Mr ALLAN MORRIS(8.23 p.m.) —This debate on the migration bills ends the charade and ends the double play—the two sides of the fence; telling one part of the community one story and another part of the community another story. The months those now in government spent undermining our immigration program are encapsulated quite nicely in the government's policy statement of February, which states:

The Coalition will also re-establish the credibility and accountability of immigration administration and procedure to restore community confidence in its implementation.

The fact is that they were the ones undermining confidence. They were the ones out there day in and day out bagging migrants and migrant communities to other communities. At the same time, they were telling migrant communities a different story.

The current Minister for Immigration and Multicultural Affairs (Mr Ruddock) sat with me day after day on public hearings inquiring into migrant access and equity. There would not have been a person who was more supportive of those people from overseas and who wanted more hours of English language courses provided free to people from non-English speaking backgrounds. We heard this day after day after day. It is funny how the rhetoric has changed now that he is a minister.

This does all come together because eventually they have to pull it together somehow. Here we are post-budget with the usual log jam of legislation. The draftsmen are too busy. We have legislation about doctors, for example, getting postponed for weeks and weeks because there has not been time to get it drafted. What do we find gets priority in the drafting process? What do we find jumps the queue and gets into the House in October? Legislation to limit the number of spouses who can come to Australia. This is the biggest shift in attitude to immigration that this country has seen for a very long time.

This government wants to say to Australians: `If you marry someone from overseas, don't be sure of living in this country.' Mind you, perhaps they cannot live in the spouse's country either. That is a huge change. Why are these migration bills so important? It is not budget legislation. These bills have nothing to do with the budget. There are no savings in here. It is simply about social engineering. It is simply about the government playing to the audience it created.

The government is setting out to prove that there was a rort and it is correcting it. Even the minister has the audacity to talk about fake marriages in his speech. He knows, I know and we all know that there is not one thing in these bills that will correct fake marriages. Putting a cap on spouses will not stop fake marriages, in fact it probably does the opposite.

The people who are cheating are probably the best informed, are in there first and know it better than anyone else. The person who will get caught by this measure will be the genuine Australian who falls in love and gets married, assuming they can bring their spouse home. That has been a reasonable assumption for all of this century. Not just since Federation or not just since 1949, but for all of this century it has been reasonable for Australians to assume that, if they marry someone, they can bring them home.

We have heard speaker after speaker opposite saying that that is a wrong assumption. `Why should anybody assume that? What is more, it is a rort.' This legislation does nothing about those who may seek to cheat. If it did, I would be in there supporting it because, as a local member, I spend a lot of my time dealing with these kinds of cases. It is important that people do not cheat.

At the same time, the word has gone out to our posts overseas. Most of us deal with our overseas posts in person, by phone or by correspondence. Now I am finding that overseas posts are advising my constituents to marry because, if they do not get married, they will not get here. That advice has been given on more than one occasion to constituents of mine who are now marrying people because they have been forced to by the department. The advisers and the department were listening, so should the minister. That is what is happening.

I go further to the topic of fiancees. I was advised by a post a few months back when this cap came in—and it was not my constituent—that it had a case involving a pregnant woman and it had already reached the quota for fiancees. She has to wait until next July. This is the kind of morality and attitude of this government.

The filters are up now in a major way around the world. I was talking to Cairo a few weeks back about the brother of a businessman in Newcastle who is a Moroccan. This brother applied to come to Australia as a permanent resident a year or so back and failed because he had no hope of passing the point score. The family accepted that, but my constituent has some young children who have never met any of their family.

The brother applied and my constituent gave an absolute assurance in writing that the brother would go back, that he could afford to support him and that he could afford to pay for his ticket. The brother was refused. I made a submission to the embassy outlining my knowledge of the constituent and of his reliability and credibility in the community. I was confident that that assurance would be met. The answer was very simple: `The profile of this applicant is such that he may be an overstayer; therefore, he will not succeed.'

The sponsor can appeal. I point out, from the sponsor's point of view, that the government is saying that his word cannot be trusted. The sponsor has said his brother will return, but the government is saying, `We don't believe you. He is the wrong profile.' The official in Cairo said, `No, we're not judging the sponsor; we're judging the applicant.' But who hasn't lodged the appeal? The sponsor. All over the world, in Poland, Russia, Europe, the Middle East and Asia—I have spoken to all those embassies in the last three to four months—the word is out: `Don't take a risk. Don't stick your neck out. Run the profile. No exceptions.'

