Don Randall (Canning, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am pleased to make a contribution on the Migration Amendment (Border Integrity) Bill 2006 today. Australia has a very proud record of border integrity, particularly in the last 11 years. The border integrity measures taken in this country to ensure that we know who comes to and goes from Australia have been very significant in not only maintaining Australia’s integrity in migration and transparency but also in controlling many other undesirable elements, such as people with bad character, people involved in nefarious activities coming to Australia unheralded and people who would be a threat to our health et cetera.

The primary aim of this bill is to amend the 1958 Migration Act in two ways. The first aim is to strengthen Australian border integrity. The bill will amend the Migration Act to allow a declaration ceasing a special purpose visa to take effect at a time specified in the declaration. Currently, such declarations can only take effect at midnight on the day on which they are signed. The second aim of this bill is to amend the Migration Act to enable the introduction of automated border processing for e-passport holding citizens and selected noncitizens arriving and departing Australia to be immigration cleared by having their identity and their visa or other Australian citizenship status verified by an automated computer system called SmartGate. I understand the SmartGate legislation will be coming to this House within the next few days. This will synchronise well with the bill that we have before us today, which I think is quite timely.

This government, as I have said, has a strong record of border security. It is there to protect our borders. To ensure that, this government has funded major expansions in new technological areas used by Customs and the Australian Federal Police to increase border protection measures, to implement more efficient processing of passengers and to assist in the detection and prevention of terrorism and serious crime. It has also taken action to shield people in Australia from developing criminal trends, such as identity fraud and the manufacture of synthetic and illicit drugs and money laundering. It has also taken measures to develop one of the world’s toughest aviation security systems to protect Australians and overseas travellers.

I will not go through and regurgitate the whole syntax of this bill, which many people who spoke before me have done in a most eloquent way. We all know what the purpose of this bill is. But I am going to use the opportunity as the last speaker on this bill to make a small comparison between Australia’s fine border integrity measures and, primarily, those of the United Kingdom, and you will see why Australia has a proud record.

But before I move on, I wish to deal quickly with special purpose visas. We know that they can be granted by the minister, and that these special purpose visas are available for people coming to Australia on discretion where they are able to receive them and have them withdrawn. But the problem is, as I said in the introduction, the withdrawal does not take place until midnight. We want to ensure that there is flexibility in this arrangement so that, should somebody be deemed to be undesirable or have an issue where they should be removed before midnight—in other words, so they do not abscond and disappear into the ether of the Australian community—that order can be given well before that cut-off time of midnight.

In terms of the SmartGate electronic passports, it is very interesting to note that Australia is at the leading edge of the technology in this world for these types of new passports. Yes, we know that current passports have an electronic chip in them which allows the storing of information such as photos, signatures, dates of birth—all the things that are on the inside of your passport—and documentation regarding your coming in and out of the country, where you have been, how long you have stayed et cetera. But SmartGate uses facial recognition biometric technology to perform a face-to-passport check to verify the person’s identity. The biometrics stored in the chip contained in passport will be matched with the image of the passport holder at the border. As well as verifying identity, SmartGate will also send the passport details of the person undergoing the clearance to Customs and the DIAC border systems, where the passport and visa details will be verified in much the same way as they would be verified if they were doing it in a face-to-face manner with someone from Customs.

One thing I would like to say to the minister—I see the minister has come into the House; I have mentioned this to him—is that I find it absolutely supportable that we are taking this leading technology on, because of the ease and expediency of processing people, but not that we are still going to retain these silly passenger cards. We all know that anyone who has flown overseas and come home has to sit there on the plane in the middle of the night or after hours of no sleep and fill in this mundane information about where you have been, what your middle name is, the purpose of your business, how much cash you have on you and all this sort of garbage. There must be tonnes of cards stored in containers somewhere, from people who have come through Customs, and all these passenger entry cards—and passenger exit cards, by the way—have piled up. They tell me that they deal with this electronically. The information is put onto electronic storage and this then goes off into some database somewhere and is used sometime later.

We are not a Third World country where we have to sit there and manually write in those little block boxes—hoping to hell you get all your letters in the amount of boxes provided—on the passenger card so that you can provide the information to the person at the gate in the wee hours of the morning. I think it is an absolute flaw to have this duplication. You are trying to fast track entry to and exit from this country by doing it in a technological manner but you are maintaining these ridiculous passenger entry and exit cards. As I have said to the minister previously, he might be one of the ministers who will cut through this unnecessary bureaucratic red-tape process that most people around the world abhor as they sit on the plane or try to get off the plane.

