Dick Adams (Lyons, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I would like to point out to the honourable member who has just resumed his seat that the Australian Labor Party does not support any smuggling of people anywhere in the world and we do not support the weakening of our immigration laws in any way. Forty-three people in a leaky canoe—this is what this legislation is about. It is about 43 people from Papua in a leaky canoe fleeing persecution, landing in Australia and the government getting out its 10-tonne hammer to crack a nut. This legislation is a farce. What sort of invasion is this? How much of a threat are a few terrified people in a canoe?

Time passes and the memory of this event is supposed to have faded since the autumn sittings of parliament. But I doubt it has. Accounts of returned Afghanis are now coming through. How many of them survived their repatriation? It seems they have been sent back to an unstable and dangerous land where the war still rages and the Taliban are beginning to make themselves felt again. The Migration Amendment (Designated Unauthorised Arrivals) Bill 2006 can mean children in detention again. Indefinite detention will return. Case managed mental health care is over. The Commonwealth Immigration Ombudsman will also lose oversight of asylum seekers when they are sent to a remote foreign island for processing. Earlier this year the government did the right thing in issuing more than 40 protective visas to asylum seekers from Papua. The visas were issued on the grounds that these individuals had a well-founded fear of persecution. When the government made this decision, we on this side congratulated them on it. This latest legislation, if it is passed, will guarantee that the government will never again treat asylum seekers with the decency that they saw earlier this year.

The bill means that if in future people fleeing persecution arrive on Australia’s mainland in a canoe, they will be sent to Nauru to be processed and Australia will act as though it has no obligations. Under this proposal, children will be in detention again. We will see indefinite detention come back. Case managed health care will be stopped. The Commonwealth Immigration Ombudsman will also lose oversight of asylum seekers when they are sent to a remote foreign island for processing. The latest idea to come to light has this government suggesting we accommodate the would-be asylum seekers in prison hulks before they are processed. That would really be offshore! My ancestors were convicts and spent time in those miserable, rat-infested prison hulks on the Thames before they came to this country. Are we going back to those days? What exactly are we trying to achieve by punishing those who believe that Australia is a safe and decent place to aspire to live in?

There is no way of amending this bill to make it just. If one government senator crosses the floor in parliament and votes with Labor in opposing this bill, it can be stopped. This issue should be above politics. If this goes through, it means that anyone who comes to Australia’s shores by boat, ship, canoe, sailboard or bathtub—anything that floats on water—will not be deemed to be in Australia. Suddenly we have no boundaries—if they do not have papers, they have not arrived in Australia. What if someone gives birth and that baby is deposited on Australian soil? What country are they in? It certainly would not be in the country of the mother’s birth; they may have been through several countries since then. It seems they are stateless and forever bound to spend their life in Nauru. They will have to go through the process of seeking assistance and be sent off to Nauru for processing. They are assessed by a single officer and if that person deems them not to be refugees, they can appeal to another officer—once again one person—and then that is it. If there is no sympathy there, they are off to Nauru to try and find another country to take them. This virtually means anyone arriving by sea without papers has little or no chance of gaining asylum in Australia, whether they are eligible or not.

What about the visiting ships? Or luxury yachts? Are they going to be banged up in a prison hulk or asylum camp just for daring to cross the country’s sea boundaries and set foot on Australian soil somewhere? It starts becoming a nonsense when you think of it like that. More potential illegal immigrants come to this country by air than by any other way. They go through the normal processes of visas, false or real, and walk happily off aeroplanes all round the country. Is this the way we want them to turn up instead? It just means we get the rich illegal immigrants, not the poor ones, who really are the asylum seekers fleeing persecution, with only the clothes on their back and a few trinkets of memories.

With this legislation I get the feeling I am living in a country run by the Red Queen out of Alice in Wonderland. You know what she used to say? She said, ‘Off with his head, off with his head’, when someone displeased her. So if whoever it is does not approve of this legislation or disagrees with our leaders, and it annoys the leaders that there is dissent, then their views are dismissed summarily. ‘We cannot possibly be wrong,’ seems to be the sentiment here. The arrogance of this government comes through. Yet there are many on the government side of the House, as well as in the opposition, who are concerned about this legislation. These people do not believe it right to lock up women and children. They believe that we should have a firm but just and fair process for all who seek to come here by whatever means. Whatever happened to the tenet that all are innocent unless proven guilty? It is a sad world in which we are making our own citizens suspicious of all other citizens of other nations. We are all one people under the sun—all part of the human race—and we do not have the right to subject them to this undoubted persecution.

The introduction of this bill appears to demonstrate that our refugee laws are being determined and rewritten by a foreign state. This is not an initiative of the responsible department seeking to improve the quality of our asylum processes. There is no doubt that the proposed law is in direct response to Indonesian anger over the granting of protection visas to the 42 West Papuans. Australian law should not be enacted at the dictate of a country which itself falls significantly short of democratic and human rights standards yet rejects any criticism of its own justice system, particularly its criminal justice system.

The introduction in this way of foreign policy considerations into an asylum determination process giving effect to Australia’s treaty obligations under the refugee convention will render these obligations meaningless in practice. As a member of this parliament’s Joint Standing Committee on Treaties, I find this extraordinarily stupid. We should be ensuring that we have some consistency in our approach to treaty making and are abiding by those that we have agreed to—otherwise, why do we bother to engage in this process? I do not believe this legislation is needed, nor should we support it. The next thing will be that Tasmania is annexed and becomes that ‘prison offshore island’—not much different from how it was in the 1800s when my ancestors finally arrived there at His Majesty’s pleasure. That experiment did not work. It did little to change the behaviour of many of the inmates; it only deprived them of their liberty and hope, which sent so many of them mad or even to an early grave.

If we want migrants with skills to become part of our nation, we would be better off accepting some of these desperate people who want to learn from us and who want to work and improve life for their families and for communities of which they are a part. We are all capable of learning, and many of those people would be already halfway there with many skills. So why take temporary overseas workers when we can take people who really want to be here and be part of our communities?

This legislation is to appease the Indonesian anger at the acceptance of some of their people who arrived by sea from West Papua. The argument is that they are refugees and they need to be assisted under the international obligations that the world accepts as due practice—for example, they are being persecuted and, if they return to their country, they will be harmed. Those are the grounds to grant them the status of refugees. Fortress Australia was never a way of solving the issue of boat people coming here. The work we do to help other countries improve the conditions of their people and their workers would be far more useful than trying to keep people out of Australia and, in doing so, wasting vast amounts of money. I oppose this legislation and reject the reasoning behind it.

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