Brian Mitchell (Lyons, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

MITCHELL () (): My question is to the Minister for Home Affairs. What were the findings of the Nixon report and how is the Albanese Labor government acting to clean up the serious issues of visa exploitation that it inherited?

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

I thank the member for Lyons for his question and for his longstanding interest in this matter. In January this year I asked former police chief commissioner Christine Nixon to undertake a rapid review into the exploitation of Australia's visa system. What this review found was utterly and truly shocking. Christine Nixon found that our migration system today has serious and systemic problems. She found that the system has been used to perpetrate some of the worst crimes that there are—sexual slavery, human trafficking—and that Australia, because of problems in our migration system, has actually become a target for organised crime around the world. Christine Nixon also found that the root causes of this problem were delay and dysfunction in our migration system and an almost complete lack of enforcement of the rules of that system. She said:

I have been appalled by the abuses of sexual exploitation, human trafficking and other organised crime that have been presented to me … It is clear that gaps and weaknesses in Australia's visa system are allowing this to happen.

We came to office with a migration system that was fundamentally broken and we don't have to look far to see the person who broke it. He's sitting opposite me in the Leader of the Opposition's chair. For almost all of the last decade the opposition leader oversaw our immigration system, first as Minister for Immigration and Border Protection and later as Minister for Home Affairs. What really makes me angry about these abuses and this exploitation is the fact that the opposition leader has styled himself as a tough man on borders. When we actually look at the facts, what he did was cut compliance officers in our department in half.

Milton Dick (Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The member for Deakin is warned.

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

It is not possible for anyone on the other side of politics to claim that they did not have great visibility of these problems. What we saw while they were in government was almost a report a year, including one done by one of the junior ministers in the portfolio during the time that they were in office, which detailed the different issues that Christine Nixon found in her report. Now, the evidence was there. The opposition leader did nothing. Instead, he cut funding and made the problem worse.

Our government has a very different approach. We take these issues extremely seriously. That is why just over a week ago we came forward with a comprehensive set of policies that will help the Australian government do a better job of doing this. What was the response from the opposition leader when we came forward with these policies? We didn't hear contrition. We didn't hear any taking of responsibility. What we heard instead was a bizarre array of the seven stages of grief. Then we heard that he was either being accused of being too tough or too soft. That's not what we're accusing you of, Leader of the Opposition. What we're accusing you of is incompetence.