And for goodness sake, what if you mess it up? You have to go right to the back of the queue and start again to fill it in. Or, if you are in those marvellously long queues at the airport and you suddenly realise that you have not filled in your card properly, you have to get right out of the queue. On the edge of the thing, there might be a spare card or there might be someone handing out one of these entry cards. You have to start again and hope to goodness that you do not mess up that one too, because you would have to go to the end of the queue again. It is just crazy. So, Minister, I would appreciate it if you could take that on board, because I am sure I am not on my own.

That leads me to this fact. When you go through Heathrow airport you have to do all this sort of stuff. You are herded like sheep through all these tapes and corrals. We are herded here a bit, but it is even worse there. You would think that the British would have a far better system than we have, because they are supposed to be at the cutting edge of European technology, but they do not. When I had a study trip to Europe some years ago I was able to go to the various migration agencies. I went to London House and to the House of Commons and I spoke to people in migration because that is an interest of mine. I am the chair of the Joint Standing Committee on Migration and I am chair of the government members’ committee on migration. I learned that the British are in awe of our migration tracking system. In fact, they say to us, ‘We would love to have the ability that you have to track people who come in and out of your country because, quite frankly, we’ve really got no idea.’

That leads me to an article written some time ago by Ben Harvey in the West Australian under the heading ‘UK groans under its soft refugee system’. There is a fair bit about refugees in the article but there is also a fair bit about border integrity. The article alludes to the fact that Mr Blair was asked by the journalist, ‘How many illegal immigrants do you have in Britain today?’ He was asked 20 times, and 20 times he refused to answer how many illegal migrants he had in the country. The fact is that he knew what the answer was and that is why he did not answer it. There are something like 500,000 illegal people in Britain today. There are 500,000 there today because Britain does not know who has come, who has gone, and where people have gone after they arrive there.

This allows drug barons into the place, who become very wealthy and end up in enclaves of no-go zones. Even the police are too scared to go into the no-go zones because people are running drugs and brothels in those no-go zones where people of no identity live. This article goes on to say:

The system is blamed for a rise in infectious diseases, including HIV and TB, in English cities and has created a hated under-class which does not pay tax but bleeds the public health system of millions every year.

Britain’s most senior police officer said the system let at 1east 100 al-Qaida terrorists disappear into British society.

That is the negative effect of when you cannot track people at your borders when they are coming into your country. Britain is groaning under this system, as the headline says.

When members of the British parliament were asked about the Australian system, one of the party members said:

The Australians don’t do a great deal to impress me, but at least they know who in the hell is living in their country.

Poll after poll in the UK now shows that 85 per cent of people do not believe the government has migration under control. The British MP went on to say:

If you want to impose this chaos on your country—

meaning Australia—

then you are mad.

The article in the West Australian goes on to say that, for example, 37 per cent of those on student visas in Britain from Ghana could not be traced, suggesting they did not leave the UK when their papers expired—because they do not know who they are. It said that one of the people that got to stay was an al-Qaeda terrorist named Kamel Bourgass, a failed asylum seeker who was getting $5 million in legal aid to appeal against his conviction for killing a policeman in 2003. The scale of illegal immigration into Britain is staggering.

This compares with what is happening in Australia. We know who comes here; we know that the boats were coming here in the early 1990s—thousands of them at one stage. More recently we are very proud of the fact that we not only know who comes here but we detain them, which, as we know, was originally Labor Party policy. Gerry Hand first rolled it out, with the Port Hedland detention centre being one of the first detention centres. So it is obviously bipartisan policy that we do not allow people to wander around and be released into the community once they have been detected.

When David Blunkett, the former British Home Secretary, called for an amnesty—they just could not find the people who had disappeared, who had arrived without passports; nobody knew who they were or where they went—something like 50,000 people showed themselves. That is the danger that you put your country into if you do not have decent border security. When a British Labour MP was told that some Australian politicians were lobbying to abandon this policy or to go soft on it, he said that the government should hold its nerve on this one:

In a few years time we will have the courage to introduce a policy such as that. It is not particularly in keeping with our traditions at the moment, but only parties pushing the barrow are from the extreme right. But it will happen. The system as it stands is a joke and it is a joke that has been played out upon the British taxpayer. Whichever party has the guts to do something about this will win in a landslide.

I raise the British example. I have also seen examples of this in Italy. The Italians have a very porous border. They do not detain people for more than a number of days. They encourage them to move on. They try to shove them up to Germany, because Germany has a pretty soft approach as well. That has been one of the reasons why the German economy has suffered some setback, because they do not control the people. We have seen it in the United States, when the wetbacks, as they are known, arrived from Mexico. Because they do not know who they are and they cannot become citizens, they do not pay tax. They use the government facilities and all the public amenities, but because they cannot be recognised as citizens they work but they do not pay tax. So that is a negative as well.

This bill further reinforces the strength and integrity of the Australian migration system: we know who is coming and who is going and how long they are here. This bill is timely and necessary and I support it.

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