I rise as the member for Barton, and the name of my electorate is never lost on me. Sir Edmund Barton, our first prime minister, led a government that built the White Australia policy. More than a century later, the seat that carries his name is represented by an Australian with Sri Lankan and Papua New Guinean background raised by a Maltese and Italian family. If that isn't progress, I don't know what is. From Hurstville to Kingsgrove, Rockdale to Earlwood and Bexley to Clemton Park, my community is the proof that migration is the story of modern Australia. It is in our clinics and our classrooms, our aged-care homes and our building sites. It is in the nurse finishing a night shift at St George Hospital and the tradie pouring a slab for a new home out in Hurstville. Those are the people this debate is really about.

Before I entered this place, I spent over a decade as an employment lawyer. I represented workers as well as employers across construction, health care and also hospitality. I saw what a well-run system can do, and I saw what happens when it is rorted dodgy operators: exploited workers and honest businesses undercut. So I say this: a migration system must be fair. It must have integrity, and it must serve the national interests. That is what this Labor government is delivering. We have brought net overseas migration down by 45 per cent from its post-pandemic peak and we've held the permanent program at 185,000. We've tightened student visa integrity, shut down the dodgy providers and closed the loopholes that let people hop from visa to another. We're cracking down on rogue migration agents, we're introducing a 'no further stay' condition on visitor visas and we're using limited ministerial directions to prioritise the sectors Australians depend on, including health care, construction, defence and agriculture.

We're also getting the right skills to the right places. We've invested $85 million so migrants qualifications are recognised faster. Our fast tracked skills assessments have already made more than 20,000 migrants available to work in the construction trades. Labor has tripled the number of construction visas. In health care, the results speak for themselves. Skilled visa grants in the sector have more than doubled from 44,000-odd in the last four years to June 2022 to 101,000 or so since. Nurses and midwives account for more than 41,000 of those grants, and, for personal carers who look after our parents and grandparents, grants went up from 88 in the coalition's last four years to 6,838 under Labor.

Now compare it with the alternative. The coalition would slash net overseas migration to a hundred thousand and abolish the temporary graduate visa and bridging visas. That's not a plan for the national interest. There are no costings. It is a plan to win votes back from the fringe. Think about what it means for the people in Barton. Hospitals and aged-care homes in my community rely on the workers on those very visas. If you remove them, the jobs do not disappear. They become vacancies, and vacancies become patients waiting longer for a doctor, a test or an aged-care bed, and there is the contradiction. They promised the biggest migration cut in Australian history while promising to increase skilled visas by a hundred thousand. They would reintroduce the Morrison government's agriculture visa, which in its time delivered not a single visa.

You cannot cut deeply and grow at the same time. Labor's approach is different. It's orderly, it's fair, it's targeted and it's built on a simple principle: temporary visas for those who come temporarily, permanent visas for those who stay and departure for those who no longer have a right to be here. It keeps faith with our obligations to genuine refugees and it puts Australian workers first. My community has always understood that a country can be both welcoming and well managed. This Albanese Labor government is proving it.