Submission to the Inquiry into the Migration Treatment of Disability conducted by the Joint Standing Committee on Migration, House of Representatives, October 2009

We welcome the government's commitment to undertake an inquiry into the
health requirement in migration law and its impact on persons with disabilities.
We are a group of academics, migration agents and students affiliated with the
ANU College of Law and its Migration Law Program with expertise and
experience relevant to the Committee's inquiry. Our submission also reflects and
draws on the vast collected experience of the teachers within the ANU College of
Law's Migration Law Program who are also practising migration agents with
extensive, practical experience of the migration health requirement.
2. It is timely to review the health requirement due to developments in the last
twenty years. At various periods in history, cholera, tuberculosis and leprosy have
been feared diseases but advances in medical science have made them less
threatening. Similarly, there have been advances in evidence gathering from
medical experts. Australia is also competing with other developed countries for
skilled migrants and we need to be confident that the health requirement is not a
blunt instrument being unfairly applied. Despite this need for an overhaul of the
health requirement regime, this submission confines its scope to reform proposals
for modifying or removing the health requirement for people with disability.