Carmen Lawrence (Fremantle, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

We have just had a very strange experience. Apart from the absence of the minister’s colleagues, who are notable by not being here, we have also heard yet another upside-down, ‘Alice in Wonderland’ rendering of the state of policy on asylum seekers in Australia. I do not know where the minister lives sometimes. I wonder where he derives his observations and his ideas. It is very curious indeed. It is an experience that I sometimes have to shake my head after having been exposed to. But after all, this is the same man who has indicated on previous occasions that depression is not a mental illness—or at least that some people might think so.

But the real standout performer in this bizarre morality play is the Prime Minister. He really has got a lot of front. We saw it again today. This is the same man who berates as weak and vacillating anyone who changes a policy position for whatever reason. He was doing it again in question time today, and behaving at the same time like the naughty schoolboy, tittering among the others on the front bench. The Treasurer took up the same theme. The Prime Minister is berating our leader at the same time as he has effected the fastest, the most spectacularly craven and abjectly humiliating retreat from a policy position that I have seen in 20 years in politics. It was absolutely spectacular. Talk about the earth moving—the whole globe shifted on its axis! And not because he discovered some good policy reason for making the change or because the people of Australia were clamouring for change—in fact, precisely the opposite view is held by them, we have discovered from Newspoll—and not because the MPs in this place were agitating for improvements and amendments. No, it was for none of those reasons, but to accommodate another government—the government of Indonesia.

At the first whiff of disapproval—and that is really all it was—at the proper administration of Australian law, the so-called ‘man of steel’—what a joke!—showed himself to be the man of tin that he really is. It turned him into a quivering mess. He was not prepared to defend our own laws and to explain to Indonesia the quite proper processes which led to refugees from West Papua being granted asylum here in the first place—a move that we all applauded. The Prime Minister has not even been prepared to try to mount an argument about our sovereignty or to advance the many reasons why we as a nation are committed to the proper protection of genuine refugees. There has been not a peep out of him on that, let alone to insist to Indonesia that they should desist from treating the West Papuans so brutally that they flee for their lives. They were found to be genuine refugees. There was a reason behind it. These are not wilful schoolchildren just popping across for a day trip. Instead, this Prime Minister cavalierly sets aside universally agreed standards of human decency so as not to offend a neighbouring country—putting people’s lives at risk so as not to offend a government.

He is trampling on those Australian values that he and his ministers so often lecture us about and tell teachers they should be endorsing and teaching in school. Australia’s interests in the region are not going to be served by showing that we can be so easily bullied into abandoning our cherished values of freedom, independence and decency, respecting the human rights of all comers.

I would say to the Prime Minister: live by those values, Prime Minister, or at least demonstrate them in your decisions if you cannot live by them every moment. Your example is much more powerful to young people particularly than any amount of preaching. They watch you, they see what you do and you have just trampled on those values that you claim to see as important. The clear message the Prime Minister is sending is that care and compassion, freedom, integrity, responsibility, honesty and trustworthiness—they are all on the list—are just words. They are just words to the Prime Minister.

I think we are entitled to ask a few questions and to get answers to them. How can the Prime Minister so wilfully ignore the recent unanimous vote of this parliament to amend the Migration Act to effect a much needed overhaul of Australia’s detention and asylum-seeking regime? How can he do that so soon after that judgment has been made? How can he so brazenly turn his back on the Palmer report after his public utterances, and those of his ministers, that the recommendations would be implemented and the lessons learnt? They have just been thrown out the window, it would appear. We are entitled to ask the Prime Minister: how can he so cavalierly toss aside the goodwill of all the MPs and senators which was evident following the release of the damning Palmer report and during that very protracted discussion and negotiation that led to the much needed changes? They were just set aside without apparent regard.

How can he so shamelessly revert to a system which will keep innocent children in detention—no matter what the Attorney-General says—in circumstances that we know will cause them serious harm? He has never answered that question, and he should. How can he knowingly—this is it: knowingly—reintroduce the disgraceful regime of indefinite detention for which so many people are still paying with their sanity? Let us be clear about that: there are still people paying with their sanity. There are some who have paid with their lives. And how can he traduce our independence and our proud democratic traditions—I should say once proud democratic traditions—so easily?

What the Prime Minister has shown to the nation is that direct negotiation with him, as occurred with his own backbenchers, is worth nothing. He is simply not to be trusted. Not satisfied with having trashed Australia’s standards of compassion and decency, the Prime Minister is now prepared to sacrifice our independence too, and I really choke on that. The stark reality is that our immigration policy is now being dictated by another nation, whose representatives then come here to watch and make sure it is done. How humiliating. Our parliament’s examination of the legislation to give effect to this capitulation is likewise, as we have heard, to be curtailed to avoid our speaking the truth to our neighbour.

If we were really a good friend to Indonesia, we would not be afraid to stand by our own standards and our commitments to treat asylum seekers with at least residual decency—and that is all it really is with this government. If we were true friends, we would tell them what we know about what is going on in West Papua. That is why the decision makers found them to be refugees. All is not well in West Papua. We would tell them that we have read the reports and heard the witnesses who attest to the fact that Indonesian police and military have engaged in violence and killings in West Papua. We would tell them that we know that Indonesian authorities have been responsible for torture killings of detained prisoners and that political, cultural and village leaders have been killed. The Attorney-General does not want to mention these untidy details.

We should tell the Indonesians that we know that some detained people have suffered electric shocks, beatings, pistol whipping, water torture, cigarette burns and confinement in steel containers, sometimes for weeks on end. We would tell them that we are aware of resource exploitation, of the destruction of Papuan resources and crops and of forced relocation and unpaid labour. We would tell them that we condemn such actions and we will protect anyone who flees from terror. If we were true friends, we would argue that there are other ways to govern the territory and that we understand but we cannot defend their reluctance to face the facts. But instead our Prime Minister humiliates all of us by his obeisance, by his capitulation.

This is the same man who said over and over again, as we have heard, ‘We’ll decide who comes to our shores and the circumstances in which they come,’ and variations on that theme. But he is not prepared at all, apparently, to defend the legislative independence of our national parliament. We are supposed to roll over and make the changes. He is now ignoring, too, the unanimous recommendation of the Senate committee that the bill should not proceed. Pushing the legislation through does not change that fact. He is not prepared to allow even the most cursory examination of this truly bizarre legislation which effectively deletes Australia, abandons our responsibilities as an international citizen and attempts to foist them on our impoverished neighbours in the region—who, by the way, are not all signatories to the necessary international conventions—or to find someone, anyone, who will relieve us of the discomfort of offending Indonesia. What a brave, brave man.

See this speech in context