Andrew Bartlett (Queensland, Australian Democrats) Share this | Hansard source

There have been some useful points made by both speakers in this disallowance debate thus far. Certainly the Democrats concur with a lot of what the Labor Party said in relation to criticisms of the government’s record on investing in training. The number of apprentices and trainees has declined. The number of students enrolled in vocational education and training in 2004 declined. We have had a reduced overall public investment in universities and TAFEs as a proportion of GDP. That is a poor record. The Democrats have been critical on many occasions of the government’s failure to adequately invest in skills training, whether it is in universities, TAFE or other vocational education.

But, as Senator Scullion said—and I think he even faintly perhaps acknowledged that there is some substance to that concern—we are dealing with what the reality is now. Complaining about what the current circumstance is does not help to solve the problem. There is no doubt that there is a shortage and an inability to fill some of the places that are around. Simply complaining about the government’s failure to adequately invest in this area does not actually fix the problem, related though it may be, of inability to actually fill some of the places.

The point could be made—and, in fact, I think the point has been made by the government—that we have a lot of people coming here on student visas and doing studies at university, so having them come in on another visa to do skills training is somewhat comparable. The Democrats do not oppose student visas at universities. We do have concerns—and, again, I think they are very valid concerns—that the lack of adequate government investment in universities has made those universities too dependent on the income from overseas students. I think that is undesirable. But that is not a criticism of overseas student visas themselves; it is a criticism of the inadequacy of the public funding contribution from the government. I think it is important not to get those things mixed up.

The example that Senator Scullion gave—and it was very kind of him and useful to use examples from my own state of Queensland—was a valid one. Of course, even when there are places available and there are Australians available to take some apprenticeships up, it is more difficult in regional areas. Indeed, it depends on what you call regional. During the last election campaign, actually, I visited a machinery workshop in Maroochydore or Caloundra on the Sunshine Coast just north of Brisbane. It is not normally thought of, certainly, as the outback. It is sometimes called regional, depending on where you draw the line. They were having great difficulty in getting apprentices for some of their places there. I and the Democrats do not have a problem with using our migration system to assist in getting some of those places filled. It will assist in generating wider flow-on jobs. It will assist regional communities in particular through generating wider economic and social benefits for those communities. I think that is an important point to make.

As I said in my contribution to the previous disallowance debate—on the disallowance motion that I moved—the Democrats do have strong support for a healthy migration intake. Whilst there are certainly issues that have to be addressed in managing the environmental impacts of population growth, nonetheless we as a country can do an enormous amount better at being more efficient in how we use resources in order to counterbalance the fairly mild increase in population that is coming as a result of our migration program.

The overall number that we are bringing in at the moment, which is quite high even by historic standards in Australia, should be emphasised because it still needs to be made part of the migration debate. The fertility rate, if it continues to decline in the sort of trend that it has over the last 10 to 15 years, will lead to us having a stabilised population by the middle of this century. I think that is an appropriate thing to aim for in terms of environmental sustainability and to ensure that the economic and social benefits that come from a well-managed migration program and a sizeable migration program continue to occur.

I believe it is important to make some of those wider comments about the migration program during debates like this. In recent times there has been debate, certainly following the disturbances in the Cronulla shire prior to Christmas and, indeed, in the last few days following some of the absurd overreaction overseas to the publication of some cartoons in newspapers, originally in Denmark and then elsewhere. Those sorts of incidents always spark up debate again about multiculturalism: who we should bring into this country, how many people, where from, what the mix of them should be and, for some people, whether we should have people coming at all, certainly with regard to the sorts of numbers that we have coming at the moment or from particular regions.

There is an understandable sensitivity about engaging with some of those topics, but I believe that we—certainly people like me—need to engage with them. For a number of years, the position of the Democrats—the party as a whole—has been to support a sizeable migration intake and that we should be more strongly promoting the benefits of it. We should not be shy about that. We need to actually confront head-on some of the apprehension in the community, because it is quite understandable.

The concerns raised in the context of just this visa include whether or not apprenticeships that Australians could have will go to people coming from overseas. The government speaker, Senator Scullion, I think adequately addressed that concern, but it is understandable that people would have it. We need to confront that and reassure people about that. Of course, people would feel resentful if they thought, ‘My kids can’t get a job and they can’t get an apprenticeship, and we’re bringing in people from overseas to take the jobs.’ That is not the case and we need to make it clear that that is not what is happening and that is not what this visa is about. We need to confront that directly and acknowledge that that is a legitimate concern, not just dismiss it as coming from people who are anti-migrant. I do not think there is enough of that in the migration debate. I appreciate that this disallowance motion is about a specific visa. I am certainly not accusing the movers of it in the Labor Party of having that motivation. To some extent, we confine our comments in this debate to the nature of the specific visa, as we did with the last disallowance.

I think we cannot compartmentalise these issues too much, because there does need to be a greater engagement with the community concerns about our migration program as a whole and about the size of the intake, particularly when you consider the very large intake of people on temporary residency visas. If I remember correctly, that is a point that Professor Hugo from South Australia has made. For all the focus on how many people come here as migrants—and, as I said, the number is quite large currently, even by historical standards; it is around 140,000 in this financial year—the number of temporary residents coming in is, I think, likely to be 450,000 in this financial year. So they are quite large numbers.

I believe the evidence is very clear that Australia has benefited enormously—socially, economically and culturally—from the sizeable migration intake over the last 50 to 60 years, but it is also clear that there is still sizeable community concern about aspects of it and that aspects of it need to be engaged with fully. We cannot just have large numbers of people coming here and not accept that there are management issues to deal with about that. There are certainly environmental issues to deal with that we do not manage adequately. We do not manage adequately environmental and resource management for the people who are here, let alone the ones who are coming next.

