Kelly Hoare (Charlton, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Labor will be opposing the Migration Amendment (Designated Unauthorised Arrivals) Bill 2006 for many reasons, many of which have already been articulated by colleagues both on this side and the other side of the House. This bill proposes to amend the Migration Act 1958 to effectively excise the Australian mainland and Tasmania from Australia’s migration zone for people arriving by sea without a visa. The so-called designated unauthorised arrivals may be removed to a declared country outside Australia for processing of any claims that they are owed refugee protection under the refugee convention as amended by the refugees protocol.

The government has indicated at this time that Nauru will be used as the declared country with Manus Island and Christmas Island as contingency locations. Asylum seekers would be prohibited under this law from instigating any legal or appeal proceedings in Australia following any determination of their protection claims. To excise the Australian mainland and Tasmania from Australia’s migration law is an absolutely ludicrous and flawed proposal. We know that, for the purposes of Australian migration law, there are islands off northern Australia which have already been excised so that if asylum seekers arrive on those islands, they do not have access to Australian migration laws.

After those excision laws were passed in this parliament there were only two islands left: Tasmania and the mainland. This legislation excises those two final islands from Australia’s migration law. What this means is that if an asylum seeker reaches our country by boat without a visa then they will be declared as not being on Australian soil for the purpose of the migration laws. They will be shipped off to Nauru, a country which, coincidentally, is not a signatory to the 1951 convention on refugees. What this means is that these asylum seekers who have come in leaky boats, in canoes and by whatever means they have in fleeing from their country of origin will find themselves, on reaching Australia, shipped off to Nauru and processed there under the international conventions.

The background to this is that on 18 January 2006, 43 West Papuan asylum seekers arrived on the Australian mainland. These asylum seekers feared for their lives and the lives of their children. They spent four weeks in canoes in the ocean between West Papua and Australia. They risked their lives coming here. We can only imagine what they feared back in their own country. They put their own children at risk, putting them into canoes to flee what they feared in their own country. Can you imagine, as a parent, putting your child at that kind of risk? As a parent, I cannot imagine what desperation would cause me to do that but there was that desperation for these 43 West Papuans.

The decision was made fairly early this year that 42 of those asylum seekers were found to be refugees and were granted asylum. Just last month the 43rd asylum seeker had his refugee status approved. At this time the Indonesians were unhappy with Australia. They believed that the 43 West Papuans did not face persecution and believed that Australia should send them back to Indonesia, notwithstanding Australian law and Australian migration law processes. The Indonesians withdrew their ambassador from our country. What did our government do? The Prime Minister could have explained our system of migration to the Indonesian President. He could have explained the way that our processes work and explained that the fact that these 43 West Papuans seeking asylum were granted refugee status did not mean that the Australian government agreed with the ideological position that these 43 people have taken in West Papua. The Prime Minister did not do that. He could have gone through those conversations with the President of Indonesia and explained those processes rather than taking a knee-jerk reaction in proposing this legislation that we have before us today.

If we take a step back, last year, as has been explained here before, we had a group of government members who were concerned about the immigration processes in relation to asylum seekers who arrived in Australia by boat without visas. They were also concerned about the processes of detention in this country and, along with Labor, forced changes to the migration laws, particularly in relation to children. They forced changes so that we would no longer see children arriving in this country by boat placed in detention behind razor wire when they were found to be asylum seekers. They made changes to the length of time people could be kept in detention, which led to the effective abolition of indefinite detention of asylum seekers. We saw the introduction of case managed mental health care, a major recommendation which came out of the Cornelia Rau inquiry as well. We have all seen the examples of how an individual’s mental health suffers while being in detention for an indefinite period. We also now have the fact that the Ombudsman is also the Immigration Ombudsman and that the system can be overseen by that person. This legislation overturns all of those changes.

Australian law only applies in Australia. Australian law does not apply in Nauru. While we saw Australian law changed or softened around the edges last year, that law cannot be applied in Nauru, so we are going to have, for example, children being locked up in detention behind razor wire. We are going to have people’s mental health affected. We are going to have a system where people may be held indefinitely in detention. A point that also needs to be made is that, under this legislation, an asylum seeker arrives in Australia and Australia ships that individual off to Nauru and locks that individual up. If under the UN processes that individual is found to be a refugee, they can still languish in detention in Nauru until a third country decides to take that particular individual so that that person can get on with their life. There is no time frame for that detention, even if the person is found to be a refugee.

Indeed, it was reported in June that the member for Pearce reminded her colleagues at a party room meeting that, at the time that they were discussing this bill, it had been 12 months since their party room had agreed to those changes that I have already listed. A lot of people in this place, on both sides, would agree that children should not be held in detention behind razor wire for any reason at all. There is no reason that anybody could conceivably understand as a good reason for that to happen.

There has been a recently published report called Seeking asylum alone, by Associate Professor Mary Crock of the University of Sydney. It found a significant increase in the number of child asylum seekers who arrived in Australia without a parent or guardian in the last few years. Between 2000 and 2002 there were 197 children travelling to Australia seeking asylum alone, of whom 154 have been found to be refugees and granted asylum. However, as recently as February this year 56 of these young people remained in immigration detention. Adele Horin’s opening paragraph in last Saturday’s Sydney Morning Herald illustrates this. She says:

They were smuggled out in the dead of night in the backs of trucks under hay or bags of flour. They were children from Afghanistan whose relatives were desperate to save them from the fate of older brothers or fathers, killed or kidnapped by the Taliban. Most of the children had no say in the decision, did not know where they were going, and had never heard of Australia.

