Murray Watt (Queensland, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry) Share this | Hansard source

I'm very familiar with the issue. It was obviously in the various newspapers today. The point I'm making is that, unlike the former government, this government is actually dealing with the extreme visa processing backlog that it inherited. As I said, in the short time we've been in office we have got the backlog of visa applications down to 600,000 from the one million we inherited. How did we do that? By actually putting more staff in the system to process those visas. Staff to support the visa system decreased by 20 per cent from 2015-16 until we came to government. That's the answer to the question. (Time expired)