Keith Wolahan (Menzies, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you to my colleagues who have spoken on the Migration Amendment (Bridging Visa Conditions) Bill 2023 before me. There are many times in this place where we get told to jump with short notice. Often we do that because there are various bills that have been brought on because there's a gap. But we shouldn't be doing that for such urgent business when we could be fixing this. This bill is flawed, and the government, when it had a chance to fix it, has said no. They don't even want to have that debate. We're going to have to have that debate in the Senate, but we could have had it here. But, more than that, this is a new government. It's still on its training wheels when the Australian people expect better. But on this side there are serious, experienced former ministers who offered the hand of friendship to fix this and were turned down. The shadow minister wrote a letter on Monday, and it was only responded to today.

We believe in the separation of powers—we support it and we defend it—and the High Court has created a bind for this government. It has made a decision without reasons. When you don't have the reasons, it makes it hard to draft legislation—of course it does. We don't know when exactly those reasons will be released. It was indicated that it could be in February next year. The High Court hasn't always done that. It's a discretion of the court. In the Pell case, it didn't. In Love and Thoms, it didn't. But it has here, and it has here in a really significant matter, and it has significant safety consequences for the community. I don't say that as a criticism of the High Court—no-one should come up here and do that; that's not what we're doing. But the onus now is on the government for how they react. How you react is that you, as the executive members of government, come up with a way to keep people safe.

The bill as proposed—I've only just got it for the first time here—hasn't had a chance to be considered properly. The amendments that we have and would like to debate with you haven't been properly considered. I note here that the Australian public might think that we know there are serious criminals who are about to be released and the government is proposing a regime that will keep you safe. The proposals here are about breaches of visa conditions and include things like ankle bracelets and consequences for not doing what the terms and conditions of a visa say. Sentencing practices have changed in the last few decades. You might think that a breach of one of those conditions is going to lead to a serious criminal being put in jail, but that's not how sentencing practices work in Australian courts at the moment. Breaching a condition like that isn't an automatic visit to your local prison. It doesn't take you off the streets. It doesn't protect people.

There are many other things that could have been considered if the government had reached out and responded earlier. We live in a Commonwealth and, as a Federation, there are other state based mechanisms that could help. For example, a lot of the states have apprehended violence order provisions. They have domestic violence provisions. There are, I assume—I don't know the details of the individuals—people who are personally fearing for their safety. I hope that the minister, who does know the details, will be liaising or having the department liaising with state based authorities to make sure that those people are kept safe and that the released individuals go nowhere near exclusion zones, schools or people who have been put at risk. Those are some of the things we need to make sure are included in a bill like this. It should not just be at your discretion, Minister; it should be mandatory. You should be making sure that those people are kept safe.

Furthermore, you should be regularly updating the parliament as to the status of those released individuals. We saw in question time, when questions were put to you, that you were drip-feeding the number of people that were being released. You were drip-feeding what particular people were being put into the community. We had to rely on the press, who are the fourth estate of government, to tell us the actual details and circumstances of where people are in this country.

My good friend the member from Canning is from WA, and a lot of the WA members of this place were quite surprised to see that their state had a disproportionate number of those people in their community. So they are quite rightly concerned about the families that live in Western Australia. We would like to know where else in Australia these have people gone. Who else is at risk? Members before me have quite rightly said that our No. 1 priority is to keep our community safe, and this government and this minister have failed in that duty.

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