What is it that could possibly drive a young person from the security and comforts of home to undertake a perilous journey through strife-torn countries and across the water in vessels of questionable seaworthiness? If you think about this as a parent, as a human being, it is beyond the imagination of most of us Australians, who really take the comforts we have very much for granted.

The case of Sayed Reza Moussawi, who was interviewed on Radio National’s Law Report on Tuesday of this week, is telling. Reza left Afghanistan unaccompanied as a 14-year-old. His brother was kidnapped and murdered, his bloodied body dumped on the front door of his family home almost three weeks after his abduction. Following his brother’s brutal murder by the Taliban, inquiries were made around Reza’s community as to whether there was another son in the household. Reza recounted what his dad said to him:

My Dad turned his face to me and he started crying. I saw the tears in his eyes, and he said, ‘Reza you should leave Afghanistan because your life is in danger, and I don’t want you to be killed like your brother and in front of us like a kind of a sheep or a horse or goats’.

Reza’s father insisted that he flee. Can you imagine the pain and torture a parent would experience in sending their adored child away, with only hope that they may be given a chance of survival better than the one they have at home? I remind the House that yesterday Australia committed further troops to Afghanistan to keep the Taliban at bay. We obviously recognise that this terrorist organisation is determined to kidnap and murder, and yet the government does not understand that it is not right to treat those victims who have fled this regime and its remnants as animals, leaving them to languish in detention for indefinite periods.

Upon his arrival in Australia after a harrowing journey in which the 14-year-old Reza was exhausted and sick, he was questioned by the authorities. He was petrified. He had fled a country where authority is to be feared with one’s life. Reza did not understand what was happening at first but was granted his freedom after 45 days in a detention centre. Whilst 45 days may not sound like an extended period, we must remember that Reza was still an unaccompanied child. He describes the detention centre as ‘a horrible place for all the immigrants and especially unaccompanied people and for the children’.

In her report, Associate Professor Mary Crock describes where Australia’s treatment of refugees in immigration detention continues to be inadequate and she makes it clear that the passage of this legislation will make things much worse. Unaccompanied children are not provided with any effective support while awaiting the determination of their applications for asylum. Under the measures proposed in this legislation, which is abhorrent to Australia’s obligations under international law, they will not even have the slim protections available to them under Australian law. This legislation proposes to send these asylum seekers offshore to places like Nauru to languish until their applications are processed. Mary Crock’s report found that unaccompanied children detained in Australian immigration centres were identified and placed in separate compounds with families. However, the report made the important point that such niceties were not extended to those children detained in Nauru and that they were treated as adults. It must be noted that, of those unaccompanied children detained within Australia, either they were all granted visas or their status was resolved. But, according to statistics provided to Mary Crock’s report by the International Organisation for Migration, of the 55 unaccompanied young people who arrived in Nauru, 32 were returned to the ravages of Afghanistan. This underscores the point that those seeking asylum who will be transhipped out to Nauru like freight by the Australian government under the measures proposed in this legislation will not have the protections of Australian law.

I would like to get some figures into perspective. Asylum seekers who arrived by boat in 2003-04 were approximately 1.5 per cent of the total number of so-called unauthorised arrivals, the rest of them arriving by aeroplane. The so-called unauthorised boat arrivals in the last four years, as has been indicated by the Minister for Immigration and Multicultural Affairs herself, represented only three or four per cent of the total unauthorised arrivals. In recent history, 2001 represented the highest number of asylum seekers arriving in Australia by boat. In that year, 12,355 claims for asylum were lodged by individuals already in Australia, while 4,137 asylum seekers arrived by boat—only one-quarter of the total number of asylum seekers that year. To add to those figures, almost 70 per cent of the 1,547 people intercepted between August and December 2001 and assessed offshore under the Pacific solution turned out to be genuine refugees. Add to that again the total of 130 Afghans on the Tampa who were given immediate sanctuary by New Zealand and the approval rate for refugee status rose to 71.1 per cent.

I congratulate all the speakers in this debate who are opposing this legislation who have brought their personal, humane values and principles to this discussion, including the member for Pearce, the member for Cook, the member for Kooyong and the member for McMillan. These people have stood up against fierce bullying within the Liberal Party and we saw an example of that this morning by the member for O’Connor, who is renowned for his bullying tactics. It has been fierce bullying. These members of parliament have bravely, humanely and with principle stood up against it.

I encourage them to further support their comments in this discussion by voting with Labor, voting against the bill. Do not be bullied by your leader; do not be bullied by the Prime Minister when he says you need to abstain from this vote, not vote against it. To further support the statements that you have made publicly and in this place you need to cross the floor, leave the Liberal-National Party coalition, vote with Labor and oppose this abhorrent legislation that will end in tragedy for many families who come to our country seeking asylum. It must be opposed, it must be defeated and that can happen in the Senate and, hopefully, it will.

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