Bill Shorten says he will make it easier for more Chinese immigrants to come to Australia as he talks with 500 voters on social media site WeChat
- Labor leader Bill Shorten told Chinese voters that he favoured family reunions
- Opposition Leader told WeChat forum he wanted them to bring elderly parents
- Spokeswoman said skilled-family reunion immigration balance won’t change
Bill Shorten has promised a Labor government led by him would make it easier for Chinese immigrants to bring their family to Australia.
The Opposition Leader made the pledge as he delivered an address to 500 Chinese-speaking voters on a WeChat live online forum.
If enacted, his social media promise could mark the biggest change to Australia’s immigration system since 1996, when former Liberal prime minister John Howard changed the balance from family reunion to skilled migrants.
Bill Shorten (pictured with Labor candidate Jennifer Yang) has promised a Labor government led by him would make it easier for Chinese immigrants to bring their family to Australia
In a Wednesday WeChat audio message, seen by The Australian, Mr Shorten vowed to make it easier for immigrants to obtain visas for their ageing parents.
Under this new temporary sponsored visa, immigrants would be allowed to bring one set of parent to Australia.
‘Labor wants to make sure you never have to pick which parents you want to bring to Australia,’ Mr Shorten said on WeChat, in a forum where he gave one-minute audio answers to questions submitted and translated from Chinese.
A spokeswoman for Mr Shorten stressed a Labor government would not be returning to the immigration balance under former Labor prime minister Paul Keating, which favoured family reunion over skilled migration.
The Opposition Leader made the pledge as he delivered an address to 500 Chinese-speaking voters on the WeChat live streaming service (Chinese New Year in Sydney pictured)
‘A temporary sponsored parent visa is a temporary visa and does not impact the permanent migration program,’ she told Daily Mail Australia on Thursday.
‘Labor has no plans to change the balance of the permanent migration program.’
Mr Shorten’s bid for the Chinese vote was made just days after Labor lost the New South Wales election, following revelations the party’s former state leader Michael Daley had told a politics in the pub forum at the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney, that Asians were taking the jobs of young Australians.
‘Our young children will flee and who are they being replaced with? They are being replaced by young people from typically Asia with PhDs,’ the then-deputy Labor leader said in September last year.
‘So there’s a transformation happening in Sydney now where our kids are moving out and foreigners are moving in and taking their jobs.’
Mr Shorten gave answers on WeChat to Chinese voters
In the state election, Labor went backwards in the Liberal Party’s most marginal seat of East Hills, in south-west Sydney, and also had a swing against it in nearby Oatley.
Both seats, with a high Asian population, overlap with the marginal federal Liberal electorate of Banks, which Immigration Minister David Coleman holds by a slender 1.4 per cent margin.
Mr Shorten has this week condemned Mr Daley’s comments, after reportedly putting pressure on NSW Labor to stand down their former leader so his controversy wouldn’t overshadow the ALP’s federal campaign.
‘I did make it clear, though, that those comments shouldn’t have been said,’ he said.
The federal Labor leader, who has a WeChat account, took questions from Chinese voters about Mr Daley, refugee policy and China’s rise as a global superpower.