In the past, when a parliamentarian said, `This constituent is responsible, reliable and will do what they promise to do and, what's more, we'll oppose any attempt to convert their status,' the application was always successful because they would vouch for them. That kind of reference to a constituent is not given lightly. We all understand that. But that no longer matters a damn because this government is running a different angle, a different line.

Why are we here tonight debating immigration? So we can reduce the number of spouses allowed under the program, so we can balance the program. Let us look at what the coalition said in February in its policy statement about the program:

Our goal, wherever possible, is to reunite dislocated families. Dependents of the family unit must receive priority in our annual immigration intakes. The role, and often necessity, of the family in providing emotional and financial assistance to its members will continue to be an overriding consideration in entry.

The coalition said earlier in its policy statement that the immediate family unit—husband, wife, dependent children—is the primary organ of support. This is Liberal Party policy. This is not the policy of the Labor Party, the previous government. This is Liberal Party policy being put into legislation where the approval of the parliament is sought to limit the number of spouses, to limit the number of parents in the immigration program.

Let us look at what that means. We will take the case of parents. We all know the rules very well. The parents have to be healthier for their age than most other people. They are the only aged people in Australia who have to pass a health test. They are prohibited from pensions for at least 10 years, and in most cases either they or their children have to have substantial means.

I dealt with a recent case involving the parents of a constituent. They brought to Australia about a quarter of a million dollars in cash and $35,000 in annual pensions, plus a lot of other assets. They will spend that money. They are buying a house—I assume they have bought it now—so they are consumers. They are spending more than $40,000 a year here. They do not require education. They do not require any services. They had to be covered for all their costs. These people are actually bringing money into the country. They are not some drain, they are not some massive liability; these people are bringing in money.

But let us put a cap on them. Let us stop them. Let us play some silly numbers game. Forget the quality, forget what is involved, let us just put up the numbers and limit those parents. Let us put up the numbers for the spouses who come to Australia and who bring skills—they are still spouses—or do we try to do a double twist on independent spouses, do a skills test on spouses, and have another category altogether? What kinds of games are we playing? Why are we debating this? We are debating this because it is a priority in the government's agenda of public debate. This is part of the game to prove that the previous government was incompetent in immigration.

If you talk to migrant communities, you will find that they do not see a problem with the policies of the past. These are the policies that previous speakers, when in opposition, endorsed. There was bipartisanship on most of these issues. The current immigration minister spoke most vehemently about the concept of capping spouses not all that long ago. I know he has been here a lot of years, but he spoke about it in recent years, not in his first few years here. He spoke on a range of matters but mainly about human rights and, more importantly, on the issue that an Australian cannot bring their spouse back to Australia.

The fact is that we are a country of isolation. We are a small country in a very big world. We have been great travellers. Our people travel an awful lot. Successive years of migration have meant that there is even more reason to travel as people go back and visit their families and the places their parents and grandparents came from. The idea that somehow the number of people who marry someone from overseas will increase is quite logical and natural. We are a country of migrants and travellers. It is not surprising, with the number of people coming here and the number of our people going overseas, that quite a lot of them should marry someone from overseas. The idea has always been that if you marry someone overseas you can bring them home. Now we are talking about a two-, three-, four- or five- year wait.

Last year I was aware of a case of a girl marrying a man in South America. Her parents in Newcastle were absolutely desperate because she would not come home unless her husband was approved. She was pregnant. They faced the prospect of their daughter having a child in an unknown hospital in an unknown town in a country they had heard of but knew little about. They went through enormous anxiety to try to get him approved in time for their daughter to come back for the baby to be born. There was a week to spare before the airline would not take her. Tell that family, `Forget it. Sorry, Ma'am, the quota's full.' What is the reason for it? To balance the program. To balance the program for whom? For independent migrants who have no family here, by this government's definition—a government that says it gives priority to families but is giving priority to strangers. Their definition of independence is that they have no-one here to sponsor them; therefore, they are independent. They take priority over those with families here.

