Shayne Neumann (Blair, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Immigration and Border Protection) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Making a new home in a new country is not easy yet tens of thousands of people do this in Australia every year. I believe Australia can and should do more. I want to thank my fellow Labor members on the Joint Standing Committee on Migration—the deputy chair, the member for Calwell, and the member for Hindmarsh—and those government members who chose to participate at the level that they did. I want to thank the experts, the security agencies, the police and the law enforcement officials who gave evidence. I want to thank the bright young people who welcomed us into their schools and their communities and who told us about their lives and their journeys, how they had made Australia their home, and their experiences and the types of supports they received and they needed. I want to thank the secretariat for the marvellous work they do. I'm constantly amazed and impressed by the professionalism, efficiency and effectiveness of the secretariat—the people who work in this place.

Some of the members of this committee travelled overseas as part of a delegation—approved, of course, by the authorities in this place—to the United States, the United Kingdom, Sweden and Germany. Each of these countries faced different challenges, and it is quite clear that they can learn more from us than we can learn from them. But, we included the ideas that we got from these countries' experiences in this report.

There are many recommendations in this report that the Labor members agreed to: recommendations 1 to 14. But there are those that we can't agree with. There are many great recommendations. For example, the recommendation about Community Hubs Australia and an expansion of that particular program. In my own electorate, we are getting five of them. I'm very happy, because we can see the importance around the country of a place where women, particularly, can come to safe locations to learn English. Often when they come to this country, because of the circumstances in the countries they come from, they don't have educational opportunities. English language is critical in their engagement with the community, not just for women but for men and children as well. English is also critical for employment prospects.

One of the great recommendations that we have here is about a neighbourhood migrant mothers outreach program that we saw in Germany.

Julian Hill (Bruce, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Here, here.

Shayne Neumann (Blair, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Immigration and Border Protection) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I note the member for Bruce is here. He was with me on that occasion, and the member for Calwell was particularly interested in this. It was about women who had experienced certain challenges in their life meeting with other women and sharing their experiences, and providing that vital support. That was a great program, not just in Germany but in the Netherlands as well. It had been operating in Rotterdam, from memory. It had been commended around the world, even in Australia. We need that type of program here in Australia. That's one of the great recommendations.

There are many other good recommendations here. For example, the idea of a youth mentoring program—a pilot program. The importance of role models was critical. Les Twentyman talked about that to us in evidence he gave. Another one was establishing a sport and active recreation program. We saw the importance of sports like basketball and soccer, or football, as many people call it. I love soccer as well. I used to play it for many years. It's really important to do that.

It's also important for agencies to talk with each other. One of the things that we found was that the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission should get funding for the express purpose of data collection on the visa status of offenders, for example, for inclusion in the national database and for national criminal intelligence systems. It's important that agencies talk to one another and that police talk to the Department of Immigration and Border Protection.

We also looked at a justice reinvestment approach in relation to these communities. We commended the work done by the Senate Standing Committee on Education and Employment, and the committee also looked at what they had done when I was chair of the Committee on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Affairs in the House of Representatives. The Doing time—time for doing report also talked about a justice reinvestment process and programs, an approach to Indigenous communities, and how that might work in migrant communities.

But I've got to say that we dissented—the Labor MPs—in relation to this particular report. This committee was hijacked—simply hijacked—by the member for La Trobe, as chair, in an attempt to reflect issues in his own electorate. He went ahead and drew conclusions and made recommendations with minimal or no evidence, based on opinion and anecdote. It was not fact based. Labor's position is always to listen to our security and intelligence agencies, and that's why we do, including listening to Victoria Police. The purpose of this inquiry was to investigate issues relating to migrant settlement outcomes. As the Labor Party, if we're in government we'll always work with state and territory colleagues to examine how Commonwealth support can be provided. We rely on robust evidence, not anecdote and opinion. We dissented from what we saw with this particular committee and its recommendations. Despite minimal or no evidence, the report focused on young humanitarian entrants from Sudanese background in relation to a certain part of Melbourne. That's what the member for La Trobe was clearly doing, regardless of what the police in Victoria, or any other agencies, experts, community or anyone involved in settlement, the legal profession or local communities recommended to him.

