Bridget McKenzie (Victoria, National Party, Shadow Minister for Infrastructure, Transport and Regional Development) Share this | Hansard source

If you travel around our great country, you cannot help but be confronted by the increasing number of tent cities and people living rough—Australians sleeping in cars, workers living in tents in public parks and whole families relying on public facilities for their shower and toilet. It is true that some of these people are stricken with substance abuse, which is another terrible blight on society and has its own enormous challenges, but many more of these people living in tents are not people disengaged from society. Many are working. A lot of those kids are trying to get to school every day. They simply can't find a rental that they can afford. You inflict rapid immigration on a country, you have a foreign student intake that, per capita, is the highest in the world, and the results are entirely predictable.

The mismanagement of immigration from this Labor government over the past three years has arguably been their worst. Over the past few years, Australia has added approximately one million migrants in its first two years of the Labor government. We have former students on bridging and post-study visas included, and it's widely understood international students are close to 800,000. Bob Birrell and his colleagues from the Australian Population Research Institute put out a paper this month that goes into the details around how temporary entry migration is driving Australia's net overseas migration surge, whether the size of the migrant growth has been exaggerated or not and if a populist agenda will alienate most voters.

The bill we are debating today seeks to give Australians a say on the high, unsustainable level of migration under the Labor Party government. Australians want to have a say. They have taken to the streets in their tens of thousands to say enough is enough. But a plebiscite model is not the pathway to do that, and so we won't be voting for this bill. But I absolutely support the need to give Australians say in what a sustainable level of migration and what isn't.

Debate adjourned.

(Quorum formed)