt the Samoan labour workforce and lead to the loss of more skilled workers and their families to Australia permanently and would further drain Samoa's already strained workforce.

When we were in government—and I took a very active role in this part, particularly when I was Speaker—I invited heads of mission from across the Pacific into the parliament, and I did my absolute level best to engage with the heads of those missions as partners—not as master and servant, with us telling them what they want. It's incredibly important that we engage with them as partners to talk with them, not to create some sort of a brain drain from the Pacific. That is what these bills will do. It is fundamentally immoral for us as a wealthy country to effectively draw upon what may be some of the best and brightest of our Pacific island countries—their own people, of working age, and their families. Just think about what sort of an impact that could have on small communities.

Whilst we support sensible measures in the Pacific, we don't believe that these bills, holistically, will provide the sensible outcomes we saw when we were in government. The relationship between Australia and the Pacific is an enduring one. It is so incredibly important, not just because these are our Pacific friends and family but because we have an enduring tie, as I hope I've outlined over the last little while, from a defence perspective. Our defence, the defence of Australia, is tied to the defence of the Pacific and every country within it. If we start adopting approaches which undermine the relationships we built up over the last nine years when we were in government, if we start telling Pacific island nations what's best for them, that undermines critical relationships and undermines both our national security and the national security of our Pacific family.

So, if I, as a member of the opposition, may be so bold as to say it: these bills need to be rethought. The government needs to go back and consult more broadly with those who would be impacted the most heavily by these bills. This is not a time for policy on the run. This is a time for working with our Pacific partners, who are friends and family.

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