Sophie Scamps (Mackellar, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Minister for Home Affairs. Last year, former Victorian police commissioner Christine Nixon was commissioned to investigate Australia's migration system. In your own words, that system is currently being used to facilitate 'some of the worst crimes that can be conducted', such as human trafficking and sex slavery. It was promised that this report would be made public before the last budget. Why hasn't the report been publicly released yet, and when will it be released?

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

I really genuinely thank the member for Mackellar for this question. She's right; there are some absolutely terrible things that we inherited in the immigration system, and there is a very large volume of work occurring on this matter at the moment. If I can just give the parliament a little bit of context, we arrived in government a year ago to find the immigration system in an absolute mess. We had a million unprocessed visas in the system and we had an explosion of low-wage temporary migration that we saw under the Leader of the Opposition, when he was running this portfolio. And, as the member points out, we had clear evidence that this system was being used to facilitate terrible crimes that I don't think anyone in this parliament would defend. The worst of those were instances of human trafficking and sexual exploitation, and this broken migration system was right at the heart of those crimes being committed, right under the nose of the Leader of the Opposition sitting opposite me.

There is an enormous amount of work underway at the moment to address these concerns. So it wasn't just the Nixon review, although I'll speak to that in just a second. We asked Australian Border Force to stand up a new task force to address some of these issues, Operation Inglenook. Operation Inglenook has been enormously successful. They have done just over 50 major disruptions of incidents where they believe that some of these issues are present in Australia at the moment. They've stopped people at the border. They have cancelled visas. They've dealt with a number of very shoddy migration agents who we know are at the centre of this problem. So there has been some very good, practical action.

But of course the system itself has facilitated this, and that's why I asked Christine Nixon, who is probably the toughest cop that we've seen, certainly in Victoria, to do this review. I'd like to just acknowledge her work. It's been very much of assistance to the government in thinking about how we're going to address these issues. So the government is actively considering the recommendations of the review at the moment. We will release the review and the government's response to that review shortly. I'm very happy to speak to the member in private before the review is released and also afterwards to talk to her about some of these very important issues facing our country.