Kim Beazley (Brand, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

There is not much integrity and honour about the Migration Amendment (Designated Unauthorised Arrivals) Bill 2006. There is not much national spirit about this bill. This is a piece of craven legislation and I will outline the reasons why we would argue that. This is not one of the honourable moments of the House we happen to be going through. This is a pretty supine piece of work by a pretty ordinary old soul running a pretty ordinary old government. It is obviously the case that not all people on the other side of the House are at all comfortable with it.

We oppose the bill and we will vote against it. I say to those on the other side of the House: come on over; come on over and vote with us to uphold Australian sovereignty; come on over to vote with us to protect our borders; come on over and join with us today in the national interest. Your vote is your own. It is not for the Prime Minister to tell you that you ought to abstain if you disagree with him. Come on over and support a stand for Australian national sovereignty and a stand for basic human decency.

The bill removes asylum seekers from the process and protection of Australian immigration laws. It is as simple as that. There is no question about that. There is nothing in the amendments that can change the underlying reality: once you move people to another country to be processed, they are beyond the reach of Australian law. Australian law stops. Any principles of fairness and decency that underpin our law will not automatically be applied, because Australian law cannot be enforced in other nations—very properly so. We oppose the legislation on the grounds that we are an independent nation. We must frame our laws independently and in our national interest. We should do that without acquiescing to pressure from foreign governments, particularly when that pressure happens to be based on misinformation and poor understanding. Children should never be held in detention and no-one should be held indefinitely in detention. Those two principles are impossible to enforce in another country. It is as simple as that.

Australia has a responsibility to meet its refugee obligations. We also oppose this legislation because it removes the direct oversight of the Commonwealth Ombudsman. For example, a visa will be required if the Ombudsman wants to enter Nauru. It is not necessarily the easiest thing in the world to get a visa to enter Nauru. It is not our business that Nauru decides from time to time to make visas difficult to get; it is their sovereign territory. But the simple fact of the matter is that what it means is that the Ombudsman will attend to affairs there if the Nauruans say that is okay. Therefore for anyone picked up under this legislation there is no automatic protection from the Ombudsman in the situation that will pertain once folk are located outside the direct area of Australian sovereignty. There will no longer be any case managed mental health care, and the bill imposes a ludicrous situation where the government’s approach to border protection is to redraw the map so, for the purposes of migration, Australia has no borders at all. We have heard about that marvellous organisation originating in France, Doctors Without Frontiers, but it becomes a bit absurd when we have a piece of legislation which says that we are Australians without frontiers.

It is bad legislation. Its principles are flawed because it is motivated by appeasement, not the national interest. We should not change our laws to suit any other country. As well, it is a backflip from the government’s position last year. The government’s position last year moved close to Labor Party policy. Last year’s changes meant an end to children being held behind razor wire, an end to indefinite detention and also the introduction of appropriate case managed mental health care. This bill completely reverses those reforms, abandoning the interests of asylum seekers to further the interests, in the government’s mind, of another government—not the Australian national interest but interests elsewhere. Last year the Prime Minister described our current immigration policy of mandatory detention as ‘mandatory detention with a softer edge’. Where is the soft edge to holding kids in detention in Nauru? How can it be wrong to lock up children in detention in Australia but right to lock up the same children in detention in Nauru? How can it be wrong to remove oversight of the Ombudsman in Australia but effectively right to do it in Nauru?

I want to talk a little bit about the relationship with Indonesia in this regard because that actually is what underlies this bill and why we are having this discussion. We are having this discussion not because of anything intrinsic or long term or longstanding in the relationship that we have as a country with our neighbour but because of the specific aspect brought to it by the character of the Australian Prime Minister and his practice in relationships with Indonesia. Others writing about this matter have talked about the Prime Minister being hoist with his own petard. I like that expression in relation to this, speaking as the person who had to debate him in the 2001 election. I like in one sense the notion of the Prime Minister being hoist with his own petard, but unfortunately that is not the case. It is not the Prime Minister who is hoist with his own petard; it is Australia that gets hoist with the Prime Minister’s petard in this situation.

