Murray Watt (Queensland, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations) Share this | Hansard source

As I said, as a result of the actions this government has taken, we are seeing migration numbers fall in Australia compared to what they were when we came to office, as a result of the policies of the opposition. In fact, to give you a few more statistics on this, Senator Roberts, there were 10,000 more overseas student arrivals in Australia in January 2019, when—guess who—Mr Dutton was in charge of our borders. More importantly, the number of student visa applications in Australia has dropped by 30 per cent compared with this time last year. This is proof that our measures are working, despite the coalition voting to block our plan to cap overseas student numbers. We've all seen, over the last couple of years, the results of Mr Dutton leaving us with a broken migration system—the Albanian crime gangs who have been rorting our visa system and more still. We have been dealing with that and cleaning it up, and we're now seeing the results with migration numbers falling.