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

I will respond briefly to that and save a bit of time by foreshadowing an amendment that I will move. The argument Senator Scullion put—and I appreciate he is representing the minister and is not the minister directly responsible—about needing to allow sufficient time for people to get an understanding of what it is to be an Australian and those sorts of things are nice-sounding words and a nice-sounding concept, but what does it mean in practice? We are making laws that people are required to meet.

The issue goes back in part to the point I was making before which, if I understand the minister’s answer to my previous point, he actually confirmed. People will not need to reside here for four years if they have completed just three months service in the permanent forces of the Commonwealth. Spending three months in the permanent forces of the Commonwealth is a fairly intensive activity. It may be that you are not getting a full understanding of all of those other things, whatever they might be—and they are always things we cannot quite nail down—about what it is to be an Australian. Three months is not necessarily a lot of time to do that, particularly if those three months are spent as a permanent member of the ADF. It is a nice rhetorical flourish, but it does not actually make the case for what is wrong with the current period of two years. Why does it need to be doubled to four years?

I emphasise that the change that is made of enabling part of that to be residency on a temporary visa is a welcome change and reflects the significant shift in the nature of our migration program. I wish there were a much greater acceptance and acknowledgement of that shift in public debate around migration issues. The number of people who came here on permanent residency visas in the last year, for example—that is what people normally think of when thinking of migrants and potential future citizens—is far smaller. I think it is about a third or even a quarter of the number of people who come here on temporary residency but residency nonetheless and long-term residency in many cases. Many of those then transition to permanent visas. The bulk of our annual migration program—of residency visas, anyway—issued each year is people on temporary visas. They have long-term temporary residency and residency rights, usually with work rights, Medicare entitlements and the like, although not always.

It is very different from the way the Prime Minister announced the change of the name of the department to the Department of Immigration and Citizenship—the idea of a progression, with people migrating and then becoming citizens. The world does not work in that nice straight-line way anymore. The fact that we have such a large proportion of people on temporary residency visas demonstrates that. The fact that we now have so many people who are dual citizens demonstrates that. The fact that we have hundreds of thousands of Australians living overseas—I think the diaspora is estimated at around a million—also demonstrates that. It is much more dynamic than the linear approach we used to have. That is another reason why a much more substantial case needs to be made.

This also provides me with the opportunity to raise a core problem with the government’s approach, which is reflected in the amendment I will move shortly, of providing certain refugees with only temporary visas. Some people who have been accepted as refugees and given refugee visas in Australia have been given five-year or three-year temporary visas. When that visa has expired they have been entitled only to another temporary visa. We have people who are recognised as refugees and are living in the community but are not entitled to permanent residency. I believe that the time in Australia of all of those people should be counted as if they were permanent residents, as it is only because of the politics surrounding asylum seekers—some of which we debated earlier today—that those people are in that situation.

That also cuts across the argument the government are putting forward. I will touch on that again in slightly more detail when I speak later, but this is a core part of the legislation and it is worth trying to get on the record—at least trying to draw out of the government on the record—what possible rationale they have for what they are doing and what the potential consequences are. Whilst the recognition of temporary residents in Australia goes some way to encouraging citizenship, for all the talk about encouraging citizenship stretching out the time period to four years works against that. Without a case being put, it is hard to see how we could do anything other than support the ALP amendment.