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

Australia has an ableist immigration system which deliberately provides for discrimination based on disability. We are seeing many migrant families on temporary visas, including many who are on pathways to permanent residency, at risk of deportation simply because a family member has a disability. This includes families with disabled children, even when those children were born in Australia. Yet Labor's policy says:

People with disability have the same rights as all Australians and Labor believes that governments should help remove barriers to the full exercise of those rights …

Well, here's a barrier. Discrimination on the grounds of disability is grossly unfair and it is inhumane. It is, unfortunately, not unlawful under the Migration Act, because that act is specifically exempted from the Disability Discrimination Act.

This kind of blatant discrimination belongs in the dustbin of history. Labor has an opportunity to put it where it should be—in that dustbin—to end the ableism in Australia's migration system and to ensure that disabled people on temporary visas who were born here have a right to stay here and that disabled people who want to come to Australia are not discriminated against based on their disability. The exemption of the Migration Act from the Disability Discrimination Act needs to be removed, and it needs to be removed now. It is within Labor's capacity to do this, and I urge the government to end the ableism in Australia's immigration system and remove that exemption for the Migration Act.