The report did not reflect the evidence and ignored the wider Australian migration situation. The focus of the inquiry was to be on humanitarian entrants and youth crime. That's what the member for La Trobe thought. He missed a big opportunity to focus on the settlement outcomes for the majority of Australians. Humanitarian entrants make up less than 10 per cent of Australia's annual migrant intake. The report advocates for flexibility in settlement arrangements.

We were concerned about what we saw. We were concerned about the line of questioning we saw the member for La Trobe undertake. It was clear he was about making sure there should be an extension of section 501 to people under the age of 18. What he really couldn't understand is that we strongly support the cancellation of visas on character ground under section 501 and voted for that in parliament. The immigration minister has many powers to refuse or cancel visas of noncitizens who don't meet the character test, irrespective of age. But he relied on thought bubbles. That's what's happened with the member for La Trobe.

He actually came up with the conclusions without facts to support them. It's very clear from the report that it was based on the opinion of one person or one organisation. He didn't take into consideration the actual Victorian crime statistics, which show that the proportion of incidents committed by alleged offenders under the age of 25 had fallen from half of all incidents in 2007-08 to 40 per cent of all incidents. The number of young people in detention on sentences also was down. Sentences in children's court since 2008-09 were halved, with only a small number receiving sentences of detention. Victoria had the lowest rate of children under justice supervision in Australia. The Crimes Statistics Agency Victoria clearly showed that the vast majority of offenders were Australian born and older than 25 years of age. The facts of the submissions and the evidence given did not support the conclusion of the member for La Trobe, but he insisted, and that's why Labor dissented.

It's important that we look at what happens with respect to those people who may come across section 501 of the Migration Act. The minister has the power now to cancel a visa, but you've got to take into consideration the fact that cancelling a young person's visa could potentially breach Australia's non-refoulement obligations. A person subject to visa refusal or cancellation might be subject to arbitrary immigration detention for prolonged periods, leading to separation of family and increased alienation in the broader migrant community.

In addition to that, the member for La Trobe wanted to establish a hotline, which we dissented from because we thought it should be a hotline across the country. Finally, despite the fact that the British authorities had canned the idea of intervention orders—Theresa May, the British Prime Minister, canned this idea—he insisted we should use them, without any evidence whatsoever and in spite of their being outside the scope of the inquiry. In fact, the intervention order regime is being looked as a term of reference of the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security.

The member for La Trobe, the chair of this committee, did a great disservice to this committee. We will see how he goes in the future, but this is a real shame. This is a great report as far as recommendations 1 to 14 are concerned, but it should have been great for recommendations 1 to 18.

Julian Hill (Bruce, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It was the great Victorian Premier Steve Bracks who said that there is nothing more Australian than a migrant, with the exception, of course, of Australia's first peoples. Representing an electorate where more than 50 per cent of people were born in another country, the highest declared percentage of any in this parliament, I can attest to that sentiment. I have 157,000 people in my electorate, yet only about 90,000 or 95,000 people are on the voting roll, in many cases because of these non-citizens—future citizens—who are contributing to our country.

At citizenship ceremonies in the city of Greater Dandenong and the city of Monash, I do my survey of love, which I will mention on this Valentine's Day. We survey the crowd as to who came to Australia for love. Some will have come as refugees or as business or skilled migrants, but there are always a few who put up their hand as having come here for love. I pay tribute to them on this Valentine's Day. These are my opening remarks. I have only two life regrets. One is that I have never lived or worked overseas, because my daughter was born young and I have always been tied to Melbourne. The other is never learning a foreign language to fluency.

With that as context, I was pleased—not as a member of the committee but as someone with an enormous interest in and passion for Australia's well-targeted migration program—to read this report. I was pleased at the outset to see a positive summary of the economic and social benefits of migration. There are many positive outcomes, as the report outlines, from a well-targeted migration program, for the labour market as well as for the public purse and our economic development. Young skilled migrants in particular are incredibly valuable. Their home countries have paid for their health care and their education for two decades, then they come here and pay large sums of money in many cases for their tertiary education, so we have paid nothing for those expensive years of their life and then they may stay and contribute to 40 or 50 years of wage earning, tax paying and economic development. What a return for Australia! Shame on the member for Warringah for his populist nonsense in recent months with his good friend, his dear friend, Senator Hanson, saying, 'If we cut all migration, the world will be better.' This report rebuts that and rebuts it clearly. Of course the migration program should fall or rise according to economic conditions, as it does overall.

