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

I want to go to some matters in the report before the Senate at the moment, which is the 2004-05 annual report of the Department of Immigration and Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs, as it was then. I want to emphasise some of the very valuable information in the report. I take Senator Faulkner’s point about what is not in it and I have spoken on that many times before. There is some valuable information in the report and it is worth mentioning, with all the public focus at the moment on immigration legislation dealing with unauthorised arrivals. If you consider all the fuss, the public debate and the political and policy focus around that group of people and then look at the figures in this report of the numbers of people coming in under a whole range of different visas, I think it has escaped the attention of many in the Australian public how high the migration intake is. That is something I support, I might say, but it is something we need to be more aware of and manage more effectively.

The number of permanent residents under the economic migration stream in the last financial year was nearly 78,000. The number in the family stream coming in as permanent residents was nearly 42,000, of which 33,000 were partners and only 4½ thousand were parents. It is a real problem that there is a continual restriction on the number of people allowed parent visas. For a government that talks about the value of the family, I think that restriction is a very antifamily measure. It also ignores the strong value of having parents around, which can enable migrant families to settle more effectively. It also helps, I might say, to make multiculturalism work more effectively.

In addition, we had 93½ thousand people coming in on temporary residency visas, which can be for as long as four years—57,000 of those in the temporary skilled area and many of which went to what I think Senator Sterle was talking about. We had 175,000 student visas granted in that financial year; nearly 212,000 people on student visas present at one stage during the financial year. The working holiday visa numbers have gone up to the record level of 104,600. If you look at all of those figures, all of which are residents, temporary or permanent, of various sorts—economic entry 78,000: family stream, nearly 42,000; other temporary residents, 94,000; student visas, 175,000; and working holiday visas, 105,000—we are getting close to the half-million mark, and that is before you count all the other visitors.

The total number of other visitor visas—tourists, short-stay business, family visitation, hospital and medical—in addition to all those I have talked about, was 3,588,947. So we have got about four million people coming in. Most of them are short-stay visitors, but around half a million of them are seeking various forms of longer stay or permanent residency. Yet we have this massive focus on and moral panic about a tiny number of people who come in an unauthorised way—people who when seeking asylum immediately seek to be identified, found and assessed. It shows how distorted our debate about immigration issues has been.

I have left out the humanitarian program: in this financial year, we had 13,178 come in under the offshore humanitarian program—only 5½ thousand are actually refugees; the other 7½ thousand are humanitarian—and 4,601 under onshore protection visas. So we have got a very small proportion that are refugees and an even smaller proportion that are asylum seekers. The problem with the massive and distorted focus on asylum seekers and the xenophobic approach to them is that it takes attention away from the much bigger need to properly manage the large numbers that are coming. We need to do better with settlement assistance than we have done, and it needs to be available more widely than it has been in the past, in my view. Such large numbers of people coming in from every corner of the globe reinforces the need to more strongly promote multiculturalism as an essential component of making that mix of people work together better.

Question agreed to.