Peter Garrett (Kingsford Smith, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Reconciliation and the Arts) Share this | Hansard source

I want to acknowledge the contributions made and positions taken by the member for Kooyong and the member for McMillan and the comments made by the member for Calare in this very important debate in the parliament. On 23 March of this year the Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs granted protection visas to 42 out of 43 West Papuans who had arrived by sea on 18 January. The next day, the Indonesian government withdrew its ambassador to Australia. Within a month, the National Security Committee of Cabinet had determined that all future so-called unauthorised arrivals to the Australian mainland would be transferred to an offshore processing centre, namely Nauru.

The Minister for Immigration and Multicultural Affairs, Minister Vanstone, was not a member of this committee. On 11 May the Migration Amendment (Designated Unauthorised Arrivals) Bill 2006, this bill, was introduced into the House and the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Immigration and Multicultural Affairs defended the changes, saying that sound border management requires flexibility and that the changes contemplated the preservation of Australia’s sovereignty. That is the view of the government: that excising our borders to accommodate the wishes of another country is an act of preserving our own sovereignty. That is toxic word spinning that has been a feature of this government. Its conduct of this portfolio is of the very worst kind. Four days later, when the Indonesian foreign minister stated that he had been assured Australia would not accept individuals processed on Nauru, even if found to be refugees, and the Australian Minister for Foreign Affairs reported that Indonesia was pleased by these changes, the about-face was complete.

This debate is not about the Indonesian government or its people, who are one of our nearest and clearly most important neighbours; it is a debate about the way in which the Howard government manages that relationship and manages immigration. It is a debate about our role as a regional state and about Australia’s fidelity to the international principles of human rights as enumerated and contained within our own laws and regulations. The crux of this debate is moral integrity and national purpose as weighed against political expediency. Additionally, as we are hearing, it is a debate about the true convictions of members of the Liberal Party under Prime Minister Howard.

The government has now got itself into a situation where it is compounding the already serious flaws that are a recognised feature of its conduct of immigration and the policy it has introduced. This is a policy whose dismal execution has been the subject of two special reports, both highly critical of DIMIA—now DIMA. This is a policy that costs Australian taxpayers dearly and which in its first instance, when it first came into the public and political domain, was driven by fear and hysteria and by the Prime Minister’s expert manipulation of the emotions of Australians. We need to be crystal clear that the government does not have the support of the Australian public or many in the parliament, including a number of members on its own side, for these changes. Nor does it have the support of senators who considered this matter in some detail and who recommended that the bill not proceed in the form that it came to them. It says volumes that the only submission in favour of the changes came from the discredited department itself.

The Leader of the Opposition, when he spoke earlier, reflected on how important our relationship with Indonesia is and the way in which the debate on this bill touches that relationship. It is worth remembering that Prime Minister Howard staked his reputation in his early term as Prime Minister on a point of differentiation in foreign affairs with the claim that under previous Labor governments Australia had been too close to Indonesia, yet now he is willing to change the laws of Australia—the very legislative framework within which our immigration system operates—to accommodate that same country. This sends conflicting and confusing messages to the region. They imply that there can be dictates that emanate from the top and that these dictates can alter—at will, it seems—existing Australian institutions. We deeply wish that were not the case.

It is a matter of public record that there are West Papuans already facing extreme abuse and threat of persecution, and this bill would see them removed from Australia. This legislation is at odds with the philosophy and decent instincts of a number of members of the government. It is contrary to the principles embedded in our own law that people should not be detained without the opportunity to be charged before a court. It seeks to avoid our international obligations and it renders the government’s earlier promise not to detain children in detention a hollow sham.

In the words of former Liberal leader Malcolm Fraser—and there will be hear, hears from this side of the House at least—‘Compassion is not an attribute of the Howard government.’ Regrettably, neither is accountability to its own decisions and statements nor to the humane exercise of its laws. In fact this bill is the latest instalment in the long-running saga of a government that drenches us in talks of values but has long given up holding any values of real worth itself. Just as in 2001 people fleeing persecution in other countries were exposed and left to drown, now people coming across the sea to Australia will be diverted to a remote island and left, where they will not be subject to the laws of Australia and where they will be isolated from the range of legal and social services that are a basic requirement of those seeking asylum.

But this government always says one thing and does another. And on values, which are the bedrock of democracy, the government is the great masquerader. It puts material into the schools, the government’s own ‘Values for schooling’ material. I want to read to the House and to the public what these values are. These are values the government wants Australians to live by, and they include: ‘Care and compassion, doing your best, respect, freedom, integrity, where character is destiny.’

What exquisite hypocrisy! The government espouses and calls on young Australians to live by these values but is itself unwilling to follow them. In this case it is young people in particular who will bear the brunt of the government’s response to refugees. In fact the values embedded in this bill are the values that have been on clear display in the past 10 sorry years of this government’s conduct of immigration policy: appalling treatment of refugees; well-documented policy failures; a culture of compliance; intimidation and manipulation; values of expediency and of taking political advantage at the expense of human rights; values of demonising the less powerful; and, now, the value of failing to stand and defend Australia’s sovereign capacity to make soundly based decisions on matters that come before it.

These are the values on offer in the bill that is before the House. What an extraordinary action: to try to please the government of another country, instead of taking the time and effort to engage in moderated diplomacy and engage in serious and fruitful dialogue, to simply bend the legal framework of this country into a contorted shape. This bill exposes the government on two fronts: nervousness in that Mr Howard and Mr Downer lacked the confidence to defend the Australian decision-making process or to engage in fruitful discussion with our Indonesian neighbours; callousness in that the government was prepared to abandon the existing laws and frameworks and to abandon asylum seekers and the integrity of our own legal system along the way simply because it was panicked by the Indonesian reaction.

