Mr BURKE (Watson—Minister for the Arts, Minister for Home Affairs, Minister for Cyber Security, Minister for Immigration and Multicultural Affairs and Leader of the House) (14:24):

I thank the member for Hunter for raising what is a very important issue, in what he has described as the 'golden ticket' visa—or what has otherwise historically been known as 'cash for visas', for the very simple reason that it's a visa you qualify for because you have cash. On 31 July last year, this government closed applications for that visa. No-one has been able to apply for the visa since then.

It will take some time to deal with the mess that was created by the previous government on that, a mess which was contributed to by a lack of compliance staff. Before I get to the lack of compliance staff, I'll explain—just to go a little bit further on this visa—that the Productivity Commission had made clear that, in a program where you have a limited number of permanent visa applications that get approved, every one of these visas takes away from another part of the program, and, when they have costed what it takes away from permanent skilled migration, the cost to the Australian economy—not our figures; Productivity Commission figures—is $2.5 billion.

There are good reasons why this government got rid of applications for that visa. The problems became embedded with the nature of the visa, as a visa you qualify for because you have cash, combined with an obsession from the Leader of the Opposition, when he held my job, with cutting the compliance staff within the department—the people who were employed to make sure that the system had integrity. They were the ones he targeted and took from 360 of them down to 203 of them. It was the compliance staff that he decided to target.

We first found out that this visa would be on the way back under the Leader of the Opposition not through an announcement. We know, from the Sunday Telegraph,it wasn't because of a shadow cabinet process or a party room process—no, no, no. This came about, we found out, because someone asked him a question at a fundraiser, and, once again, there was a boom mic overhead. That's how the public found out about this. I'll tell you what: for the Australian people, that was not a free lunch. That one was in no way a free lunch.

The Nixon review had found, under his leadership, mass exploitation of vulnerable individuals, as well as syndicates running brothels and engaging in sexual exploitation—even human trafficking. The Productivity Commission on cash for visas had said 'there is no case' for retaining this category of permanent visa. If you believe in the integrity of the program, you don't reintroduce cash for visas.