Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs Legislation Committee, , 5:58:45 to 6:02:43
Officials outline the timeline and internal departmental process for developing the comprehensive immigration reform package announced by the Minister.
Topics: Employment, Public service staffing
Speakers: Clare Sharp, Stephanie Foster, Hon Jonathon Duniam, Senator Jana Stewart
Excellent. Thank you very much. That concludes the questions we have in outcome one this afternoon. So officials responsible in outcome one are now released with our thanks. We will now move to outcome two. While Senator Duniam is warming up his vocal cords, we can get the officials to the table. Senator Duniam, you've got the call.
Back to those questions I foreshadowed under corporate the development of the ultimately announced immigration policy by the Minister at the press club. I was wanting to understand what elements of the department were involved in the construction of that policy. Staff numbers, etc.
So, Senator, um these are issues that have been the subject of much discussion between the department and the Minister. But I'll let Ms. Sharp and her team take you through the sort of detail of how we've been working.
Thanks, Secretary. Claire Sharp, head of immigration. So Senator, we led the development of the of the reform package through the division led by Mr. Kylie, who leads our immigration policy division.
Yeah.
He drew on as the and that was a core team if you like that consists of policy officers as well as some officers who specialise in sort of analytics and They then, as needed, drew on our program divisions, you know, the divisions that actually run the student visa or the working holiday maker or our more operational teams in field and immigration compliance in removals to put together the suite of reforms that Minister Burke announced at the press
Okay, very good. And when did this work commence?
And I think really it commenced around November last year. Yeah, 25. I mean, in in some ways, something like migration. We're always looking at the system and collecting up and really we started the first discussions as the shortly after the election, but it really got ahead of stand from about November last year.
From November, okay. And when would you say the package was uh in a broadly final form?
Um Minister Burke actually spoke to that in his press club address. And really from about February, um we we had a package that uh I guess you would say the bones were there, and and as Minister Burke reflected in the press club address from there, there was a lot of um reflecting, massaging, looking at the circumstances, uh, but but the bones were all all there from about February.
At the risk of stating the pleading obvious Senator, the um complexity of the system and the scale of the reforms meant that as we reflected on different options. You know, if you change one thing in the system, it has a flow-on effect. And so it's actually quite a um a complex process of if you know if we have a set of outcomes that we want to achieve, which is essentially about a well-managed migration system that meets Australia's skills needs. Um there are different ways to achieve that. And that's the sort of work that was going on over that period.