Michael McCormack (Riverina, National Party) | Hansard source

I appreciate what the member for Barton says—'Hear, hear!'—and I thank you for that!

The situation with international student visas is an interesting one, because I know that during COVID we, as a country and as a coalition government, sent a lot of students home. We told them that the best place for them to be was back in the country of their birth or citizenship—that Australia couldn't sustain that number of people, given the extraordinary, unique circumstances at that time. And we copped a lot of flak for it. I know there were a lot of universities and a lot of supporters of young people who helped out those students. We were doling out so much money to help Australian businesses stay afloat, to help Australians with their day-to-day cost of living and, indeed, to keep Australians alive with the rollout of the vaccine program. Quite frankly, the Treasury couldn't extend every source of relief and financial support to take into account the international students then.

But we also had a situation where backpackers were told the same thing: that they needed to return to their country of origin or to the country where they had citizenship, if they weren't able to do the work that they came here to do—that is, work in the horticulture or agriculture sector, or whatever the case might be. Some of those backpackers, many of whom came to Australia by sheer means of word-of-mouth advertising, have not returned. It has been difficult to get that number of visa holiday-makers back to this country. I want to put on the record that they are welcome—certainly from my point of view and from the Nationals' point of view. We don't want to see any cut to the number of backpackers, without whom, quite frankly, fruit would rot on the ground and many beers wouldn't be getting pulled in country pubs. And that is a fact.

And we are having a situation—I might be digressing a little bit from the technical aspects of this bill, but we are having a national discourse at the moment about migration, and migrants underpin regional Australia. If we go down this path of demonising migrants—if we go down this path of making it difficult for migrants, via a judicial process or whatever the case might be, to take their place in our country towns—then we might as well give up on our aged care, our child care and our health care per se, because it's the migrants who do so many of the jobs, and not just the jobs that Australians won't do but many, many of the high-level, highly paid—as they should be—positions in those regional communities.

I say that because, at the moment, we have people from one particular party making a lot of comments about migration and a lot of comments about migrants that simply don't stack up when you go into a country town and you go to a hotel and you see how many of them are working in the hospitality sector or when you go into a hospital and see how many of them are doing the work of the medical staff and the medical specialists to keep people alive. Many of them are in meat-processing plants but also, indeed, in universities and everything in between. That's really saying something about how our migrants are valued in regional Australia, and they're certainly valued by me.

I know this bill does speak to, as the member for Blair indicated, international students, visa classes and the rest. The minister said in the second reading speech:

The bill makes amendments to the Administrative Review Tribunal Act 2024 and other Commonwealth legislation to expand tribunal powers, improve tribunal processes, increase efficiency, avoid administrative delays and aid the management of caseload surges and backlogs—particularly in migration matters.

And that is something that is most important. We do want to see those migration matters dealt with in an efficient way, of course, but in a speedy way as well, because what we're dealing with here is people's lives. What we're dealing with is people's ability to get on with their lives.

I have to say, I have had some matters, in recent times, with the amazingly resilient and beautiful Yazidi people in Wagga Wagga, which I took to Minister Burke. I found the way he handled those very professional. I found he handled those particular cases very compassionately, and I want to put that on the record because, all too often, all we ever see and hear about this level of parliament is the argy-bargy and the fact that people don't get along. Well, they do. There's a lot of bipartisanship that goes into these migration matters, and there's a lot of work that is done behind the scenes to help people to get citizenship and to help people with their visa cases.

One of the most difficult jobs in parliament is Minister for Immigration and Citizenship. It truly is. You only ever read about the cases which don't go the way of some communities or families or individuals. They make the media; they get headlines, and the shock jocks take great delight in trying to get the clickbait and the audience riled up. But what you see in so many cases are the right decisions made for and on behalf of the families in the national interest by ministers, be it Labor, be it Liberal—I say that because usually it's a Liberal minister in the coalition government who is the immigration minister, not a Nationals minister. There's a lot of compassion shown and a lot of common sense shown. It doesn't make headlines, but it is the right thing to do.

The minister said:

These changes apply to matters in the ART's migration caseload, as well as other caseloads where written reasons may not always be required.

As the minister pointed out, there are safeguards and guardrails around the particular legislation. The minister said:

Applicants who fail to comply with the identity verification requirement in FCFCOA proceedings would require leave of the Court to continue proceedings. Where leave is not granted, the FCFCOA would be able to dismiss the proceedings.

…   …   …

The bill would, among other matters:

The minister feels that this is important, that this is right and that this is just.

As I say, matters of migration law can become very sensitive and are very difficult, sometimes, to manage. I appreciate that, given the circumstances of huge migrations across the world, we as a nation need to have the best policies and the best framework in place. The coalition is supportive of that. The coalition wants to make sure that our borders are safe, that our borders are right and that migration policy is held up to every safeguard and every account by this government, and we will do whatever we can to make sure that we do get the right people in the right circumstances to support this nation and love it as we do.

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