Clare O'Neil (Hotham, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Justice) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise today, on behalf of my Hotham community, to speak out against the government's cuts to Status Resolution Support Services. SRSS is designed to support people who are on bridging visas in Australia. This means they have applied for refugee status but the immigration department is still making up its mind on whether it will be given or not. SRSS provides these people, some of whom are the most vulnerable people in our entire country, the supports they need to survive. We're talking here about things like casework, trauma counselling and the necessary income they need to have a roof over their head and money to feed their children. A lot of these people have dependent children.

These are people who are trying to rebuild their lives in our country. Many of them have seen and experienced things that no human being should ever have to go through. They have come here at the generosity of this beautiful country of ours to seek our support and assistance, and it is my belief that the least we can do for these people is try to provide them with the support they need, to have food in the fridge and to get their kids to school every day, while their refugee status is being determined.

I speak today at the request of some crucial groups within my community who advocate for the interests of refugees. And they do so from rich and great experience. I'm very lucky to represent an area of Melbourne where we have a great number of refugees. You only need to walk down Springvale Road or Buckingham Avenue in Springvale to see the enormous contribution that will come when we provide support to these communities. But if we take that support away it's an act of utter cruelty.

The City of Greater Dandenong has been one of the key advocates in this area, and I want to pay tribute to the mayor of the City of Greater Dandenong, Youhorn Chea, who travelled to Canberra with some of his councillor colleagues to conduct meetings. Labor's spokesperson on the issue, the member for Blair, was kind enough to speak directly with the mayor about this issue.

One of the things that's been frustrating in watching this issue play out is that the government hasn't been able to provide really basic information about who is going to be affected by this policy change. We conducted Senate estimates recently where Labor senators subjected this to the normal inquiry process. Basic things like how many people will have their supports taken away and how many dependent children will have supports removed were not able to be answered by the department. That is just simply not good enough. Some students at Monash also raised this with me—Austin Bond, Charmain Sim, Mia Glass and Ale Kan. These are four young people who are desperately concerned about this issue, and I thank them for their advocacy.