Bruce Baird (Cook, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am not the first to say that the measure of a society is the way it treats the weak and vulnerable. In fact, what we are dealing with in the Migration Amendment (Designated Unauthorised Arrivals) Bill 2006 is how this country treats the dispossessed that come to our shores from various parts of the world. It is a measure of this society. This society is often called the lucky country. We have been blessed with incredible resources and economic growth. We have seen a 16.7 per cent increase in the income of Australians over the past 10 years. We have had an average growth of GDP of something like three per cent per year. At the same time that our affluence has been growing and people have been building their houses and buying their plasma screens, we are asked to look at those who are less fortunate than us: the vulnerable in our society.

In this House there are many things that we could address, such as the management of the economy and our customs regimes. But the bottom line is that we need to use our power for those who have no power, and use our influence for those who have no influence. The reality is that this involves families. It involves children. Nelson Mandela said:

There can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul than the way it treats its children.

If that is the case, why would we want to continue to have children in detention centres? We went through this process before, and other colleagues who are here today were involved in that process. I had no interest in the question of the processing of asylum seekers until I went onto the Joint Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade Human Rights Subcommittee’s review of detention centres around Australia. What I saw of modern Australia shocked me: many people who were severely depressed; children behind barbed wire around Australia; people who were woken up in the middle of the night by having torches shone in their eyes; people called by numbers instead of names; and people left in detention centres for years upon years, thereby affecting their psychological stability. That was not something I was proud of. It is something that we as a society should be looking at and saying: ‘This was not a good period in terms of the way we treated the most vulnerable.’

Whether or not we use a Christian analogy, certainly we know that we are encouraged to look at the weak and vulnerable as a starting point. While we build our riches as a nation, the danger for us is that, in this process of collecting a glittering prize of materialism, we lose our soul. If this is the result of the bill we have before us, then I think there is a real challenge for us. Clearly, this is a challenge for all of us, including my colleagues here. When you are in here and vote as a group, there is a question of mateship, which is a great Australian tradition, but there is also another tradition we have in Australia: a fair go. It is a tradition of giving a fair go to those who are less well off, giving them a helping hand and saying: ‘It’s okay, mate. I understand that that is the problem.’

Clearly, there are people who rort the system. I spoke to the head of a processing centre in one of the most generous of the processing countries I saw when I went on a study tour to look at how other countries treated their asylum seekers. I asked him, ‘What is the biggest challenge that you have in this job?’ He said, ‘Losing your sensitivity to people who are in trouble.’ And so it is for us. We want to stereotype them as queue jumpers, as the rich who throw away their passports or as people who decide that they are going to get in this country by one means or another. They will pay off the people-smugglers, they will get onto leaky boats to get here—they are economic refugees and not genuine.

If that is the case—and I have heard some people talk about such people—then they do not know the refugees that I have met. They do not know the people I was involved in getting out of the refugee centres, like the young man who was part of a church in Iran, where the militia came and shot up half the congregation. They fled to various parts of the world. He was knocked back by both the principal review process and the RRT, which did not believe that he belonged to an underground church. This man has now become an Australian citizen. I handed him his certificate, and I was very proud of the fact that I did so.

What is this young man doing now? He is doing engineering at university during the day. At night he works in a factory to pay for himself. And at the weekend he works as a translator at a church in the western suburbs so that his Iranian friends can have knowledge about Christian life.

This is the man who was knocked back. This is the type of person who comes here and whom I have seen. It is why I feel so passionately that we should continue to process them in the right way. We should continue to look after the vulnerable in our community and not simply ignore them as some untidy piece of work. Are we to just excise the whole of Australia and not worry about what happens to them—just think that they are in some other place, some other country?

Let me review what was achieved in this House just a short time ago: women and children were not to be processed behind barbed wire. I would go and see a family that I dealt with. It was a family of three. I visited them in school holidays, at Christmas time. They were all behind barbed wire. They could not get out and play like other people there. They were behind barbed wire. We said that was wrong. We said that we were going to have all women and children out of detention centres, that we would not have it any more—and appropriately so.

Those people were put into alternative accommodation. They had to check in once a week. What happened? Did we find these people tearing off to the ends of the world? The answer is no. Not one person disappeared. Why? It was their best chance of getting into Australia.

Secondly, we on that human rights subcommittee decided that we would put time limits on how long it took to process people in detention. People could be in detention for years. People had forgotten about their case. When they went to see the case officer, they were rude to them. Some of them did not speak English. They did not know. When people have that uncertainty, what happens is that it affects them psychologically. If you have people who have been there for four, five or six years, the result is clear: great uncertainty and psychological unbalancing of these people. We decided we would put time limits on—three months for the primary decision and a further three months for review—so that we would not have this situation any more.

Finally, we said that, for any case over two years, we would call in the Ombudsman, who would do an automatic review to decide whether it was appropriate to keep the person in the detention centre. There are some cases when that is the situation—when people should be kept in for security reasons, health reasons or whatever. Usually there is not much justification, but it should be an independent person who reviews it.

We achieved that. The heat was taken out of the community. My view is that most people out there in the community supported it. We made changes for the benefit of this country and, particularly, for the dispossessed people who came by boat to this country. People say that we are letting in terrorists. We asked Graham Richardson—not Graham Richardson; I mean the former head of ASIO.

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