MIGRATION ACT
13/06/2012
The Hon. K.L. VINCENT (15:46): Today I will speak about another
section of our federal statutes that discriminates against people with
disabilities and those with serious health issues. I talk, of course, of our
federal Migration Act. Matters involving this have been brought to my attention
on several occasions over the past year. The most recent case relates to a UK
police officer and his family, including his 25 year old stepdaughter with
autism and their rejection by the immigration department to gain an entry visa
to South Australia because of his stepdaughter’s disability.
Peter Threlfall, the rest of his family and his stepdaughter with
autism, will no longer be coming to our state. They will not have the
opportunity to make a valuable and possibly creative and vibrant contribution to
a country town. I believe that this family could have made a positive
contribution to the community of Ceduna. Finding qualified police for our
regional areas—indeed all of South Australia—is a challenge, and consequently
SAPOL has been actively recruiting police from the UK.
It had accepted Mr Threlfall, and he was to move to Ceduna. He
had spent $8,000 already on his application. He had not taken up promotional
opportunities in his current UK position and had actively pursued setting up his
family here in South Australia, all to have this thrown back at him by our
immigration department. A second case involves a Filipino doctor, Dr Edwin
Lapidario, only being allowed to have his 457 visa extended after his employer
paid $52,000 in medical costs.
We have a shortage of GPs in this state, particularly in lower
socioeconomic suburbs and regional centres, and here we have a man who is a
well-liked member of the Hackham Medical Centre about to be thrown out of this
country due to his son’s disability. A third case was not in South Australia but
related to a working, tax-paying qualified Indian social worker, Simran Kaur,
battling to be granted a permanent residency because she was legally blind, and
this was late last year.
The first two cases raise many serious questions about how many
skilled and diverse immigrants in the state are missing out because there is a
family member who has a serious physical or mental illness or who has a
disability. Given that the federal Migration Act forbids the families’ own
insurance, financial or other means for managing illness or injury, blanket
discrimination is assured against anyone with a chronic mental or physical
illness or disability.
As I explained in question time today, here in 2012 it seems that
features of our own Migration Act explicitly discriminate against people with
disabilities and those who have serious or chronic illness. As Ms Kaur’s
advocate, Brandon Ah Tong, elucidated last year:
Immigration in
itself, is a uniquely prejudicial site of public policy, in which the goal of
exclusion is exercised and institutionalised within law and bureaucracy, as the
essence of its nature. Unchallenged in its breadth and power, perhaps with the
exception of social welfare or insurance, the principle objective of migration policy, is to act as a filter
for the movement of persons across
sovereign borders against the supreme interests of the state. Migration policy
in Australia, going back to its first incarnation in the Migration Restriction
Act 1901 as the first Act of Federation, has always been about making judgments
upon the fitness and desirableness of would-be Aussies.
I believe that there are people with disabilities around the
world who could well make a positive contribution, both economically and
socially, to our community if they were able to immigrate here. I hope that some
day we can reform the federal Migration Act so this might occur.
In question time today the Minister for Disabilities assured me
that he will be writing to his federal colleague on the issues of our Migration
Act, and I look forward to him reporting the response back to me and to all of
this parliament, and I will certainly be writing to minister Bowen on this
matter. It is time our Migration Act moved into the 21st century.
