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

I note that interjection from Senator Evans. And it is true with regard to the humanitarian intake as well. I think it is worth making that point. One of the downsides of the debate that we did have about refugees and asylum seekers, apart from all the blatant, disgraceful vilification, was this suggestion that it was a drain on the economy. Sure, there are costs; I do not dispute that. But there is a cost every time a person has a child. People chew up resources, and children chew up a lot of resources, as any parent knows—as society should know, with the cost of educating and schooling any child. But any suggestion that we should stop people having children because they cost too much to educate would be rightly laughed out of the arena. To use such crude arguments against having migrants or refugees coming here is just as ludicrous. Of course there are costs, and of course we need to take those into account and assess them all, and look at the wider economic, social infrastructure and environmental issues that come into play. But to simply make blatant statements and say they are a cost is ludicrous. The minister was right in emphasising that even the humanitarian intake, where people can have significant issues in relation to overcoming past trauma, English issues, major social dislocation issues, family separation issues and settlement issues, in general costs money; but it is an investment, in the same way education is an investment.

To me this comes to a core point. One of the aspects of the significant increase in the proportion of our migration intake that are coming as long-term temporary migrants is that our settlement support and wider welcoming measures, if you want to use that term, have not adjusted properly. Lots of people when they come here, whether as permanent migrants or long-term temporary arrivals, do fine—they come into a job, they have family here, they can plug straight in. But plenty of them do not. Plenty of international students are actually extremely isolated and are quite at risk; many of them are quite vulnerable. Many of them have had parents go hugely into debt to make sacrifices to provide this opportunity for their children. It is certainly not cheap to be an overseas student to pay for your education fees, let alone the costs of getting here, the costs of housing and all of those things when they arrive. And if they run into difficulties, if they fail too many subjects, if they get caught working 20.1 hours instead of 20 hours, they can have their visa cancelled like that and they can lose the whole lot. They can literally have their lives ruined, particularly if they end up in detention, as some of them do—they cop a debt as part of that; they have a mark on their record as though they have been jailed. It can cause horrendous destruction of people’s lives, a cost far in excess of an appropriate penalty for any mistake they may have made with regard to breaching their visas or simply not passing their courses. We need to take those things into account, particularly for what is an export industry. There are always going to be circumstances where these things happen, but I think we can reduce them, whether it is in the student area or in the many other areas where people arrive on temporary visas, by just providing more short-term resources to make sure people are not isolated, that they are plugged in somewhere, that they have support, that they know where to go to get help early on. That early investment in the arrival of these huge numbers of people—because they are not cogs in a machine; they do contribute to Australia economically, socially and culturally—like education itself can bring enormous benefits to Australia down the track, as we have seen from so many who have come here under the humanitarian and family intakes. I do think it is important to have more resources and to re-examine how we deploy existing resources with regard to arrivals.

Another aspect of the significant increase in the migration intake is the potential for public backlash. There is no doubt that that exists. The apprehension about large numbers of people coming here is understandable. That is why I think it is better to have an open debate about it, and that is my understanding of why the minister has called for an open debate rather than just pushing it all through and hoping nobody really notices. There is a real risk that factors can combine. I am certainly seeing a growing number of people somehow or other suggesting that we need to reduce the migration intake because of climate change—because more people will come here, so we will have more emissions. Now, people consume resources wherever they are on the planet. Whether they consume resources and are involved in generating greenhouse emissions in Australia or elsewhere, it is a global issue. To me the issue is the amount of emissions everybody is generating, not where they happen to live when those emissions occur. But to blame too many migrants for greenhouse impacts or for us not meeting our climate change targets is an easy argument to make, if you do not think about it too much. There is a strong thread within parts—certainly not all—of the environment movement that really heavily pushes this line.

The reason I became immigration spokesperson for the Democrats when I first got elected to the Senate was that we had a migration policy with one line in it—which none of the then senators supported—courtesy of a departed former senator, calling for zero net migration. It made it rather hard to argue that we should be allowing refugees and boat people to stay, when we had a policy that said no-one is actually allowed to stay until someone else leaves.

We had a policy that I think was not logical, and I was very pleased to take on the portfolio so I could help make that policy logical again. But that thread of thought about zero net migration still survives in parts of the environment movement, and climate change is the latest thing people hook onto—and the environmentalist side is my side of politics. Similarly, there is undoubtedly still a thread within the trade union movement that continues to run the line that migrants take jobs and drive down conditions—arguments that were run back in the late 19th century and early 20th century. When we are, I think rightly, considering taking in people from some Pacific island nation both to assist the economies of those nations and to meet labour shortages here in my own state of Queensland, that has undertones of some arguments that were put forward from the union movement there around the early 1900s.

If an argument is being put from an environmental angle, or from a workers’ rights and conditions angle, and there is also general unease about rising housing prices, and migration is being blamed for increasing demand too much on housing and pushing up prices, and there is a general unease about rising costs in general, these things can all knit together to create a fairly nasty mix. That is why I think it is valuable to have a public debate about it, to be open about these things. I am not saying that everyone who expresses concerns about environmental impacts or about workers’ rights is just some bigot; not at all. What I am saying is that those concerns need to be addressed factually. A really strong leadership role needs to be played by everybody in public life, not just by politicians but by people across the board in any sort of public position to counter some of that mythology, to highlight the undoubted benefits that migration provides to us across the board. I would also make a plug here, again, for the family intake, because that was significantly reduced.

I note that Senator Ellison moved a motion calling for the retirement visa group to be given the opportunity to apply for permanent visas. I think that is an area worth considering, without making the obvious point that the previous government had plenty of time to do that and did not. The previous government also put a very severe cap on the ability of parents and aged parents to come here and reunite with their families, unless they could pay a very large fee for their visa. This was the so-called non-contributory parent category. It is very small—I think it was 1,000. It has an enormous waiting list for people who do not have a lot of money, and it is pleasing that there has been an increase in that. But I think it is difficult to be making an argument for one group without also looking at the parents of those people who have been here for a long time. (Time expired)