Joanne Ryan (Lalor, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Last week Shayne Neumann, the member for Blair and shadow minister for immigration, visited my community. I was proud to take Shayne to meet with Wyndham City Council' Mayor, Henry Barlow, its CEO, Kelly Grigsby, and other senior officials to discuss their award-winning social cohesion program. Wyndham has three citizenship ceremonies a month, with 120 new citizens at each forum. Lalor is one of the youngest and most diverse electorates in the country. We are lucky to have a council that sees opportunity in our multiculturalism, a council that sees diversity as an opportunity. Council talked to the member for Blair about what happens when migrants settle in Wyndham but also told a positive story about how people waiting for citizenship and people now settling in Australia make contributions to our local community. I want to thank Wyndham City Council for all the work they do to make immigration successful.

We then visited Wyndham Community & Education Centre, where the member for Blair and I spoke to about 60 English-language students. Wyndham CEC works closely with settlement services to make sure that new migrants get the English language training they need and to generally help them integrate into the community. They are ably led by Jenni Barrera and dedicated people like Cathy Brunton. The shadow minister and I heard from their perspective how immigration and settlement services have taken a turn for the worse under this government. We heard about the hardening of the department and the lack of communication between gatekeepers and settlement services. None of this makes us safer or improves people's settlement experience. Treating people as you would objects coming through customs frustrates integration and makes it harder for communities and individuals.

They also spoke to us about the inflexibility in English language requirements and they made it clear that the current system does not account for a range of people, including those who are preliterate, meaning that they had not learnt to read and write in any language when they arrived in this country.

Finally, we met with representatives from a range of migrant communities in a town hall forum. We heard from Spanish and Portuguese students, some of whom teach at Australian universities but are still required to repeatedly complete the English language test. We heard from South Sudanese Australians who had spent years in refugee camps. We heard from Karenni and Chin refugees, who have effectively always been stateless. They made it clear that the government's settlement model is hurting their communities. Although they spoke positively about the community sponsorship program, they all asked that it be counted on top of our humanitarian intake rather than in place of it. We heard from people who go through the stress and financial burden of saving loved ones from war and conflict. We heard their desire to see our humanitarian and refugee intake increased.

Finally, we heard from community members from the subcontinent—people who feel betrayed by this government's long-stay parent visa arrangements, people who thought they were going to pay a bond and who are now being told it will be a fee, people who are now choosing which set of parents to invite to this country.