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

We have had quite a lot of debate in recent times in this place and in the wider community about asylum seeker issues and so-called boat people. Whilst I welcome the outcome of the latest legislation being withdrawn, I do have a concern that with so much political and public focus on boat people we are actually ignoring a much wider issue that needs the attention of all of us. It should be remembered how many people are entering Australia now through our various migration programs as well as on visitor visas.

I will look at the numbers of people that arrived just in the 2004-05 financial year. There were nearly 78,000 permanent economic entry visas, and that increased to nearly 100,000 in the following year. In the family stream there were nearly 42,000 people. In the humanitarian offshore stream there were over 13,000 people. Only around 5½ thousand of those, I might mention, were actually refugees; the other 7½ thousand were broader humanitarian cases. That is the permanent intake, which was already close to 135,000 people—and growing. Add on top of that people coming in on temporary residency visas, which can be for as long as four years. We had nearly 94,000—mainly skilled workers. We also had 175,000 student visas, which, again, can be for a long period, and 105,000 working holiday visas. That adds up to over 500,000 people coming here in a single year on various forms of either permanent or temporary residence.

Compare that with the number of people that arrived by boat, which was under 100. So, looking at what area we need to be devoting our focus to in properly handling and examining people coming into this country, and dealing with them effectively when they are going to be living here for prolonged periods of time, we really have our focus on completely the wrong area.

As we heard from the previous speaker, suggestions were made by a government member in the other place linking boat people with terrorist threats that are happening at the moment. Every single one of that group of fewer than 100 people that arrived here by boat sought to be detected and declared their presence as soon as possible, and every single one of them would have had their circumstances more closely assessed than virtually every single one of the half a million people that came here on various forms of residency visas.

I am not trying to transfer a scare campaign to the half a million people; nor am I trying to suggest that that is an inappropriate number. Unlike some in the community, I am unashamedly in support of the high migration intake. What I am saying is, with such a large number of people coming here from all over the globe—including those trying to fill labour market vacancies in various parts of the country, in skilled and, indeed, unskilled positions—it is in our interests, for social harmony purposes, economic purposes and environmental purposes, that we put a lot more effort into engaging with and assisting those people and getting our settlement services working effectively.

I believe we need to be devoting much more attention to that area instead of focusing all the political energy on a very small number of asylum seekers who should just be dealt with according to law—who should have their claims for protection assessed and be able or unable to stay on the basis of whether their claim for protection is genuine. That should be cut and dried. Instead of having all the energy and all the angst focused on them, with all of the completely misleading suggestions that they are any sort of security risk, we should be looking at the half a million people that come in here as residents, let alone the 3½ million that come here as visitors each year. In terms of border protection and border security, it is not asylum seekers who are a threat to the border. They declare themselves straight away and they are assessed more thoroughly than anybody else. The issue is the millions of people that come here each year on visitor visas and the half a million who stay for prolonged periods on various forms of residency visas.

We already have settlement programs for migrants and refugees, and I am quite willing to acknowledge that in many cases they have worked relatively effectively. Since 1945 Australia has taken around six million permanent migrants, including over 645,000 refugees. That is quite a lot. But, comparing that to the half a million people we now take each year in permanent and temporary residency, we are actually taking a much greater proportion of people each year than we have had historically. We are at historically high levels of intake at the moment.

When we already have 24 per cent of Australia’s population who are overseas born and 40 per cent with at least one parent born overseas, then any suggestion that we can somehow quarantine ourselves off from the world and only take people from a certain area, a certain religion or a certain background to keep ourselves safe in some way is simply farcical. Even if you were to suggest it was desirable, and I am not, it is just not attainable. If we want to engage with the world culturally, socially and economically, in all those sorts of open ways in a globalised world, then you cannot exclude people from that.

What we must be doing is focusing our attention on dealing with the huge numbers of people who are coming here each year and ensuring that they get better assistance in settling, even if they are only coming here as a student or on the skilled visas for three or four years. Many of those people then stay on and transfer to permanent visas and end up becoming citizens. Even for those who do not, it is much better for us to be ensuring that none of them fall through the cracks and that all of them have the opportunity to engage more effectively with Australian culture, Australian society and Australian understandings of things. I do not think we are doing that job effectively enough. Perhaps what we have done in the past in settlement services has been adequate for the style and nature of our migration and refugee intake, but I think we need to dramatically upgrade it to deal with these new circumstances: the breadth of areas we are taking people from, the wide diversity of reasons that people are coming here and the significant numbers of people who are coming here.

We have areas like the provision of English language tuition through the Adult Migrant Education Program, on site and telephone interpreting and translating. We have some grants to community and service organisations such as migrant resource centres and the Community Settlement Services Scheme. We have an Integrated Humanitarian Settlement Strategy. All of these things have definitely been beneficial. I acknowledge that the actual expenditure on settlement services has gone up in recent years. It has gone up to over $78 million in 2004-05 and that is to be welcomed. But we need to recognise that we are taking in such dramatically increased numbers that the amount spent on settlement services needs to be increased proportionally as well.

Whilst there are clearly special needs for humanitarian and refugee intakes, and we need to be tailoring our services better to meet those needs and those people, we should not forget the needs of the wider migration intake. There is a problem sometimes with settlement services and assistance being too short term and not following through with people to make sure that, in the longer term, their settlement is going well. There is also a problem with some of the settlement services not being tailored enough to the specific needs of where people have come from. We have seen that in recent times with the greater intake of people from Africa who have very different backgrounds and very different issues to deal with, particularly in the humanitarian area. We have not been able to adequately tailor the services to meet those needs.

What I am calling for is a much greater focus on both the resources provided to settlement services and also the effectiveness, the flexibility and the long-term nature of those settlement services—not just for refugee and humanitarian people, although they particularly need more assistance, but also for recently arrived migrants across the board. That would still be a small investment in relative terms but it would pay huge benefits for Australia in the long term. If we do not do that we are much more prone to getting bitten by some of the difficulties that other countries have. We have a good record with multiculturalism in Australia but it did not come about by accident. It came about through strong promotion and genuine investment at government level. That is something that I believe we need to reaffirm and, indeed, strengthen with more political will and more public resources. The Democrats will certainly support any attempt to do that.