I was pleased to see this thoughtful discussion at the outset, but settlement in a foreign country has challenges, and, to realise these benefits, people need support. Without support, people can struggle, and we see many negative impacts and costs to the community in terms of us not realising those social and economic benefits. Successful multiculturalism in this country is no accident. We don't just plonk people in the suburbs—we don't have a set-and-forget mentality—as, I might say, some European countries have done. There are parts of France and there are parts of England where there has not in any way been the same kind of support as there is in Australia, for years, for people from different cultures to settle in, to learn the language, to get involved in the community and to find employment. It takes care, effort and investment.

When I read the report, I thought, 'Oh, this is good. We're dealing in facts here, not assertions. That's kind of old-fashioned, particularly for this government.' But it's a disjointed report. Many of the recommendations, as the previous speaker, the member for Blair, said, are well reasoned and well argued. There are important recommendations about settlement support and language proficiency and employment and integration and so on. The previous speaker said that the 14 recommendations in the first six chapters are pretty sensible—that he'd sign up to them. But the report then gets kind of weird. It feels like someone has stapled the last two chapters, and they got them a bit mixed up at the photocopier. They're the kinds of chapters that are in a law enforcement committee report or a completely different inquiry. They are utterly disjointed. There are pages of minutiae at the outset in the seventh chapter and anecdotes, almost, of crime statistics in Victoria, including analysis by Andrew Bolt, the media commentator. It may be right; I'm not, in any way, saying that I've gone back and checked the figures. But it's a curious approach for a serious, thoughtful parliamentary inquiry to quote, in serious terms, various random media comments that have been made on the issues at hand.

So I draw attention to page 123 and 124 of the ABS report, which includes statistics on offenders between 10 and17 years of age who were formally charged by police between mid-2015 and 2016. It talks about the number of youth offenders having increased by less than one per cent. It then goes on to talk about New South Wales crime—with that Liberal government!—increasing by three per cent, while Victorian crime decreased by four per cent. That's the ABS, so let's take that as reliable.

Honourable Member:

An honourable member interjecting—

Julian Hill (Bruce, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

That was a Labor government, I know. I know! I thought, 'What has happened? Have I got an error in my photocopier?' I went back and looked at the terms of reference, and it's just not supported, as the previous speaker said, by the evidence that was heard by the inquiry. I would say that a random submission or a factoid or something you read in the newspaper is not sufficient evidence to make serious recommendations. I say this as someone who actually has a lot of time, indeed, a lot of affection—I'm putting it in Hansard, so everyone will know—for the member for La Trobe, in many regards. He has a good heart. He's a good human being. I disagree with him on many matters, but I do agree with him on many matters. But I decry where the debate has gone in response to some of the issues ventilated in this report, particularly the politics of fear led by the Minister for Home Affairs and for immigration and border protection—whatever cabinet positions he's managed to nab off others this day. In Victoria, my home state and home state to three of the four members—

Tim Wilson (Goldstein, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

A great state!

Julian Hill (Bruce, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

A great state, as the member for Goldstein said. Victorians, apparently, are terrified to go out for dinner. The politics of fear is the lowest form of politics. The business model of dividing the community, scaring the crap out of everyone based on picking out statistics, is the lowest form of politics. I've seen this in local governments, and shame on this government, shame on this minister, for running this line. His attacks on African Australians are disgraceful.

