Murray Watt (Queensland, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you, Senator McKim. I welcome Senator McKim recognising that our government has committed to make permanent the very large number of people who the former government left languishing on temporary protection visas. That is a position that we always opposed. We thought it was extremely unfair for people who had been granted those temporary protection visas to remain lacking certainty from year to year, and of course there's a massive cost to taxpayers in requiring the regular processing and reprocessing of people on those temporary protection visas. So we are undertaking a lot of work to make that happen. It's not an easy process because of the sheer number of people who are on those temporary protection visas, but it's something that we remain committed to.

The people who are on temporary protection visas have been found to be refugees and are owed our protection, and that's why our government is committed to ensuring that they get permanent protection, which is what they should have been granted in the first place. (Time expired)