Carol Brown (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Disability and Carers) Share this | Hansard source

Labor supports this disallowance motion. The proposal by the government is unnecessary and unfair. The current Australian Citizenship Regulation 2016 provides for concession rates of $20 to $40 for citizenship for migrant pensioners, veterans, widows and some others who qualify under schedule 3 of the regulation. This change will remove those concessions. So, from 1 July 2018, groups such as migrant pensioners, veterans and widows will have to pay the full fee of $285 when applying for citizenship. The government wants increased fees for migrant pensioners, veterans and widows to go from between $20 and $40 to $285.

The aim of the concessions is to provide greater access to Australian citizenship for those of disadvantaged backgrounds. The Minister for Home Affairs lodged the legislative instrument on 7 June to repeal these concessions. It specifically repeals table items 10 to 13 and 17 of schedule 3. There is no other way to describe these changes than unfair, unnecessary and mean-spirited. These changes mostly affect those holding pensioner concession cards who receive forms of welfare, including Newstart, pension, disability support or parenting payment. We're talking about veterans with pensioner cards who receive income support payments, including payments for aged service, invalid service or partner service, also losing their ability to access a discount.

In 2016-17 a total of 137,750 people became Australian citizens by conferral from at least 190 different countries. This measure is expected to affect three per cent of applications. This change aligns with the broader government agenda to attack migrants and reduce the number of new citizens. In June last year the government also tried to change the rules around people acquiring Australian citizenship, in introducing the Australian Citizenship Amendment Bill 2017. Despite significant changes being proposed, the government could not provide any evidence that the changes were based on anything other than a report by Mr Philip Ruddock and Senator Fierravanti-Wells. The community opposed this bill, Labor opposed the bill, and it was struck off the Notice Paper last October.

Over 10,000 submissions were lodged with the citizenship bill inquiry and only a small number were in favour of the changes, one of those being from Minister Dutton's own department. The inquiry heard stories about the sense of belonging and community that citizenship gives to new migrants. Evidence given in the inquiry found that over two million Australians would not pass the proposed English language test either. These unfair changes would increase the pathway to citizenship to over 10 years, causing unnecessary delays to good people. The university English test would result in a permanent underclass where people live in Australia permanently but never get to pledge allegiance to Australia and become a citizen.

The proposed legislation also stated that a person could be deemed as having competent English if they were a passport holder of the United Kingdom, the Republic of Ireland, Canada, the United States of America or New Zealand. The Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights report said in regard to the university-level English test that 'the measure appears likely to be incompatible with the right to equality and nondiscrimination'. The report also confirmed Labor's questions around the evidence base and the rationale provided by the government to justify the unfair measures, stating that some outcomes could be averse to social cohesion and 'concerns remain that the measure may not be rationally connected to its stated objective'. The citizenship test is already in English, and Labor supports people having conversational-level English. Minister Dutton proposed to increase the English language level requirement to level 6 university-level English. That failed. Now Minister Tudge has talked about reintroducing the legislation with a lower level of English needed for applicants to pass the language test.

Recently in Senate estimates when asked whether the department was providing information to Minister Tudge on citizenship, the department confirmed it was. When asked whether further research into the English language requirement for new citizens had been undertaken or sought, the department took the question on notice. This reveals that the government's proposed citizenship legislation is policy on the run—mean spirited and unfounded thought bubbles formed firstly by Minister Dutton and now by Minister Tudge. The government has been unable to illustrate why these changes are still under consideration. Labor has always said that people need to pledge allegiance to Australia and commit to the values of the nation, but we don't support unfair changes that have no credible basis.

I will take a few minutes to turn to Mr Tudge's claims. In speeches and in media Minister Tudge has claimed that he has focused on cohesion to avoid, and I quote, 'parallel' communities and that there was a reduced level of English capability. These claims were questioned in a The Sydney Morning Herald article by Jacqueline Maley on the weekend:

Tudge cited a scary statistic - he said that by 2021, Australia will be home to 1 million people who either don't speak English well, or don't speak it at all.

He reached the 1 million figure by extrapolating from Australian Bureau of Statistics data, which shows that in 2006, about 560,000 people in Australia did not speak English well or at all. By 2016, the figure was almost 820,000, which sounds like a lot.

But as the minister later acknowledged, these figures are absolute - as the population grows, and the overall number of migrants increases, so will the number of people whose English is poor.

That doesn't mean the problem (if you see a lack of English proficiency as a problem, and many don't) is worsening. It's more instructive to look at the proportion of migrants who don't speak English well or at all.

According to the minister, that proportion has increased, from 18.6 per cent of new migrants in 2006, to 24 per cent of migrants in 2016.

But an alternative analysis of the same data, by Ingrid Piller, a professor of applied linguistics at Macquarie University, shows the proportion of people who speak English not well or not at all has actually declined slightly. Piller finds that in 2006, 17.5 per cent of migrants spoke poor English, and in 2016, the proportion was 16.6 per cent.

Minister Tudge also quotes the Scanlon report in his speeches. The part he forgets to quote is that the report also found that 83 per cent of respondents agreed that multiculturalism has been good for Australia. It's this kind of selective reporting that Minister Dutton tried to push and failed, and which now Minister Tudge is pushing.

We also see an attack on citizenship through neglect. Since March 2016 processing times for citizenship applications have increased from 12 to 16 months. The department confirmed this extension of wait times for applicants and said it had hired some staff to assist with processing applications. The department has also confirmed that complaints regarding citizenship applications have increased. The delays are causing distress and hurting people who have spent years in Australia studying, working, buying a house and raising children. All they want is to be able to pledge allegiance to this country and live here as citizens.

Labor cannot and will not support the changes by the government. We support the disallowance motion. We want it to be on the record that modern Australia and multicultural Australia are the same thing. Anyone who thinks differently is living in the past and, in the case of the government, is trying to create division for political purposes only.