There's no point going to the ins and outs of crime statistics. The media reporting is divorced, in many cases, from reality. Some of it is real; there are issues, and they should be dealt with. I say very clearly: crime should be dealt with firmly. Crime should be dealt with firmly. Crime should be dealt with firmly. Hansard, that is not tedious repetition; it is repetition to make a point, so I hope it's in there three times. But it is better to prevent it. Crime should be dealt with firmly, but it is better to prevent it. I do not believe that there is any member in this chamber who disagrees with that. But community safety, in reality, is a mixture of reality and perception. If you scare the crap out of people, you make people feel less safe, even in suburbs where crime has gone down. Even in Victoria, where crime has gone down by six or seven per cent in the last statistics, people are terrified because statistics are being misrepresented. That is a disgrace and anyone involved in that should be ashamed. There's an age-old truism for me: if you have young men in any human society on the planet sitting around, not engaged in education, with no hope for the future, being locked out of the employment market, they will do dumb stuff. That's a fact.

I tell the story of the Sandown Lions soccer club. I went down there two weeks ago. They sent me an email and I actually shocked them because I rang them back at nine in the morning, an hour after I got their email because I was doing my emails. It was quiet, at the end of January. I went down to their training at 7.30 at night in Noble Park. They're a fantastic team; 90 per cent are young South Sudanese guys in their 20s. They're working. The club captain works for the NBN and studied here. There's a teacher, a truck driver and people running their own businesses. They explained to me the vision for the club. They bailed it out a few years ago. It had run out of money. They put their hand in their pockets for five grand. They've got a women's team starting this year. God knows how, but we're going to get them a grant from the Victorian government. We're working with Daniel Andrews; it's in his state electorate. But their dream is to start an under-18s team because they're ashamed of some of the kids with no fathers who are running off the rails and they're trying to do the right thing. So they've gone around to businesses in the area and said, 'Can you give us some sponsorship?' They were very insightful. They said, 'Look, we're not like the Greek community that's been here for decades. We don't have rich businesspeople to give us money and support us, so we need a bit of support.' They got lectures, based on articles in the paper, that they had to improve their attitude, pull up their socks and come back when they'd improved their attitude. I said, 'What—stop being black?' They said, 'Yep, that's pretty much what they meant.' So, if anyone out there listening at home to the Fed Chamber wants to give some sponsorship to this fantastic club, we're helping them build a prospectus and we'll do what we can.

What worries me is the lack of evidence. I actually don't disagree that there are some important issues raised about what to do with young offenders at risk of violent extremism. There may be unpalatable, unpopular methods warranted, but it should go to the Joint Committee on Law Enforcement. There is not the evidence in this report to say, 'Send it to COAG; the case is made'—because it's not. Send it to the law enforcement committee if you want the Commonwealth parliament to express a view and send it to COAG. Then the evidence can be gathered. I hope the next speaker will talk about the excellent recommendations 1 to 14, which I applaud. I didn't quite get to those!

Maria Vamvakinou (Calwell, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Thank you to the member for Bruce. In fact, I'm going to take this opportunity to have a second bite at the cherry, as they say, having spoken when we tabled this report last week, and my intention was to talk about some of the recommendations—those 14 recommendations that members of the committee did find common ground on.

It's very important. I'm going to focus on the title of the report, No one teaches you how to become an Australian. As I said in the other chamber last week, this is a comment that was made by a young man, Gum Mamur, who works with the Les Twentyman Foundation in Victoria. Gum's story, I think, illustrates very much what the aspirations and focus of this inquiry were to begin with. They were to examine the current settlement services that we have in this country. It's always a good idea to audit our services and see whether they are appropriate, whether they are well targeted and whether they're actually meeting the needs of the people they are servicing. Within that, I will say and put on record that when the chair and I first spoke about this inquiry, I felt that some of the issues that the chair proposed to explore in relation to the South Sudanese gang activity in Victoria were matters that were better placed to be explored by, as my colleagues have already said, a committee such as the Joint Committee on Law Enforcement. However, I felt, and other committee members felt, that it was probably a good idea to review the settlement services but to also look at where they are found to be lacking in helping young migrants and young refugees—those who come here at a young age and, indeed, those who are born here from migrant or refugee families—because the experience of a young person as they work their way through the integration process in a country like Australia is very different to that of their parents. I know that for a fact, because in the sixties I was a young person who came to Australia—

An honourable member: Look how you turned out!

