Peter Khalil (Wills, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I'm actually quite flabbergasted that the opposition would have the audacity to put up an MPI that talks about mismanagement of the immigration system. All they really need to do is look back at the nine years they were in government to see clearly the classic template of mismanagement and incompetence. I think what they're doing here is classic projection. They are projecting. They're trying to deflect from the fact that their track record over nine years in government was the exact essence of mismanagement.

They've got an impressive capacity to be in denial and deflect, and we've heard from previous speakers what sounds almost like a rap sheet of mismanagement. There's the fact that, when they were in government and Peter Dutton, the Leader of the Opposition, was the minister, they released some 1,300 criminals from immigration detention. We've heard about the two men convicted of being accessories to murder and the 102 convicted sex offenders that were released, 64 of which were child sex offenders. They did this without any electronic monitoring, without any curfews or conditions and without any Australian Border Force or Australian Federal Police operations to monitor those persons that were released. Of course there was a man who was released from detention in early 2020 who then went on to be one of the three men who assaulted Ninette Simons in her home in Perth in April last year.

So, clearly, there is this legacy of mismanagement. But what they also did is they starved the Department of Home Affairs of the resources necessary for the proper functioning of the immigration system. Under their watch, there was an almost 50 per cent reduction in the number of compliance officers employed there. What impact do we think that's going to have? The Nixon review showed a rampant lack of integrity in our migration system that went unchecked for years under the previous government and for six years under the Leader of the Opposition while he was responsible as minister for immigration and for home affairs. For nearly a decade we witnessed not just mismanagement. It was more than the mismanagement they have in the title of this MPI. It was also negligence, neglect, underinvestment and, of course, incompetence by that former government.

As well as all of those things, there was also the politicisation of the Administrative Appeals Tribunal appointments. The largest division of the AAT is the Migration and Refugee Division. By the end of last year this division had—wait for it—more than 54,000 cases on hand. They built up this backlog while they were in government. They appointed 85 former Liberal MPs, failed Liberal candidates, former Liberal staffers and other close Liberal associates onto the AAT without any merit based selection process. These were individuals with no relevant experience or expertise, and that fatally compromised that system. They left behind a shameful backlog of people who had been waiting for years and years for decisions and who were handed incorrectly determined and undercooked decisions they had to appeal through the lengthy and expensive judicial process. That is their legacy, and they have the audacity to bring an MPI here and say there's mismanagement of the migration system. The facts speak for themselves. It was this government in the past two years that had to clean up their mess. It was the Labor government that had to start all over again and create a new administrative review body, the Administrative Review Tribunal, the ART, which is more efficient, more transparent and most importantly more fair.

Those opposite are busy attacking this government about visitor visas. But, as we've heard, we have the same security checks that existed back then when they actually took in 1,991 people from Afghanistan and thousands of people from Iraq, Syria and the Palestinian territories. The same security checks exist today as did back then. In conclusion, the audacity of the opposition to raise an MPI around mismanagement means that they need to look back at their record and see exactly what it means to be mismanaging, to be neglectful, to be negligent and to underinvest, because they did all of that over a period of nine years. This portfolio is too important. It is too important to be securitised and politicised, because the public policy importance of social and economic elements of this portfolio are what makes a difference to this country—our immigration which we've been built on. (Time expired)

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