It is little wonder that the government’s decision and this bill in the parliament have attracted so much attention and caused so much angst amongst decent people of all political persuasions, including many from my electorate of Kingsford Smith. There has been a gathering in the parliament over the past couple of days to talk about the Christian faith; there are many in this House who hold a Christian faith and I include myself as one of them. I note that the churches have been speaking out. I note that Newcastle Christians for Peace have released correspondence to the Minister for Immigration and Multicultural Affairs, urging her to remember Australia’s obligation to assist those fleeing persecution.

At the beginning of this debate, the Social Issues Executive of the Anglican Diocese of Sydney addressed the content of the bill. I think it is fair to say that this is a diocese whose politics are measured; we might even say they are conservative. But the diocesan Social Issues Executive have given thought to the proposed amendments under this bill and found it wanting. They urged Anglicans to contact their MPs and urged them to oppose the bill, and their reasoning was sound. Article 14 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states: ‘Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution.’ The UNHCR in its submission to the Senate Legal and Constitutional Legislation Committee inquiry said:

UNHCR is concerned that the proposed off-shore processing measures will detract from Australia’s responsibilities, as a State party to the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees (“the 1951 Convention”), to put in place a system which reliably identifies refugee status and protection requirements, as well as offers timely opportunities for proper and appropriate solutions.

It is a principle of international law that everyone has a right to seek asylum in a safe country so as to escape persecution, and Australia is a signatory to the refugee convention which sets out the necessary measures that should apply. If someone makes a claim on the soil of a convention signatory, such as Australia, then the convention applies. Australia is a signatory; Nauru is not. It is the case that following the Tampa incident in 2001, which saw the refusal of the government to allow into Australia over 400 asylum seekers, mainly Iraqi and Afghan, Australia provided an aid package to Nauru in return for its taking the refugees. We traded aid for proper process and compassion.

The Howard government then decided to process asylum seeker claims offshore if people were intercepted and not carrying valid documents, but people who arrived on the mainland would be processed under Australian migration law. Come by ship, out; come by plane, in—very poor policy. Nauru and Papua New Guinea, through Manus Island, its designated site, agreed to detain asylum seekers in centres run by IOM, International Organisation for Migration; hence, the Pacific solution was born. And it is expensive: the 2001 MOU with PNG for Manus Island costs us about $700,000 a month but, up until May 2004, very few—I think only one detainee—had been held there.

Then we get to November 2003 when the government excised 4,000 islands from Australia’s migration zone. Any so-called unauthorised person arriving by boat and landing on any of these places would also not be able to apply for an Australian visa. Fast forward to last year and, following intense public anxiety, significant criticism from Labor and unease by some government members about the impact of the policy, there was some change, including the release of all children from mainland detention centres and the Ombudsman to review cases of those held in detention for more than two years.

But in early 2006, after nearly all the Papuans and subsequently one other Papuan, were rightly judged to be genuine asylum seekers and following the Indonesian government’s response, an announcement was made to extend the Pacific solution. Many speakers will point out that features of the Pacific solution are undesirable. Importantly, the centres are not governed by Australian migration law. They are places where Australian government policy sort of operates but it sort of does not as well. The extraordinary lengths that the government has gone to to hide the deficiencies in the Pacific solution have not prevented members from its own side recognising that it is no solution at all. Significantly, asylum seekers will be denied access to a fair and impartial review process via the Refugee Review Tribunal.

We must note that, between 1993 and the start of 2006, the Refugee Review Tribunal had overturned 7,885 decisions of DIMA to refuse asylum seekers refugee status. In other words, without the appeal process, all of those people, including families, may have been removed from Australia to situations where they could have been at grave risk. That is something we now know to be the case with the news this week of the fate of people who returned to Afghanistan.

Mary Crock, associate professor at the law faculty at Sydney university points out that the Pacific solution produces fewer successful refugee claims. That is one of its effects. Notwithstanding the appalling conditions that many children faced in detention centres in Australia, at least they got to stay. But of those who were detained on Nauru, around half were sent back.

There is a long history of investigation into the number of Australians who have been illegally detained. There are the cases of Cornelia Rau and Vivian Alvarez Solon, and we have the Comrie report. We have an extraordinary history of the conduct of Immigration in this country, which speaks very poorly to the government and to its ministers—in particular, the former immigration minister and now Attorney-General, and the current immigration minister. In fact, the only action of any worth that I can identify by the current minister is when she admitted on the 7.30 Report some months back that it was an indisputable fact that the government was responding to Indonesian pressure on the decision to grant refugee status to 42 of the 43 Papuans who had arrived in Australia on 18 January. I think one or two days before that, the Prime Minister said that the bill had nothing to do with listening to Indonesian politicians. Who are we to believe?

But what of those people who are genuine refugees, who experience persecution, violence or intimidation and who come by sea? Are they to be denied the same rights and opportunities to be consistently and properly processed that would otherwise be the case and, in this instance, simply because they hail from Papua. This is a callous and contradictory policy. It was framed on the run, as represented in this bill, by a government unsure of how to prudently manage a critical relationship but willing to add to its already disgraceful track record in immigration and to escape, for the time being, the consequences of its actions.

But I have some confidence that Australians will not tolerate for much longer a government for whom principles and compassion have no meaning. It is a government that lacks the confidence in its institutions, in its own laws and in its own officials to allow events to take their course, as they ought. It is a government that lacks confidence in what its proper place in the region is. It is a government that has no idea of what Australia’s primary values are—a commitment to equality before the law, a commitment to respect human rights and a commitment to give those who seek sanctuary a fair go within the accepted, identified and legally consistent instruments, laws and regulations that exist in this country and that have served us well. A government that so betrays its own values is a government that is no longer worthy of representing the people of Australia. This bill must be opposed.

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