Page 434 - Week 02 - Wednesday, 8 March 2006
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It is worth noting at this point that the Greens are in no sense anti immigration. We fully embrace and celebrate the richness that has brought to our community. But we want to see less emphasis on the financial resources, the employment prospects and the English language skills of applicants and more focus on family reunions, refugees and other humanitarian streams.
We already know, from the experience of several generations of migrants in our own country, that second-generation migrants often contribute a great deal to our work force and that, due to their parents’ experiences in their own countries, their children are encouraged to work hard and do well in school. We are the beneficiaries of the second-generation migrants who are contributing hugely to our community. So we really need to think about the kinds of people that we encourage to be our migrants and think of the contributions that their children can make, as well as their own generation. Currently Australia’s doors are more open to people who can afford to buy their way in. I am not quite sure of the exact figure, but I think a couple of hundred thousand dollars are needed to be recognised as an ordinary migrant in Australia.
We are also more inclined to support short-term migration. The benefit of having people knowingly come here for shorter periods, often because they have been brought here to do work with a business for a time—often lucrative contracts are offered here; we are talking perhaps about people who already work for a multinational firm elsewhere and who are brought to Australia to work for our local branch—is often more to their company and to the individual than to our community. The financial benefit frequently goes to the person rather than it being the other way around.
There are a lot of issues around migration when we are talking about increasing our skilled work force, and we need to consider them all. There is also a moral obligation upon us, when we think about importing skilled migrants, to ask about the impact that we are having on the countries of origin. We are well aware that there is a diaspora of migrant workers, especially in our own region.
We are constantly told about domestic workers from the Philippines and Hong Kong. There are a whole range of people whose governments are now relying upon them to work elsewhere because their remittances home protect that government from having to provide welfare to families in countries that we know do not have the welfare polices that we enjoy here. That is more at the level of the low-skilled migrants.
They do not appear to be the topic of this motion, but when we are talking about highly skilled migrants we have to ask whether we are depleting Third World countries of people that they need to help advance their own country. Because funds for training are in much shorter supply in poor countries, investing in training our own people can, in this way, be a form of development assistance as it is gives less impetus to mine—and I call it “mining”—the skilled labour of our neighbours.
As you are probably well aware, in the Senate the Greens senators have been working in the areas of immigration, industrial relations and apprenticeships. Kerry Nettle has continually called for increased investment in education and training. Last year the Greens identified an additional $2.8 billion needed over four years to meet the increased demand and to maintain quality in the TAFE sector.
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