Julian Hill (Bruce, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

It's lovely that the member for Fenner has come to join us on this his 50th birthday. I wish you a happy birthday! Thank you to the member for Warringah for bringing this debate and I appreciate your genuine interest and contribution on this.

The electorate I represent, on the 2016 census—I haven't actually checked the latest figures—covers the most multicultural part of Australia, the city of greater Dandenong. I have nearly 200,000 people in my electorate. I note the public discussion about resourcing. At any time we would like to sit down and have a cup of tea and talk about what it's like to represent an electorate with tens of thousands of non-citizens, who create far more work, frankly—and we do our best—than citizens. I've also represented, in previous boundaries, wealthy areas and I can tell you what generates more constituent work.

My staff joke that I'm most popular amongst people who can't vote. Every morning my emails are a sea of human misery—and not just the ones we get from Afghanistan—from people in the community, most of whom, again, are not citizens. I think in the south-east, in my electorate, we host about a quarter of the asylum seekers resident in Victoria, and I have more people who were born in Afghanistan in my electorate than there are any other electorate in this parliament. So my focus since I was elected has not actually been on the offshore detention; it's been on the human misery and economic carnage that is the Department of Home Affairs, and trying to speed up the visa processing.

I made a bit of a contribution on that on Monday night, and I said I'll continue to speak up even if it doesn't always please the ministers or certainly the departmental secretary. But I do acknowledge, from my deep conversations, that many people who are in immigration detention, onshore and offshore, live in my community and have views on this. Many, many, many people still have connections with people in onshore and offshore detention. There's strong community interest. It may surprise people, though, to suggest that actually the majority of people I hear from in my community do not want to see the boats restarted. There's not strong demonstrated, expressed community support for settling people who arrive by boat. I just make that point.

See this speech in context