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

I thank the Senate, particularly because Senator Nettle expresses support for the bill. I am pleased to hear that. I understand the rationale of the Labor Party in not supporting the bill, as was outlined by Senator Kirk. I appreciate the indications she gave that the minister, Senator Evans, is examining some of the issues that are raised around complementary protection and the current inadequacies and quite enormous inefficiencies in the ministerial discretion system. I recognise that the minister would want to consult widely and do everything properly, because it is not simple to get this right, but it does need to be done. The purpose of this legislation—and, I might say, a number of other private senators bills relating to migration that I have on the Notice Paperis to advance the agenda and put forward the case as to why change is needed.

Frankly, if the government can come up with another way of doing it that they think achieves the goal more effectively, I would be pleased. I do not have any great sense of my way being the only way. I do think that action needs to be taken to address these issues and if the government can find a better way then I am quite happy about that and supportive of it. So I welcome the indications that have been given that the minister is examining this area along with a number of others. I think the basic point needs to be made that it is about getting a migration system that is fairer; more efficient and therefore cheaper for the taxpayer; less bureaucratic and less full of red tape; and less opaque than what currently operates for people in these sorts of circumstances.

I think it has been valuable to have this debate, despite my not being successful in getting support for the legislation from either of the major parties, and to get some of these things on the record. I think it has been valuable to hear some of the arguments, including the arguments put forward by Senator Barnett. I appreciate some of the comments he made, but I think the suggestion he made—and I am sure this is what he has been told—that this equates to a mechanism that enables people to jump the queue, is wrong. It does not do that. I think some of those misunderstandings need to be corrected. When the government does make a move in this area—as hopefully they will, in six or 12 months time—these are the sorts of potential misunderstandings that could be put forward, either in good faith or perhaps with less honourable intent. I am certainly not suggesting that in terms of Senator Barnett. Obviously this is an area that has been politically contentious in the past. I think we need to try and take the political point-scoring out of it and look at the substance and facts of the issues.

One of the things that have become very apparent to me while working on this issue for the last 10 years or more is that we are dealing with human beings here; we are not dealing with faceless people who can be used as a political football. The decisions that this parliament makes, and even the words that we use in coming to those decisions, can have—and have had—direct and, in some cases, extremely harmful impacts on innocent people, some of whom have been through horrendous circumstances, and some of whom go through further horrendous circumstances as a direct result of the decisions made, and the words spoken, in this parliament and in the political arena. So we need to try and get the debate as fact based as possible. Adopting complementary protection does not automatically mean that a bunch of people can jump the queue. A quicker decision does not equate to someone jumping the queue; it means that everybody has a clearer circumstance. Those who are successful obviously get a positive result quickly but those who are not successful also have a quicker and clearer result. That is important and desirable in any area of public administration, but certainly with regard to visa applications and the migration system.

It was the decision of the previous government, quite early on in its time, during Minister Ruddock’s period as migration minister, to link the offshore humanitarian program and onshore asylum claims, which were previously dealt with separately with regard to the numbers of people. Frankly, I think that should be looked at so as to reverse that decision because the offshore humanitarian program is something that Australia has had a good record on, even during the Howard years. Despite my very severe criticisms of many aspects of the government’s actions in the migration and refugee area, with regard to the offshore program, broadly speaking it continued to be a positive. It is a program that we quite rightly hold up as something that more countries should seek to emulate. But it is a determined program under which the government decides who they will select. I might say, in the first place, that people are not selected in the order of a queue. One of the reasons that you cannot jump the queue is that there is no queue. People who come here through the humanitarian program do not line up in a nice orderly process, even in terms of a bureaucratic list in the migration department. People do not get refugee visas or offshore humanitarian visas in order of application. It is not a matter of, ‘Well, you’re the next on the queue.’ It does not work that way.

The government makes a decision about where they will take people from, and amongst people in a particular area they then make a smaller decision about who within that group they will take. There is a whole range of criteria that are used in coming to those decisions. Quite a number of those criteria are not related to humanitarian circumstances at all. Some of them are, but some of them are not. It is simply false to say that there is a queue, in the sense that those who have been waiting longest now get their turns; it does not work that way at all. But, even if it did, implementing a complementary protection visa for people who apply in Australia is a different matter, and it would not mean taking anyone else’s place unless the program was structured deliberately to make it that way. That would be a deliberate decision of government, not a consequence of people making a visa application here. It would be no more jumping the queue than somebody coming here on a skilled visa is jumping the queue in relation to a person offshore in a refugee camp.

It is just as absurd to say that someone applying for a complementary protection visa would be taking the place of somebody waiting in a refugee camp as it is to say the same thing about somebody applying for a parent visa, a skilled visa or any other type of visa, unless the government decide to link the two—and then, frankly, that is their decision. It certainly should not be a cause for taking it out on people who are applying for a humanitarian visa here. That misunderstanding needs to be clarified for the purposes of future debate on this issue.

Whilst the majority of the Senate obviously does not support this legislation as it stands—although I recognise some degree of in-principle support with the goals, from the government at least—this debate is not going to go away. As has been made clear by the comments of Senator Kirk, there will be a need to continue to examine this. It is a simple fact. You can talk about the proud record of the previous government as much as you like. I do not particularly want to get into the areas where I disagree and the areas where I agree—that is not the purpose of this debate—but one area where clearly things were not working efficiently is in the area of ministerial discretion. You cannot have a system where an immigration minister has to examine thousands of individual visa applications. It is ludicrous and it is horrendously inefficient. It is just bad public policy. You get inconsistencies, lack of transparency, enormous delays and great cost to the taxpayer and to the applicants and the people supporting them. It does need fixing. This would not fix it in totality but it would go to a clear part of it, particularly the part that makes people apply for visas they know they are not eligible for and go all the way through an appeal process that they know they are going to fail just so they can then seek ministerial discretion.

Once again, I point to the Senate committee reports that I referred to earlier on which highlighted that serious problem and that absurd inefficiency. It is not just chewing up the resources of the minister in having to examine all of those requests for intervention but also chewing up the resources of the tribunals. Every time somebody has to go through this process, because we do not have a clearly defined visa such as a complementary protection visa, means a delay for everybody else. If all of those people were taken out of the system and did not have to go through what is by definition a futile process before they could access ministerial discretion then that would obviously mean that things would flow through more quickly for all the other people who are waiting for decisions from the Migration Review Tribunal or the Refugee Review Tribunal. There would be significant savings and efficiencies to the taxpayer, and increased speed of decisions for everybody in the migration and appeals system. That is something we should be aiming for.

I welcome the indications from the government through Senator Kirk that the new minister is looking at these things. I believe from my own understanding that it is something he is doing, and he does recognise the need to make our system work more fairly and more efficiently. There are a lot of reasons why it does not work as well as it should and could, and they are not all the fault of the previous government. It has built up over a long period of time for a lot of reasons. But it does need fixing and I urge the government to do that as promptly as possible. The sooner it does do that the better the outcome will be for a lot of people who have compelling humanitarian grounds. It is also better for the taxpayer, the economy, society, the community and the overall effectiveness, transparency, fairness and efficiency of the migration system.

Question negatived.