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

I rise just briefly to close the debate. That was a slightly political contribution from Senator Mason, so I probably need to respond to a couple of his points. Firstly, I accept points that people have made. Indeed, I have called a number of times for the streamlining and rationalisation of visa categories. As may be evidenced by people trying to interpret this debate, it is an incredibly complex area and all of the different subclasses, subparagraphs and criteria that flow around the place and are continually changing are absolutely bamboozling.

I think we have about 150 separate visa subclasses in Australia, which I think is an absurd and excessive number of different categories to have for people that are simply trying to migrate to Australia or to come here for temporary purposes. You need some different criteria, but I think having 150 is getting quite over the top. I support rationalisation; I just do not support one component of this rationalisation, because I think it downplays the family component.

Certainly, it helps people integrate if they have an increased chance of getting a job when they get here—there is no doubt about that—but that does not guarantee effective and comprehensive integration. Having recognition for the family who are here is another key avenue and, I would argue, one more likely to be a solid, long-term, more wide-ranging mechanism for integration.

So it is not a matter of skills being the way to go or of family being the way to go; I think it is a matter of getting a better balance. It may well be that the balance was out of whack under Labor; I think it is now out of whack in the other direction under Liberal. I think we need to balance them out more.

The following point has been made many times, so I shall only make it briefly now. One of the reasons we have to have such a large skilled intake is the lack of investment over more than 10 years by the coalition government in skilling the people who were already here—and that includes many migrants who, after they arrive, need continual reskilling, as do Australian-born people. It is, in part, because we have underinvested in that area that the requirement for the skilled area to be such a big component in the migration program has occurred.

Having said that, we will always need to—and we always should—look to bring skilled migrants here. Australia has been built, in large part, on the contribution of migrant labour, both skilled and unskilled. That in itself generates prosperity, and so creates more demand and more need for those further skills and that further labour. So it is a self-generating process, generating prosperity and the need for more migration. But we also need to do better at skilling the people who are here—migrants who are recent arrivals and long-term members of the Australian community—and we do not do that well enough.

But this is not just about getting people here as economic units and getting them into the workforce. We are undervaluing the family. It is particularly ironic, coming from a government that would normally be seen to be more likely to be spruiking the central role of the family, that we are undervaluing the contribution and the role of family, both in assisting migrants to be grounded in the Australian community and in that wider role of integration—that of maximising the effectiveness of multiculturalism and ensuring that all Australians benefit most effectively and completely from that. So I think we have to do a lot more to get the balance right.

That will not be helped by recycling some of what I think is basically mythology. Even if it is mythology spruiked by Barry Jones himself, it is still mostly mythology. As most people know, the idea of locking up the Greek vote, or the Arab or the Lebanese or the Chinese vote, or any other vote—the gay vote, the English migrant vote, the New Zealander vote—is grossly overstated. It just does not work that way. You might be able to do a little bit here and there, but the notion that there are these big clumps of people that you can shift around as voter blocs is, in my view, grossly overstated. I think Barry Jones, whilst he has lots of skills, is not necessarily most skilled in assessing that aspect of the political process, if I might say so.

So the core concerns of the Democrats remain with regard to this. Certainly, we will continue to push for greater recognition of a family component in the migration program. As an aside, I note that, amongst the many changes the federal government has made over the last decade and a bit, the one that remains seriously problematic is the major cutback in and continual capping of aged parent migration. There are waiting lists of over 20 years for the non-contributory aged parent visa category. Obviously, a wait of 20 years, in relation to aged parents, is less than satisfactory.

I think that is a terrible undervaluing of the role that parents and families play in integration and of their wider contribution to the Australian community. Even if they are not all going to come here and go out and get jobs and become doctors and nurses straightaway, there are other contributions that migrants make and that parents and grandparents make. I think that is an area that the government needs to reconsider and re-examine.

Clearly, on this occasion, this disallowance motion is not going to be successful. But I think it is important to continue to highlight the need to give greater weight to the role of family in the migration system and also in what is quite a complex point system that applies to various visa categories. To downgrade or remove the family linkage is, I think, a mistake.