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Advocates for migrants last night accused Angus Taylor of using his budget reply speech to “chase votes with dog whistles, fear and division”.
Taylor claimed that migrants were coming to Australia and claiming benefits before they were becoming citizens, a situation which he said Australians did not accept.
But the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre said that newly arrived migrants already face strict waiting periods of up to four years before they can access most Centrelink payments, including JobSeeker, Youth Allowance and the Parenting Payment.
By the time most permanent migrants become eligible for those payments, they are already eligible to apply for Australian citizenship, it said.
double quotation markThe Coalition’s dangerous decision to return to its harmful, failed refugee policies of the past shows what a mess they are in. They have no new policy ideas. Temporary protection visas have harmed countless people and kept many families apart for over a decade. So many are still trying to recover.
Taylor’s comments tonight are inflammatory and desperate. The fact that he feels the need to dog-whistle about mass deportations of so-called ‘overstayers’, many of whom are actually trapped in a massively blown-out court and tribunal system created through years of Coalition underfunding, shows they are far more interested in stoking fear than delivering serious policy solutions.
The language in tonight’s address misleads the nation by claiming that migrants are arriving and immediately accessing welfare payments, which is a blatant lie. In reality most of the restrictions he’s talking about already exist and there are lengthy wait periods for welfare payments.
The Coalition knows all this and is deliberately misleading Australians about how the welfare system already operates in order to whip up fear and division.