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

I move:

That the Senate take note of the document.

I have a series of Migration Act reports here today. This report is on a topic similar to the last one. It has to do with a pledge by the Prime Minister on changes to the Migration Act which required reports to be tabled by the Department of Immigration and Citizenship on the processing of protection visa claims. The previous report I spoke to was about the time taken to process claims before the Refugee Review Tribunal.

There is a key factor in this report that I would like to emphasise. But, firstly, if we look at the overall statistics we note that 1,534 protection visa applications were decided in the 90-day period. We are reminded that there are many protection visa applicants amongst us in the community, some of them with little or no support whilst their claims are being assessed. This highlights the irrationality of having a selective mandatory detention regime and is an opportunity to highlight the Democrats continuing determination to see the mandatory detention regime abolished.

Of the 1,534 protection visa applications decided in the period covered by this report, 81.5 per cent were finalised within the 90-day time frame, which obviously means 18.5 per cent were not finalised within the time frame. That translates to 284 people out of the 1,534. It is worth noting that the number of applications on hand that had yet to be determined but were outside the 90-day period was 325, which is up from the 288 in the previous reporting period. So we have a total of over 600 people whose claims had not been assessed by the department within the 90-day period.

Part B of the report lists those visa applications where the initial decision had not been finalised by the department, of which 325 had not been finalised within the three-month period. I am not so concerned about those where the department is responsible for the delay—it says there are 19 of the 325 where the department is responsible, so the department can say, ‘Out of those 325, we were not responsible for 306 of them; it was not our fault that the delay took more than 90 days.’

Looking through the brief reasons given, I note that 92 of those cases where the delay has been over 90 days are due to what is quaintly called ‘external factors’ such as an external agency, or a security assessment from a relevant agency, which in most cases would mean an ASIO assessment. I do not have a problem with ASIO assessments being made of every protection visa application, but what is apparent from this is that 92 of those 325 were delayed because of security assessments by ASIO. Looking through the dates here we note that in many cases it is not just an extra week or two. We have seven or eight applications going back to 2002 and 2003. These applications are now three or four years old. The original reason for the delay may not have been ASIO; it may have been that they needed to wait before the determination could be made because they were temporary protection visa holders. This highlights the absurdity of waiting until the end of the process before ASIO starts its work. But there are many others which are not temporary protection visa holders claiming protection visas which go back to 2005; another claim goes back to 2004.

People have been waiting for two years or more for an ASIO or security assessment to be finalised. These are vulnerable people and we need to be looking at ways to speed up that aspect of the process. I am well aware that it is something outside the hands of the immigration department directly, but it is within the hands of the government as a whole. This report highlights this as a key area where we need to be focusing on improving the speed of assessment. Often, these people who are waiting have had a lot of trauma; this continuing insecurity in their lives just compounds that trauma.

Question agreed to.