We hear figures about unemployment, but what members do not tell us is what jobs migrants are doing. They are in work, but doing what? The minister will know what they are doing because he went through the inquiry with me. Doctors are working as gardeners or as cleaners. Let's face it, this is not the first generation where we have deskilled our migrants. The number of skilled European migrants in the late 1940s and 1950s who went to work as labourers in the factories of Newcastle was legion. The number of skilled migrants now in Australia in work but not using their skills is also le gion—architects working as draftsmen and doctors working as gardeners or trying to get work as social workers. We had witness after witness before the inquiry in the last parliament. The idea of producing numbers saying that these people are working does not tell the whole story.

On the other hand, where families are bringing out their relations who pass on a points test—which, as we all know, is very tough—the chance of their getting work in their profession is much greater because they are brought into the system with someone who knows how the system works. Bringing a person from overseas with no connections, no contact, is a much surer recipe for failure as a migrant than the alternative.

We have had this debate for some weeks now. We had the debate about immigration the other night to a farcical level. We had the minister sitting there, listening to speaker after speaker opposite absolutely misrepresenting the legislation. The Treasurer (Mr Costello) just a few weeks back claimed that the Senate's decisions meant that we on this side of the House were supporting the idea of people getting off the boat onto the dole. That expression was used last week by those opposite, speaker after speaker.

The minister sat here listening, knowing full well what was being done. And what was being done was to reinforce the scurrilous attacks from those opposite before the last election and since. That is why it is being debated now. That is why it got priority. It is not because it is a budget measure—which we are so short of legislation for and things will not get passed—but because it suits their purpose to have this debate. I just remind the House of a quote from recent weeks in the Sydney Morning Herald. On 30 November, Mr Ramsey said:

What's happening, effectively, is just another nasty version of the race debate.

And in the same article:

That's the way politics works, too. Now we've got new migrants to bash, along with all the other scapegoats this Government keeps coming up with to justify what's wrong with the economy.

Who do we blame next?

A few days later, the same journalist wrote another article in a similar vein. It is of concern to a lot of thinking Australians that we are debating immigration over and over—and what for? No-one seems to know what for. Certainly what we are debating is not in line with the government's policies at the last election. It is not in line with any other standing position that has come forward. It absolutely breaches any attempt at bipartisanship because there has been no consultation and no attempt to consult.

There has been no attempt to rein in the remarks of those opposite who know better. I watched the other night while people listened to what was said. They were very clear the other night that the amendments about restricting access to benefits were not being opposed for social security benefits, for jobsearch and youth training allowance. People got up over and over again and kept saying they were, yet they knew they were not. What they were doing was maintaining the fiction and the confection. It is a very nasty fiction; it is a very nasty confection; it is a very nasty version of the same race debate.

I have been surprised somewhat at the willingness of the new members of parliament to buy into this debate. They have not been here for immigration debates in previous years. To those of you were not here in 1984: go back and look at the Hansard and see what the then shadow minister for immigration—Mr Hodgman, from Tasmania—was saying and what happened with that debate. Go back and look.

This is not the first time these issues have come up in this country, but this is the worst time by far. For a government to start talking about taking away from Australians the right of their spouse to join them in this country—when there is no evidence of fakery, no claim about forgery, nothing in the legislation that says that it is making the processing more rigorous—is a major change. This is not some trivial issue.

As for not reducing the number of migrants overall—simply balancing the program, as it is called—in the minister's second reading speech there is no issue about what the proper balance is. He does not say how many of each should be the balance or why. He does not say what changes the balance and what criteria he will weigh up in the balance. He simply uses these motherhood statements about balance.

He is trying most of all to imply that this legislation corrects so-called rorts. He knows that it does not. We all know it does not because there is nothing in the legislation that changes the rules about spouses. He also tried to maintain the fiction that somehow this government is fixing up immigration. What this government is doing is not fixing it; it is ensuring that immigration will be kept a matter of contention for months ahead. As the migrant community, the academic community, read Hansard, speak to those opposite and start to understand what this debate about, there will be an awakening and an awareness. It will not just be Alan Ramsey talking in this way; there will be many other people doing so.

The government can run it so far. It ran the split agenda for some months. The agenda comes together and, when it comes together, it shows: it does not fit. This government is maintaining a fiction, a very nasty fiction. Tonight and in the weeks ahead that will come to a head. This legislation is odious and should be condemned and rejected from the parliament absolutely.