Indonesia is a fascinating country at this moment. What is happening inside Indonesia is an inspiration in many ways. Here we see a fabulous nation of vast diversity, one extraordinarily geographically dispersed, making the effort in the most difficult circumstances to produce a democracy. It has not been a nation that has in its experience, in its period of time since the independence struggle of Indonesia, which we strongly supported—the Labor government of the time strongly supported it while the Menzies-led opposition opposed it—enjoyed an untrammelled experience with democracy. It has not enjoyed a continuum of inevitable progression to a closer and closer understanding of what is meant by the rule of law. That thing has not been Indonesia’s experience, but it is now dealing with that and it is struggling to deal with it as effectively as anyone can. Those of us who visit Indonesia frequently, and I am one of those, can never fail to be impressed by the efforts that the Indonesians are putting forward in that regard.

Nevertheless, there is a legacy in Indonesia of a comprehension of political power untrammelled by the rule of law so that, when a person of authority in a political process—a Prime Minister, a President or whoever—stands up and says, ‘I will decide who comes to this country; I will decide the circumstances in which they make landfall,’ it rings like a bell in the historical experience of our neighbour. ‘Yes,’ they say, ‘that must be true because that is what we have experienced over the years in the structure of our government.’ Whatever the status of judges and whatever the status of parliamentary legislation, there is almost invariably going to be a set of circumstances where the person of power can override the consequences of law and ensure that their will is imposed. When they were megaphoned by the Prime Minister during the course of the few months prior to the 2001 election, when he hectored and lectured them on the requirement on their part to stop sending on refugees for whom they were the first point of call and we were the second point of call, they were engaged intensely by the Prime Minister hectoring them to change their practice of permitting people to come on.

All that reinforced the impression that in Australia you had a situation where there was no rule of law, that in Australia you had a situation with which they are wholly familiar. The law might be there on the statute books, with forestloads of trees being chopped down in order to be able to print vast numbers of them and circulate them around the country, but what it actually said was not necessarily so: it was an issue of who you knew and it was an issue of who actually had the numbers at any point in time. That is the impression, created by the Prime Minister of Australia in his relationship with Indonesia, of the nation of Australia. They did not have emanating in anything from a presentation to them by the Australian government that there was in fact a tradition in this country, centuries old, of the rule of law, that ministers and prime ministers are not unencumbered by broad legal principles, that ministers and prime ministers govern within the framework of laws which are passed by the nation. Those laws are, supposedly and probably, interpreted by the courts within the framework of the meaning of those laws as opposed to what might be the political preferences of any in power when the laws are applying to a situation with which they are very directly involved.

So when the asylum seekers from West Irian came ashore in Australia, the Indonesian government absolutely believed that, were they to stay in this country, they would stay only if the Prime Minister of the day wanted them to, that they would be accepted as refugees only if the Prime Minister of Australia agreed that they were refugees, and that they would exist in Australia only if the Prime Minister and government of the day harboured in their hearts a view that the constitutional situation of West Irian within Indonesia was wrong. Whether we like it or not, that is a product of many aspects of an Indonesian interpretation of what Australian political processes have conjured up. The Prime Minister, in his conduct, in his personal relationships, in his behaviour in the internal political processes of this nation, has created a distinct impression in this, our most important of neighbours, that we somehow do not accept their legitimacy as a state, that we somehow wish to undermine them and that we somehow take the view that refugees are only refugees where we politically agree with the source of their refugee status or the cause of their refugee status. Therefore, there is no dispassionate law in this country; there is only a preparedness to insult our neighbours. That is the impression given; that is what all of this emanates from. That erroneous view in Indonesia, directly influenced and created by the Prime Minister’s ineptness as a leader of this nation, has created the circumstances in which we are now dealing with a piece of legislation which, quite frankly, is a nonsense, is absurd and is a disgrace to any nation interested in and covetous of its sovereignty. This is an absurd piece of legislation which we should have nothing to do with.

