Clare O'Neil (Hotham, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Home Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Lyons for his question and for his longstanding interest in this matter. In January this year I asked former police chief commissioner Christine Nixon to undertake a rapid review into the exploitation of Australia's visa system. What this review found was utterly and truly shocking. Christine Nixon found that our migration system today has serious and systemic problems. She found that the system has been used to perpetrate some of the worst crimes that there are—sexual slavery, human trafficking—and that Australia, because of problems in our migration system, has actually become a target for organised crime around the world. Christine Nixon also found that the root causes of this problem were delay and dysfunction in our migration system and an almost complete lack of enforcement of the rules of that system. She said:

I have been appalled by the abuses of sexual exploitation, human trafficking and other organised crime that have been presented to me … It is clear that gaps and weaknesses in Australia's visa system are allowing this to happen.

We came to office with a migration system that was fundamentally broken and we don't have to look far to see the person who broke it. He's sitting opposite me in the Leader of the Opposition's chair. For almost all of the last decade the opposition leader oversaw our immigration system, first as Minister for Immigration and Border Protection and later as Minister for Home Affairs. What really makes me angry about these abuses and this exploitation is the fact that the opposition leader has styled himself as a tough man on borders. When we actually look at the facts, what he did was cut compliance officers in our department in half.

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