And look at me—look how I turned out! I went through that integration process. For young people a lot of that is about identity formation. It's about working out who they are and where they fit into a society that is very diverse. It is about how they manage and find some harmony between their home environment, their cultural inheritance, the expectations of their cultural inheritance and the traditions of their parents. It is about how they balance that in the playground when they go to school and how they work with that as they become adolescents in this country. Many of us felt that the settlement services were not really designed for that sort of work. There is a five-year period in which agencies, very adequately and very well, service new refugees and migrants more broadly.

When Gum Mamur came before the committee in one of our first hearings and said, 'No-one teaches you how to become an Australian,' that resonated with me profoundly, because I think he articulated exactly what a young person actually feels when they are out of kilter and cannot negotiate their way through the process of becoming an Australian. This is why we have called the report No one teaches you to become an Australian. I want to thank Les Twentyman for the incredible amount of work he does with young people who he virtually rescues from disengagement and alienation, and Gum was one of those people. Today he is a mentor for young children, especially from the various African countries. He works as a mentor in some of the local schools in Melton and elsewhere and does an amazing job helping young people develop a sense of pride and a sense of purpose. I want to thank Gum for that inspiration.

The recommendations are at the heart of what I believe this report is really about. I think the member for Blair spoke about our dissenting report, and I spoke about it last week, so I won't labour on that, because I'm very keen to look at some of the recommendations. Recommendation 1 states:

The Committee recommends that the Commonwealth provide additional funding to expand the Community Hubs Network nationally and to establish similar flexible settlement service programs.

I want to single out Dr Sonja Hood, who is the CEO of Community Hubs Australia. I have 14 community hubs in my electorate. They do an enormous amount of work with newly-arrived communities. In particular, I want to speak about the community hubs at St Dominic's in Broadmeadows and the Good Samaritan Primary School in Roxburgh Park. They are receiving a large number of the refugees that have come to Australia from Iraq and Syria over the last couple of years. I have a very close working relationship, especially with Good Samaritan. I want to thank the principal, Paul Sedunary, the vice-principle, Helen Smith, and Baan Sharmu, who is the liaison officer between the school and the community, for allowing the committee to conduct one of its hearings at the school. I want to thank them because the work they do is above and beyond that of teaching the children. School is the place where parents who have come to Australia take their children, and school is almost at the coalface of helping those families orient themselves into the community. All of the difficulties associated with that, in many ways, are first expressed and first discovered at that school level. So the Community Hubs Network is very important and it provides a very good service to the broader settlement services network. I'm hoping that the government will adopt these recommendations, especially in relation to the Community Hubs Network.

The second recommendation talks about developing a neighbourhood migrant mothers outreach program to service the most recently arrived families. The committee's trip overseas saw us go to the United Kingdom, to Sweden, to Germany and to the United States, and we saw this program implemented in Germany. They call it the district mothers program. Basically, they have trained and employed women, who are mothers with children, from the communities that they are receiving their refugees from. Those women actually go into the homes of the newly arrived, and the idea is that they are better placed to connect with the mothers in those families. They help them through and give them the confidence that they need to engage with the services in the broader community. I am particularly interested in this program, because I can see how it would work in my electorate, in amongst the women with their capacity to reach out to other women in their own language, understanding their culture. They would be able to assist them in those very critical first months and years of being in Australia.

The other area that the inquiry looked at was making the delivery of settlement services a lot more flexible. In particular, I have heard from the many refugees that have come into my electorate that the type of English language that is being delivered to them is aimed at assisting them to find employment; however, it doesn't necessarily assist them in learning conversational English so that they can actually engage with their community. So improvements to, and flexibility around the delivery of, the English language program are vital, because everyone knows that the key to engaging with your new community is to be able to communicate with it. The teaching of the English language has been one of the greatest strengths in our settlement program. The member for Bruce is absolutely correct: multiculturalism and migration in this country are not a success just by chance; they are a success because they have been underpinned by incredibly well targeted settlement services.

I have run out of time. I recommend this report to the House, and I encourage the government to adopt recommendations 1 to 14 in particular.

Debate adjourned.