The Sketch: Labor’s love’s lost in migrant romance

Home Affairs secretary Michael Pezzullo during Senate estimates hearings. Picture: Gary Ramage

When it comes to matters of the heart, our go-to guy is Michael Pezzullo, the Osher Gunsberg of Australian immigration.

But instead of roses, he hands out visas to wishful lovers on ­behalf of season three Bachelor Scott Morrison (a former tourism chief who loves cooking curry).

The heart-pounding reality series continued in the nation’s capital this week, where Monday’s date card sent viewers to ­the steamy scenes at Budget ­Estimates.

Romantic fluorescent lighting revealed an intimate committee room with a luxuriously long ­polished wooden witness table — socially distanced of course.

The tension is palpable.

The camera pans to Peta Dunn, the department’s first ­assistant secretary in the Immigration Programs Division.

“The migration program has been set as planning levels for a number of years. In the last few years — I think, since 2015, if my memory serves me correctly — it has been set as a ceiling rather than an artificial target,” Dunn explained, in dulcet tones.

Labor Senator Kristina Keneally clarified: “A ceiling?”

Dunn nodded yes.

Keneally asked the question on everybody’s lips: “How is a ceiling different from a cap?”

The room was eerily quiet.

“The planning level can be ­either a target, which you aim to achieve, or the upper indicative number, where we look to achieve the quality and the outcomes of each of the programs that are determined to us up to that ceiling,” Dunn explained in pitch-perfect mandarin jargon.

Enter Pezzullo, wearing a deep navy suit. “So it’s the upper end of the planning range,” he clarified.

“That’s right,” Dunn said.

Labor senator Kristina Keneally during Senate estimates hearings. Picture: Gary Ramage

Keneally wasn’t satisfied. “But it’s a ceiling. If you were to hit it, that would be it for that year.”

“You would never hit it,” Pezzullo said. Keneally repeated, incredulously: “You would never hit it?” “You would never hit it, because you have regard to the quality, as Ms Dunn just said.”

But the Labor senator had more questions. She knows that sometimes you need to weed out the thorns to get to the rose.

“Are partner visas demand-driven?” Keneally inquired.

The emotive music swells.

“There are the demands of love, I suppose,” Pezzullo mused, then asked: “How would you characterise the demand that generates a partner visa?”

Keneally said she wasn’t asking about how people find themselves wanting a partner visa.

“There are matters of the heart, but once you get past that,” Pezzullo started to say before he was interrupted: “Mr Pezzullo, don’t make light of this.”

“I’m not,” he replied.

Keneally kontinued: “We know certain visa classes are demand-driven.” “Correct,” he acknowledged. “I am trying to understand if the department considers that partner visas are demand-driven,” she repeated.

Dramatic pause. “I’m not sure we describe them as demand-driven,” he said.

After the break! Will they or won’t they (end up on Christmas Island)?