James Stevens (Sturt, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I want to take the opportunity to put a few things on the record regarding the Migration Amendment (Giving Documents and Other Measures) Bill 2023. It deals with some administrative matters to do with disputes et cetera around the minister's powers and notifications that the minister gives. We all see at times the very significant attention to the ministerial power around the ability to cancel visas, particularly when it involves tennis players or who knows what that captures the public's imagination. It is a power that can bring great attention and fame upon an immigration minister that exercises that discretion.

But when it comes to, more broadly, matters around these amendments to do with recordkeeping and paperwork, I want to briefly put on the record that it's very important, when we're talking about our migration system, that there are two elements to it. There's a policy element and there's an implementation element. Policy is always within the purview of the government of the day to make decisions around the size and scope of the migration program, and to bring forward proposals to change, sometimes legislatively, the way or standards which will be applied to visas, the complexity of visas and all the rest. We could all have a lot to say about that.

As a local member of parliament, I would say visa applications, after NDIS, are the most significant complexity around case management in my office, and I would be surprised if most members weren't fairly similar there. It can have additional complexity because people applying for visas are not citizens of the country; they're usually working with someone who is a constituent of yours that is looking to support them. There are also times when people don't have a citizen to support them, but they might be on a particular visa in the country and looking for your support as the local member. I know that everyone happily supports people, even if they're not on the electoral roll, to get the best outcome they can.

There have been two significant moments of enormous burden on the department in recent times. The evacuation of Kabul had an enormous burden on processing capability, with the sheer volume of that. The other was helping people fleeing the conflict in Ukraine. I commend the current and previous government, the ministers and the departmental structures that were there to help with those extremely unpredictable circumstances. I reflect on my experiences of helping people from an administrative point of view. These comments are relevant to this bill, which is looking to make changes to the streamlining of the processing of decision-making around this. I think we could look for opportunities to improve the way in which the implementation of whatever the government of the day's position and policy is around migration and visa processing. This is in no way a comment against the current government whatsoever. I think it's an ongoing issue, of decades into the past, and may well be very difficult to solve in an optimal way for decades into the future.

Clearly we all have experiences when we're working with particular people that are having an enormous amount of uncertainty around the waiting time that they experience in seeking to get decisions made. I respect and understand that that's a function of two things. Firstly, it's a function of needing to have a very high standard to process and ensure that the sort of people being granted visas are fit and proper people to be granted visas. Secondly, you cannot have a situation where people get special treatment because you as a member of parliament think they've got a particularly compelling reason why they need to be urgently considered, because almost everyone waiting for a visa has probably got the same kind of very good cases and reasons for that. So I look to any opportunity for us to consider legislative change that potentially, as technology develops in particular, allows the bureaucracy to move in a more efficient churn.

It should always be up to the government of the day to determine what the scale and scope of the migration program is, but at times—I have been here for four years, and for three of them I was part of a government, and these experiences frankly have nothing to do with who is in government. At times, I think we can look for opportunities for the bureaucracy to absolutely be implementing what the government's policy is when it comes to migration. If there are legislative opportunities, there are other opportunities. I would love to be part of discussing them and considering them in this chamber, because I think that the way in which we work through, on an individual basis, the sort of challenges that people can have at times—I actually think members of parliament are probably some of the great experts in our society around ways in which we could improve the experience and the way in which those decisions are made; not changing the outcome but perhaps improving the timeliness. Given this is a bill, we understand, with the intention to improve the way in which ministerial decisions are made and to reduce some of the litigation and appeals, I just put those comments on the record as part of contributing to the debate on this bill.

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