Sally Sitou (Reid, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I do thank the member for Wannon for his extensive list of questions. It's a shame that he never asked his own government some of those questions. The family that you mentioned, and your desire to give them that security of being able to stay in Australia—it's just a shame that your government failed to do that for so many temporary workers. In a sense, you created a guest-worker system in this country with policies your government introduced. So why weren't you asking them the questions that you're asking now?

Australia is now a majority migrant nation, and for the first time in our history more than 50 per cent of residents were born overseas or have a parent that was born overseas. We are the first English-speaking nation to have a migrant majority. We are a beacon for countries around the world, and we are often described as a multicultural success story, albeit one with a painful and difficult past.

The dismantling of the White Australia policy and the embrace of multiculturalism in Australia was decades in the making, and in this federal parliament we have a new cohort of parliamentarians that better reflect multicultural Australia: me, as the member for Reid, a proud Chinese Australian; the member for Fowler, a refugee from Vietnam; the members for Holt and Higgins whose families are from Sri Lanka; Senator Payman, an Afghan Australian; and on it goes. This is the most culturally diverse parliament we have ever had, a parliament that truly reflects and represents the communities in which we live. That is only possible because we had policies that welcomed migrants from around the world, policies that allowed them and their families to settle down and build a life here, to become Australian citizens.

As the Minister for Home Affairs has previously said:

Australia's historic migrant success is rooted in permanency and citizenship.

But those opposite sought to whittle down our migration system, which was dominated by a large temporary migration program, workers who had no pathway to permanency or citizenship. It was a system that sometimes led down dark paths of migrant worker exploitation and the undercutting of wages for Australian workers. It was a migration system that let down businesses in need of skilled workers. It let down migrants, and it let down Australians. Under the previous government, we were left with an alphabet soup of various visa classes and subclasses. The complexity was a bureaucratic nightmare.

I am proud to be part of a government that is reforming our broken migration system so that it will make Australia more secure and prosperous. By the end of this year all temporary skilled workers will have a pathway to permanent residency. Let's be clear here: this is not an expansion of our capped permanent program. It will not mean more people. What it does mean is we will be giving temporary workers an opportunity to apply to be permanent residents. While we talk about migrants in the abstract, we should never forget this is a very human issue. This discussion makes me think about Charmine Acob from the Philippines. I met her at the Chiswick Manor Care Community, an aged-care facility in my electorate. She came to Australia more than a decade ago to study nursing. During that time she picked up part-time work as a cleaner at Chiswick Manor. She worked in various roles there throughout her degree, and, once she graduated, she continued working aged-care facility but as a qualified registered nurse. She is now a permanent resident in Australia, and we are better for it. Charmine's story demonstrates the best of our migration system, a system we are determined to restore so that the next chapter of the Australian multicultural story continues to be one of success.

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