A related issue is the failure of governments at state and federal level to adequately invest in infrastructure in general—not just education and training but wider community infrastructure. Bringing in more people at a time when we are failing to adequately put public investment in that infrastructure is a problem, but it is a problem with the failure of the policy of the government. I believe it should not be reversed around to say: ‘We can’t take migrants in because we don’t have enough of this or enough of that.’ Those aspects need to be acknowledged.

Another aspect also needs to be addressed. It is a concern that I have with this visa. It is not a sufficiently big enough concern for me to support the disallowance, but it is a concern that still needs to be raised, and that is the overall amount of settlement assistance that people get. If we want to get maximum benefit for our country, our communities, our regions, our economy, our society and the multicultural nature of Australia, we need to assist people in every possible way when they first come to the country. Whilst we have done well in various areas with settlement programs, we have not done perfectly. We are getting some more gaps and some more failures in that area. That applies to the humanitarian intake. I will not divert by repeating the concerns that I have raised many times about the absurd refusal to adequately help refugees on temporary protection visas, but I think we are also not doing as well as we need to with our other humanitarian intake.

We are also not doing as well as we need to with people in the skilled area coming in. The fact is that people coming in on this visa have to have the financial capacity to meet not just their course fees but also their living expenses, travel and other costs for themselves, their spouses and dependent children, and adequate health insurance. They are people who have a bit of money to back themselves up. They have to have the educational qualifications and skills background.

The fact that people might have a bit of money and education and are not a refugee from a camp in the middle of Africa does not mean that they do not need settlement assistance. We need to do better with that. It is an investment from the public and government side of things. Early on it is of course a cost, but it is a cost that should be seen as an investment that will pay off much more significantly in the long term. I believe with regard to this visa—and I am happy to be corrected if I am wrong—that people getting it will not have access to government settlement services. We are talking about people coming in to get trained in skills. They will still be basically unskilled immigrants, under the age of 35, I believe, moving to a different country and into regional areas—hopefully into areas quite remote from the capital cities—with no broader settlement support services other than what the employer might provide. That is not ideal, and that is an aspect that needs to be looked at, both with this visa and others more widely. Nonetheless, people getting this visa are required to have vocational English. As I said, I understand that they need to be less than 35 years of age and already be sponsored by an Australian employer or organisation which has to have approval as a trade skills training visa sponsor.

There are clearly benefits to areas that come from these visas being filled. People regularly comment—partly in response to environmental concerns and other issues to do with adequate distribution and viability of services—that we need to be trying to get a higher proportion of our migration intake into regional areas. That is easy to say; it is not so easy to do. But one piece of moderate credit I have to give the government is that they have made some advances in recent years in finding formulas—to some extent in cooperation with the states—that have meant that more migrants are going to regional areas, to states other than New South Wales and to places other than Sydney, reducing some of the pressures there, and are assisting in improving the economic and social viability of other communities. That is a positive aspect that I think still has a lot of room for further gains, but wherever there is an opportunity for that to be done, whether it is through this visa or others, it is one we need to seek to undertake.

In some ways it is fair enough to call this visa a bandaid to meet some of the skills shortages, but a bandaid is still better than no bandaid, and it does goes some way to addressing the problem. The problem is, in significant part, of the government’s making. Senator Scullion said that it is ‘of the government’s making’ in generating a good economy. He forgot, I am sure inadvertently, to mention the Democrats’ contribution to having that good economy through our cooperative approach over the last nine years in the Senate, enabling most legislation to go through and, indeed, improving some of the government’s legislation, not least their workplace relations legislation that enabled a more harmonious and effective employment market. Unfortunately, I think we will soon see the consequences of us not being able to do that with the most recent workplace changes. However, apart from the cause of the overall operation of the economy generating this, there is no doubt that inadequate investment by the government in some of these areas of skills development is also part of the reason. But that does not mean that we should not try and address the situation that confronts us at the moment.

So whilst the Labor Party raised some valid concerns, I do not believe they are sufficient for us to support removing this visa altogether. The clarification Senator Scullion gave did address some of those concerns, although not all. Some of the other concerns that Labor expressed are totally valid, but they are still nonetheless separate from the specifics of the visa itself. I nonetheless reinforce my concern about the need, wherever possible, to provide broader settlement assistance to people. We need to be looking at that—even with people coming in on temporary visas—and perhaps call it something other than settlement assistance. It is in our interests as a country to make sure that people do have as much support as possible in those early stages when they move here from overseas, particularly if they are going to regional areas and particularly if they are younger. That will help them, but I think it helps us as well—and that is a concern that I have. It is one that I think will help alleviate not all but more of the community unease about aspects of migration. You will never address all of those concerns, and you would not want to with some of them, because they are concerns that I believe are inappropriate. But there are some valid aspects to community concerns about aspects of the migration program. We need to more positively promote and sell the gains to the entire community from large components of our migration program. I do not believe we do that enough, and we need to look at ways to do it more and more.

That does not mean that any sized migration program is desirable. The calls from some in the business community to massively ramp up our migration intake are simply unrealistic and absurd. Suggestions of doubling our migration intake, of aiming for a 40 million population or things like that, are unsustainable in all sorts of ways. But a good healthy intake is a positive for the country and is clearly workable, and the benefits that it has produced are there for all to see. However, that does not mean that we should turn a blind eye to some of the potential negatives that need management, and I think we can do a better job there.

I have raised a few side issues in addressing this disallowance motion, but I believe from what has been put on the record that, on balance, this visa is worth supporting. That is not to say that other problems do not need addressing, but I think the visa itself is worth supporting and I think it will be a net positive to many communities and to Australia—like, I might say, so much else of our migration program.

Question negatived.