Julie Owens (Parramatta, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Small Business) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Bruce for moving this motion because it gives me an opportunity to speak about something that is happening in my electorate—in fact, something that is happening to people who live in my electorate. It was way back in 2014 when my staff first brought to my attention the increasing length of time people were waiting to get ceremonies or waiting for their applications for citizenship to be assessed. At first, it was quite subtle. There were some unusual stories, but it was quite subtle. But, over the 2014 and 2015 years, our concerns grew as we heard stories of people who had been given a date for a citizenship ceremony and then been told two days before by voicemail that the ceremony was not on, only to drive past and see that it was. People were being told that they could not be scheduled for a ceremony for several months. People were waiting a lot longer than the 12 months which is the standard. In fact, if it takes longer than 12 months, they are supposed to be advised in writing by the minister, and yet it was not happening. We were finding that we were using more and more of the resources of our office chasing down what was happening to applications that were, at times, years old.

In 2015, the Refugee Council noticed the same thing and did a report, and that report was quite damning. They surveyed 188 people, and they found exactly the same stories that we found. Rather than 80 per cent of applications being processed in 80 days, the statistic according to the department, they found that, of these 188 people from refugee backgrounds, the average person waited for 215 days, and the longest waits were 603, 623 and 682 days. Of those who completed the test and were yet to attend a ceremony, a full quarter of them waited 357 days from the time of their application while the average waiting time was 270 days. Two hundred and seventy days is a long time between actually doing everything you need to do—going through the process, sitting the test, being accepted and then just waiting for a ceremony—and it being made final.

That is made worse by what is known as direction 62, which is a ministerial direction which rules that no applications for family reunions will be considered. They just basically go to the bottom of the pile until people become citizens. I had one really quite beautiful man incredibly traumatised because his young child is still in his home country with no-one and she is being abused. He believes she will die before he ever sees her again. We had another person who was forcibly separated from their two-year-old, and that child is now eight. They have found her and they are trying to get her back to Australia. These are dreadful stories that we are hearing and dreadful delays that seem to be focused on people who came by boat more than others. One of our biggest complaints here is the seemingly different treatment of people depending on how they arrived here.

Last year, two young men took the department to the Federal Court over extensive delays, and the judgement by the court was really quite interesting. Those two men had been waiting 18 and 23 months respectively, and the judgement was quite damning. There was evidence received that more than 10,000 applications required further assessment as of July 2016, yet there were only 12 officers in the department who were trained to assess those applications. So there were 10,000 applications requiring further assessment and only 12 staff to do it. It was also noted that the evidence provided suggested that something beyond resourcing of the citizenship program had caused very significant delays and that the possibility of applications being ordered by reference to an unreasonable rationale could not be excluded. This is a damning judgement by the courts of the government's behaviour in this.

I can accept at face value that the government might believe that the reassessments are necessary for security reasons. I can accept that at face value. What I cannot accept is true is that the solution is to have these people who you fear are not legitimate asylum seekers and may be dangerous to Australia waiting out in the community for even longer. In fact, if you think they are a risk, the thing to do is to speed up the processing, put extra staff on and get it done so that you can identify those who you do not want to accept as citizens, remove them and let the others get on with their lives. Every month we delay the citizenship test makes it harder for these people to settle. I strongly call on the government to get its act together in relation to these delays.

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