Cameron Thompson (Blair, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is a pleasure to speak in this debate, which has been quite an emotional one. A lot of heavy rhetoric has been thrown about, and people have taken very strong positions. I want to come back to the core question of what the Migration Amendment (Designated Unauthorised Arrivals) Bill 2006 is supposed to be about and what our immigration policies are supposed to be about—in relation to the refugee program and our humanitarian program, which seek to assist people who might be fleeing for their lives. Given that the problems worldwide are much greater than we could hope to deal with ourselves and that the world community struggles to get anywhere near dealing with the problem, the most important thing has to be that we assist the most needy people first. We must always seek to do that. We must also make sure that our program values the lives of refugees and puts them first. We must also make sure that, in giving consideration, we do not create false expectations and we endeavour to deal straight with the refugees—the people we are seeking to assist—and not mislead them as to our intentions.

I am rather disturbed that in Australia at the moment we have what amounts to a two-speed process of dealing with refugees. We have two groups. Across the world there are refugees in horrible places like Sudan and other parts of Africa—and a little later I am going to read a story from someone in that circumstance. The other group, who are travelling at a different speed, arrive in Australia and seek to make their application for refugee status onshore. What I think is significant about that is that, if you make an application onshore in Australia, with the Refugee Review Tribunal and all the appeal mechanisms that apply in our country, the odds of successfully negotiating and proving a genuine case are a lot better than practically everywhere else in the world, where the processes recommended and approved by the UNHCR are in place but where the mechanisms for appeal may not be as good and other things may apply. So, if you want to maximise your chance under this two-speed system, you do not apply offshore; you apply onshore.

Under the legislation that applies today, we have created a lure for people to come to Australia and make their claims here—and the best and most proven way of people undertaking that path is to throw themselves into an unseaworthy vessel, go onto the high seas with their children, risk their lives and come to this country to get a leg-up to give themselves a better chance of getting refugee status and bring forward the case. Later on I will talk about people who apply for refugee status from war-torn countries in Africa—they can be waiting for four years or a lot longer to get their chance. So, to bring things forward, people hop on boats and take that risk. It really disturbs me that, in this House, the entire Labor Party and people on my own side say this is a good thing.

There was an article in the Canberra Times on 8 April on the arrival of those Papuans about whom we have talked so much in this debate. It describes how they basically built their own canoe in the backyard—a longboat with an outrigger. Over six weeks the boat stealthily navigated almost the entire coast of Papua from Jayapura in the north. They ended up spending five days on the high seas, rather than two. The article states:

They ran out of food and one of the two motors on the big canoe broke down as they hit stormy weather and high seas.

“We just cried, ‘Oh God, help us bring to the mainland. We don’t want to die in the sea,’” Wainggai says.

I think it is illustrative that they say, ‘Oh, God, help us bring to the mainland.’ There is the lure: if you make it to the mainland you get the opportunity to bring forward your case. As it stands under the legislation, if you have children with you—and that group did; they had two children as young as three—you are able to bring forward your application and be released into the community. That is a hell of a better prospect, for example, than the same group would have had if they had done as many other Papuans have done and simply walked across the border into Papua New Guinea and made an application for refugee status from there. Because of laws that stand today, which I believe are flawed and dangerous in their logic, we have a position where we create a lure for them to go onto the high seas and risk the lives of their children.

I do not know if it has been widely reported but, in the very same month that those Papuans set to sea, another group of Papuans set to sea from the same area, Jayapura. Here is an article from the Sydney Morning Herald headed ‘Papuans missing at sea as crisis talks start’:

A boat carrying 21 Papuans suspected of being asylum seekers has sunk with one confirmed dead and 18 more missing, Indonesian police say.

The article goes on to say that the boat had departed from Jayapura and rolled over in the sea. One dead body was sighted. People seeking asylum in our country are being asked to put their lives at risk. I think that is a terrible situation to have, because there is no doubt that there are people in refugee camps in serious danger of their lives who need assistance and who are pushed to the back of the bus to make way for people who have taken that risk, spurred on by what I think is a very false and fundamentally corrupt existing policy. I think it is a dangerous policy and a policy that has to change. We need to have all refugees put on an equal footing: to make all their applications at exactly the same level and to make sure that they are properly assessed.

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