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

I want to talk about border protection—and I mean the real story, not the government's pathetic, desperate, shrill scare campaign about boats. It's about how the Liberals have lost control of the borders through mismanaging the entire visa processing system, creating a honey pot for people smugglers, who are now just sending their clients by plane from Malaysia, China, India and Vietnam to work in sex shops, on farms and in restaurants.

We've seen more than 80,000 applications from asylum seekers lodged over the last few years by people who arrived by plane. This is an inconvenient truth for the government amidst their scare campaign, but their own published data and expert advice reveals the scale of the mess. There has been an explosion over the last four years in the numbers of people seeking asylum who arrived by plane—from about 8,500 to 28,000 last year. The raw numbers alone tell you that something has gone badly wrong under the Liberals on border protection, but it actually gets worse because these increases have been driven mainly by people from Malaysia and China. More than two-thirds in 2017-18 were from those two countries, with a rapid growth now in people from India and Vietnam. And they're dodgy. In 2017-18, only 22 per cent of the applicants from Malaysia were found to be genuine refugees and only 10 per cent from China.

Amidst this crisis, the Prime Minister's desperately trying to convince us all he's some kind of John Howard-style figure. What a joke! John Howard's legacy was an increase in legal migration and a decrease in illegal migration, yet these Liberals have presided over an increase in illegal migration while actually managing to cut permanent skilled migration. In one sense, it's ironic that you could stuff it up this badly—a kind of achievement award—but it's actually really serious because, unlike those who arrive by boat, most of these people are not genuine refugees. So the real story of illegal immigration now is not boats; it's planes.

This record surge in dodgy protection visa applications, however, is not an accident. It's because people smugglers are taking advantage of the complete chaos that the Department of Home Affairs is now in. It's seen massive staff cuts—thousands of staff cut by the Liberals—and delays in critical programs like family reunion visas, which have paralysed and choked the entire system because there's now an unprecedented backlog of applications across all visa categories. As the waiting times blow-out, ordinary-life things like getting your new wife or husband a visa become impossible, so people are coming on visitor visas. What happens then is, while they're in the country waiting for their real visa to be processed for months or years, they get a bridging visa. We now have around 200,000 people in Australia on bridging visas.

Bridging visas are the canary in the coal mine for the system—the lead indicator of the seriousness we're now in—and they're the green light to people smugglers because they signal the department is in chaos, allowing them to strike. People smugglers know that, once the system is choked, they can sneak people in on visitor visas then lodge their dodgy protection claims. People smugglers know that, because of massive staff cuts under the Liberals, the government simply cannot process the claims and reject them because the whole system is choked. Dodgy asylum seekers can stay here for years on these bridging visas, working and paying the people smugglers their cut.

It's not new, though. Experienced immigration officials who are speaking out now have known about the risk for decades, but instead of putting more resources—public servants—on to fix the backlog and stop the honey pot, the government is continuing to cut thousands of staff and are now trying to privatise the whole visa system to their Liberal Party mates for profit. Privatisation will make this mess worse because contractors will chase the profit. They'll jack up the fees for the profitable visas, not clean up this mess and restore integrity. Whoever wins is going to have to face up to this mess. Whoever is the government after the election is going to have to reverse these cuts and put resources back into the department.

But the scariest thing is not actually the money that's going to be needed to fix this. It's the emerging nightmare that Australia now faces the very real risk of a US- and European-style migrant crisis, with a permanent and growing underclass in the community of failed asylum seekers because it appears that many of these people are not being deported. They're disappearing into the community. We don't know how many disappear as the government has stopped publishing the figures on the net stock of asylum seekers in Australia. You can do the maths from annual reports and you'd figure out the backlog grew by about 13,000 last year alone. The AAT is about to be overwhelmed by a tsunami. There are already 18,000 there, and the Malaysians and the Chinese haven't reached there. If this mess is not tackled quickly and firmly, Australia will face a crisis so large and so entrenched that it may become impossible to fix, as the US are seeing, and it will permanently change our society for the worse. Bring on the election.