What should have happened when these issues arose between us and the Indonesians is that we should have gone into an all-court press with Indonesia to explain the character of those laws. It might have been useful if the Prime Minister had said: ‘It is conceivable, Mr President, that you have been misled by my behaviours in the past. Understand that there is an Australian political process in which it suits our interests to simplify things, to create impressions of robust defences here and there. In fact, it is done within a framework and that framework includes very robust law and very robust legal practice. So, while I might look like a man of great mana and power, the truth of the matter is that I am bound by law and bound by legal processes.’

The laws in relation to refugees are laws which are based on a definition of refugees that in no shape or form reflects any approval of the political causes which may have created their refugee status. In fact, in all likelihood, it is the opposite. In many of those instances the political circumstances that create that refugee status are, on the other hand, in Australia, political circumstances and commitments that they have assumed and of which we would disapprove. But the point is that their adoption of those positions has created a set of circumstances in which an objective judgment must be entered into by an independent body, an independent person, an independent tribunal or official, subject to judicial testing subsequently, in which the status of the level of threat to the individual’s wellbeing is assessed. On those grounds only is a refugee created.

That is what we needed to do with Indonesia. When you are acting in the Australian national interest, every now and then you actually have to sit down and have a difficult conversation. I have had to do it myself a few times as a minister. I had to do it when I was changing the structure of the Australian defence policy back in the 1980s. I knew that in shifting Australian defence forces to Darwin and Western Australia I would create alarm in the minds of the Indonesians, and I did. I created a great deal of alarm in the minds of Indonesians. Before I introduced that white paper, I went to Indonesia and sat down with my counterpart, who was the Minister for Defence, and explained all the things that I was going to do. I explained how important their unity as a nation was to us and explained also that a sensible appraisal of Australian strategic geography would tell them that there is nothing other than this that we could do if we were sensibly planning for the defence of the nation. They did not like it. They did not like it at all, and it did not stop them from attacking me when the white paper was brought down. But I did learn over time that they respected the fact that I treated them with decency at that point of time by assuming that they would have a problem and that they would have an explanation and that the explanation would not necessarily change Australia’s position—we are not going to determine our defence policy on the basis of how another nation might feel about it. Nevertheless, there were ways of doing this which were respectful and ways of doing this which were insulting, and we should always act respectfully.

So when problems arose over this I would not have expected the Prime Minister to megaphone the Indonesians about how mistaken they were in their interpretations. They were entitled to a prime ministerial visit. They were entitled to several prime ministerial visits. They were entitled to a detailed explanation. They were entitled to words of comfort in relation to how we saw the Indonesian nation. They were entitled to statements from the government and from everybody else that we are not in the business of dissolving Indonesia. They were entitled to all of that. What they were not entitled to was a rewrite of the Australian laws. That is what they were not entitled to.

The problem—and I know this well from dealing with these folk—is that they now believe, because we are changing the laws like this, that what we were doing was wrong. Many in the Indonesian political process now believe that, yes, in subterranean fashion in the Australian government there are many people who feel that the people from West Papua are legitimate refugees not because they are threatened but because we agree with their cause and that they have cunningly tumbled us, exposed us and forced us to change. It is so erroneous, it is so wrong and it leaves inside the Indonesian administration the seeds of further trouble as a result of what we are doing here.

I will conclude because there is no further evidence I need to give to my Indonesian friends than the fact that the vast bulk of the refugees from the Tampa went through Nauru, were assessed as refugees and ended up here in Australia, so anybody who is processed in that way will probably end up here as well. I could go through all of that; but I do not want to because, apart from the fact that this is exceptionally bad foreign policy and exceptionally bad in terms of building a relationship with our neighbour, it is also exceptionally bad in humanitarian terms. This is so totally dumb and wrong. All I can do is end up where I started off and say to those on the other side of the House: come on over and join us and defend our national sovereignty. (Time expired)

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