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

I listened carefully to all those who have spoken on both sides. They did speak with great passion. Those on the other side who spoke are some of the members that I hold in high regard and consider more than colleagues; some of them are friends. But when I listened to the contributions to this debate, I saw an example of how their deference to the discipline of the talking points of their party takes over. It's a formula that we see again and again. When an argument comes up that you don't like, you call it 'misinformation'. When it's a topic that you'd rather we not talk about, you attack the person and not the idea. You say, 'This is engaged in the wrong tone,' or it's 'an exercise in anger and division'. They don't even go to the topic. But this topic of competence in our immigration system is a fundamental one, because it goes to more than just our economy; it goes to who we are.

The last census told us a lot about who we are. It told us that more than 50 per cent of Australians have either one or two parents who were born overseas, or they themselves were. In electorates that are closer to the city, like mine, it's even higher. In my electorate, 70 per cent of people are first- or second-generation migrants. I am a migrant myself; I wasn't born here. I remember sitting with my dad—in fact, lying on a bed while it was raining—and he was telling me stories about his travels in the world. The place that he spoke most fondly of was Australia. He said that one day we might get to go there, and we did, because of the generosity of Australians then. That generosity was founded not just on a sense of compassion and self-interest—that's a given—but also on a belief that the system is run well. We can't have a generous and compassionate migration scheme if it's not run competently. Those two go together. So, when we stand up and have a matter of public importance and put to the government that the system is not being run competently, the government should take notice. If they don't, we may not have a generous, compassionate migration scheme going forward, because we must have public legitimacy behind it. In fact, it's the only thing that has ever backed it up.

We have a housing crisis at the moment. There is no silver bullet or lever that we can pull that will instantly solve it. There is one that comes close, and that is having a proportionate migration scheme. A proportionate migration scheme means that the numbers of people that come here are proportionate to our interests, what the economy needs and what our society can cope with at that time.

I come from the great city of Melbourne, and much of our migration system sees people go to that city because it is one of the world's great cities. I'm very proud of it, but it is struggling right now. It is struggling to build enough schools, enough hospitals and enough infrastructure. It's even struggling to keep clean. For those of you who land in Tullamarine, go down the Eastern Freeway; it is covered in graffiti and rubbish, and trees are cut down. It's not the city I remember. It's not at its best; it's unwell, because it's struggling to cope. When we ask this government whether they are running a migration scheme that is proportionate to our capacity to build all of the things that we need to preserve green space, the answer is no. When the government tries to address those questions, they engage in rhetorical devices and straw man devices. Australians deserve better than that. The government will resort to that old tactic that they use against this side all the time, which is to tear down the character of whoever is sitting in that chair for the Liberal Party. It's easier than engaging in the ideas. It's easier than actually doing the hard work and actually running a competent system that is in the national interest of this country and that Australians want and desperately deserve. Right now, our immigration system is broken. We are calling on the government to at least recognise it, to turn up here and have the debate, and to not just say, 'Well, what did you do in the last 10 years?' because we are well past that. This term is almost up, and it is time that this government showed up.

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