Andrew Bartlett (Queensland, Australian Democrats) Share this | Hansard source

I welcome the tabling of this report. The inquiry was the result of a motion that I moved on behalf of the Democrats, and it is an inquiry that almost certainly would not have been established under the current Senate arrangements. It was initiated in June, before the government took control of the Senate. Judging by the government’s record since then, it is precisely the sort of inquiry that would have been blocked.

I am a bit disappointed in the final results. I think the government senators’ approach from day one has been quite defensive, and that is disappointing with all of the talk from the government about culture change, acknowledging past problems and the reforms that are under way. I would have thought it would be a good opportunity to be more open to examining the problems that still exist.

One comment of Senator Fierravanti-Wells that I do agree with a little bit was that there was a very heavy focus on the asylum seeker and refugee area. Despite that being the area of biggest public controversy, it is actually one of the smaller areas in the operations of the immigration department. That focus in large part was because that is an area a lot of the submissions went to and where the biggest injustices occur. But it is not the only area where there are problems, and it is certainly not the only area where people suffer as a result of the department’s administration of the Migration Act and, indeed, the content of the Migration Act.

Some of those other matters did come up. The inquiry examined issues like the deportation of long-term Australian residents to countries overseas on character grounds and some of the terrible human situations that occur as part of that. We examined and heard some useful evidence about student visa cancellations, the way those are being run and the impact that has on people, and about a few other matters as well.

I think we have to continually make the point that, if we are genuinely going to change the culture of the department, we have to look at the act and the policies that the department has to administer. It is simply not possible and not credible to suggest that a culture is not heavily influenced by the laws and policies that a department has to administer. We have had continual complaints about the number of people that appeal to the courts and the tying up of resources in court action. The fact is that there have been many pieces of legislation put through this chamber supposedly aimed at reducing court action in the migration area and none of them have worked. In fact, I think they have had the opposite effect.

If you make the law deliver unjust outcomes, people will appeal them, because people have an underlying assumption that the law and the system will produce justice and fairness. I know that is a nice, utopian sounding concept, and we all recognise that there are limitations in the justice you can get from the law. But, when you have situations that are clearly fundamentally unfair, unreasonable and unjust, of course people are going to appeal them. The attempts to try and narrow the grounds of appeal to restrict the opportunities for appeal have all failed because the outcomes the government is trying to deliver through its legislation are fundamentally unjust.

There have been warnings time after time. As the Ombudsman himself made clear, there has been report after report, year after year, into all sorts of problems and injustices in the migration area that have been ignored. That has changed with the Cornelia Rau incident, but clearly not enough. We are seeing through this that there is still no recognition from the government. It is time to go back and look at all of the changes that were made over the last 15 years or so and see which ones were really counterproductive. They were all, of course, supported by the Labor Party. They would not have passed into law otherwise, because the Democrats certainly did not support them. There is valuable information from this inquiry that builds on work that has been done before. Unfortunately the government has ignored a lot of that work. I hope they do not ignore this work. I seek leave to continue my remarks later.

Leave granted; debate adjourned.