Nick McKim (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

While we were discussing in here the government's response to people on temporary visas, in terms of the expiry of their visas and in terms of providing income support for many people on temporary visas, the government ministers in here were stalling away and not giving any commitments. I'll just announce on behalf of the government that in real time, only moments ago, they dropped a story to one of the government's favourite 'dropees' at The Australian, Simon Benson, who understands that the Morrison government is 'working on a plan that includes a form of support payment for potentially hundreds of thousands of temporary migrants who stand to lose their jobs in industries such as tourism and hospitality'. The lead of that story also mentions visa extensions being offered to nonresidents. It's such a shame that, rather than the Prime Minister communicating with the Senate and with his ministers in the Senate, the PM's office was off dropping the story to their favourite recipient in The Australian.

This is a good thing that the government are doing here. It's something we are very glad they are doing, and we're very glad that we've been pressuring the government to do it. It is a shame that it's not in this current package. Because it's been dropped to The Australian rather than messaged into the Senate, we obviously have no capacity to ask detailed questions about it, because we simply have no detail about what the package is. It's almost like the Prime Minister's press secretary was listening to the debate in the Senate and went: 'Whoopsie! We left about 1.5 million people out of our coronavirus response. We'll just get on to The Australian really quickly, drop it to Simon Benson and see if we can get ourselves out of trouble.'

But I do want to make a very serious point here to Minister Cormann. In response to one of my previous questions on this issue, he mentioned that the government's focus was on Australians and Australian residents. Well, Minister, a lot of people are about to become effective Australian residents because they simply can't get out of the country, through no fault of their own. As Senator Keneally quite rightly pointed out, this is a public health issue as well as an issue of equity, fairness and humanity. No matter whether someone is ordinarily resident in Australia or ordinarily resident overseas with a temporary visa in Australia, they could still contract coronavirus just as easily as anybody else. If you want to run a comprehensive, holistic public health response to coronavirus, you need to have a financial package supporting everybody in the country so that they can self-isolate. I can't put it any more clearly than that. Your normal tricks are not going to fly here. You're in an emergency. We're all in an emergency together. That includes people in this country on temporary visas.

The story in The Australian appears to reference only people who are on temporary visas and who have lost their jobs as a result of the shutdowns around the coronavirus response. If those are the parameters of the package, it won't go far enough. Everyone who is in Australia right now should be regarded as a resident of this country for the purposes of the coronavirus response, and everybody in that category needs income support so they can have a house or a home in which they can self-isolate should they be required to.