Julian Hill (Bruce, Australian Labor Party, Assistant Minister for Citizenship, Customs and Multicultural Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

Do they want to cut child visas? Which industries would you cripple? Which nursing homes would you close? Which regional healthcare centres would you close down? Which parts of the defence and other industries do you not want to see staffed with skilled workers? Be specific. Don't bring the general smears.

The other measure—and I'll address the points made—is net overseas migration. It was too high post COVID and the borders reopening, and it's now falling. It's over 40 per cent down in the last couple of years. Think about it like this, for anyone actually interested in the facts. Net overseas migration plummeted during COVID to negative for the first time since World War II, because—who knows?—if you shut the borders and no-one comes in, it plummets. Then it spiked, when the borders were reopened, for about 18 months or two years, as Australians came back—Australian citizens count as net overseas migrants—and partner visas, students, working holiday-makers and agricultural workers stuck offshore came back. It spiked, and now it's coming down, exactly as the government said it would. The rise was a bit higher, but not because of arrivals. This is the big lie. It was because departures were slower than predicted, because we had the lowest average unemployment in the country for over 50 years. So, if you want to come in here with the smears, deal in facts.

There are two things that you got wrong there, Member for Kennedy. You said most students don't leave. That is not true. It's a falsehood. Most students go home. It's our fourth biggest export sector. International education supports more than 250,000 Australian jobs.. I see the Minister for Education here. It's critical to the internationalisation of our universities, to our global research partnerships, to jobs right across Australia and to our global rankings at our top universities. Most students go home. Some of them stay. They become some of our most highly skilled contributing migrants. That's a pretty good deal for the taxpayer with an ageing population. Their home country pays for the first 20 years—their early childhood education and primary schooling. Their taxpayers pay. They come here and pay, at a profit, for an Australian-standard education, and then they work and pay taxes for 40 or 50 years. It's a pretty good deal for the country.

But really the trick which has been done here—we see this on social media and, sadly, the member for Kennedy has chosen to come in here and repeat it—is the big scary number. What they're doing is taking parts of the arrivals without looking at the departures. They just pick random numbers and put them on social media and say there are a million people coming. It's just rubbish. It's not true. Just because you say it doesn't make it true.

What we have is a competent government, but we do not have a functioning opposition. They're terrified of, and yet cuddling up to, One Nation. They're calling for massive cuts to migration, but they never come in here and say what they actually want to cut. And Pauline Hanson lives rent free inside their heads. Paul Keating said in 1996:

The great tragedy of the shamelessly regressive politics of Pauline Hanson is not so much that it is rooted in ignorance, prejudice and fear, though it is; not so much that it projects the ugly face of racism, though it does; not so much that it is dangerously divisive and deeply hurtful to many of her fellow Australians, though it is; not even that it will cripple our efforts to enmesh ourselves in a region wherein lie the jobs and prosperity of future generations of young Australians, though it will—the great tragedy is that it perpetrates a myth, a fantasy, a lie.

The myth of the monoculture. The lie that we can retreat to it.

We are diverse and the key to being an Australian is respecting each— (Time expired)

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