Parent visa ‘could see 200,000 applications’

Over 200,000 parents of overseas-born Australians may arrive under Labor’s temporary visa.

The Singh family in Perth. Picture: Ross Swanborough

More than 200,000 parents of overseas-born Australians may arrive under Labor’s generous temporary visa, putting pressure on future governments to allow them to stay for good, demographer Bob Birrell has warned.

In his analysis of Labor’s policy, Dr Birrell says migrants with a strong sense of duty to parents in China, India and the Middle East would be likely to take up the visa in large numbers in the first term of a Shorten government, although lack of detail in the policy announced last month made it hard to predict.

Almost 100,000 foreign parents, mostly Chinese, are waiting in a queue for a permanent parents’ visa.

They are likely to jump at Labor’s open-ended temporary visa, to be joined by the fast-growing Indian and Middle Eastern communities, leading to “at least 200,000 parent applications” in the first three years of a Shorten government, Dr Birrell says.

Melbourne University population expert Peter McDonald estimated that
1.5-2 million offshore parents could be interested in Labor’s visa and predicted an early rush to take advantage of its generosity before a likely tightening of the rules by a future government.

Last night, Labor’s campaign headquarters said the new visa would apply the Coalition’s minimum taxable income of $83,454 for migrant families, thereby limiting demand to households earning above that figure.

The spokesman denied this was a change on the run, saying opposition immigration spokesman Shayne Neumann had made this clear by telling journalists last month that Labor’s visa would use the government’s “current process” for vetting migrant families who wanted to sponsor a visit. He could not produce any party document stating explicitly that the income threshold would continue­ ­unchanged under Labor.

 

Labor trumped the government’s new temporary parents’ visa last month with the promise of cheaper fees, the right to bring out both sets of parents, no limit on visa grant numbers, and renewal for a second five-year term without first having to send parents back home. Both visas would require­ health cover for visiting parents and debt guarantees.

The Coalition’s new visa costs more, has a cap of 15,000 grants a year, allows only one set of parents to come and makes them go home before they can get a renewal.

The launch of Labor’s visa policy­ appeared to be aimed at Chinese-born voters in Sydney and Melbourne.

The burgeoning Indian community had collected almost 30,000 signatures com­plaining that the government had failed to deliver its 2016 promise of a workable long-stay parents’ visa.

Dr Birrell, an immigration critic, said Labor’s new policy would put in jeopardy years of difficult policy reform favouring young, skilled migrants and cutting back family reunion programs in the 1970s and 80s that brought in migran­ts with weak English who struggled to integrate and proved a burden on the taxpayer.

“Labor’s ‘temporary’ parent visa is an unprecedented offer — no other Western country provide­s any similar parent visa,” he says in a nine-page report issued by the Australian Population Research Institute.

There is pent-up demand to bring in parents. Only 7371 permanent parent visas were issued in 2017-18. The temporary visa does not allow access to health and welfare­ benefits.

Indian-born Hardeep Singh, 32, whose Punjabi parents are visiting­ him in Perth on a restrict­ive tourist visa, said migrant families were happy to bear all the costs of a workable parents’ visa.

“If the government was allowing migrants’ parents to come over and use Medicare without paying anything extra, I wouldn’t agree to that (either) — we pay tax for Medicare as well,” he said.

Mr Singh applied for a permanent parents’ visa in 2013 — “it’s in the queue and it’s supposed to get finalised by 2030”.

“Most of the parents (of my Indian­-born friends in the same position) are already 65 or 70 years old — by the time the visa comes they will be dead.”

He voted for the Coalition in 2016 because it promised a long-stay parents’ visa but about 40 people he knew planned to vote Labor this time because they were disappointed with what the governm­ent had come up with.