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

Another day, another adjournment—you hear them all. I've got the very last spot for today, I'm the last speaker, and I might pick up where I left off in my last adjournment speech. Last time, I went through a roll call of failures of the previous government, trying to pick the biggest mess or the biggest stuff-up that we were left. We talked about the aged-care crisis, the state of the budget, a trillion dollars of Liberal debt and the energy and climate crisis—you had 22 plans and you didn't implement any of them, because you couldn't agree on one of them. But without a doubt, for me and my community, the biggest mess is the mess in the visa and citizenship processing area. The Department of Home Affairs is a black hole of carnage, human misery and economic damage. It's a broken system.

There's good news and bad news for the government of which I'm a member. I'm pleased to note that the government announced 500 new staff at the Jobs and Skills Summit to start to deal with the backlog. That's having an impact. The minister had about a million visas on hand that he inherited from this incompetent mob. Instead of processing the visas, they wasted $92 million of taxpayer money trying to privatise the visa system. They didn't get anywhere with that and crab-walked away. The reason they couldn't award the tender, of course, was that they couldn't find a tenderer who wasn't a mate of the former Prime Minister. They couldn't get through the probity. That was their agenda, though. But we've got a long way to go. The thing we need to watch is that those 500 staff so far, I think, are only there for nine months, so we're going to have to wait and see. I'll hold our government to account for what happens in next year's budget, because we're going to need more ongoing staff.

But not everything is getting better, and I want to call out the mess of partner visas. In June this year, the average waiting times were between 20 and 32 months for 309 visas. Now they are between 29 and 38 months. So, despite all these resources, things are actually still going backwards. It's not good enough. The Department of Home Affairs needs to lift its game. It's a function of four things: there's the so-called planning level, which is how many visas the government says it's going to issue each year. If you don't get that high enough in the migration program, things will keep slowing down because Australians still fall in love, and we get more applications in. There's the resourcing, which we're dealing with. There's discrimination still in the program. To his credit, the minister has finally said that he's going to deal with that, but we still discriminate against people, particularly from Afghanistan, who are pushing those numbers up. Thousands of people in my community have been waiting five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10 years—missing their children growing up! It is not good enough for our government or anyone else that these numbers keep going in the wrong direction.

There's also the culture and management in that department. I'm absolutely delighted, as I said, that the minister is reviewing Ministerial Direction 80 and that discriminatory provision that former ministers over there have left. I do call out the department, though. They now have what I think is a racist procedure, where, if I want to raise something on behalf of one of my constituents from Afghanistan, they won't deal with it. I can't email the department if my constituent is from Afghanistan. Even if it's about a partner visa of an Australian citizen, you have to fill out this stupid web form that no-one replies to. I understand that the department cannot respond to queries on the more than 220,000 people who have applied for humanitarian visas. I do understand that, but it is not acceptable to condemn to a web form Australian citizens who are inquiring about their husbands, wives and children from Afghanistan. They need to be treated like everyone else. That's one for the secretary if he's listening at home.

On the partner visas, I do believe that our government must not continue the approach of the past, and I commend the Minister for Home Affairs for initiating substantive review of migration. Partner visas need to be uncoupled from the annual migration program. We have to stop this farce. Twice the parliament, under Prime Minister Hawke and Prime Minister Howard, tried to get legislation through the Senate to give the minister the power to cap partner visas, and on both occasions the Senate rejected it, so no government has the power to cap partner visas. They should be demand driven.

Australians should have a right to fall in love with someone from overseas and bring their husband, wife or partner here in a reasonable time. They should not have to wait three or four or five or six or seven years if they fall in love with someone. We have about the highest fee in the world—$8,000—if you want to bring your loved one here. We make a lot of money off that fee, so surely we can do better than three years. I look forward to the migration review and to seeing us finally make some proper changes that will get these waiting times back down to where they were—roughly around a year—when we were last in government and left office, before the Liberals created this appalling mess. I commend the ministers on the actions that they're now starting to take to clean up the mess, but we need to keep doing better.

House adjourned at 20:00