Michael Danby (Melbourne Ports, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Madam Deputy Speaker, as I opened this debate, I seek leave to speak again without closing the debate.

Leave granted.

Yesterday I presented to the House the report of the Joint Standing Committee on Migration on its inquiry into immigration detention in Australia entitled Immigration detention in Australia: a new beginning. This is a report of which the members for Hughes, Makin, Isaacs and Petrie are all very proud. Madam Deputy Speaker Vale, I apologise for missing your contribution to this debate as the member for Hughes. I value your views and I have got to know them as our committee has gone through this inquiry. Your contribution, as the member for Makin said, has been extremely wise and very helpful in the deliberations of the committee. We have had a very hardworking core group of people on this committee, including a couple of senators—Senators McEwen and Bilyk. Certainly the members for Hughes, Makin and Petrie have helped form the core of this committee and, together with the member for Kooyong and I, have been at most of its hearings.

Tonight I want to briefly consider recent comments made by opposition members on the matters discussed in this report. I will begin my conclusion by referring to the matters the member for Makin and the member for Isaacs discussed, and that is the comments made by the member for Murray. The member for Murray alleged that changes made by the current government to the detention policy are encouraging people smugglers. She implied in her question in the House yesterday that there has been a so-called surge in unauthorised boat arrivals in Australian waters. Regrettably, there was a story on the front page of the Australian yesterday that reported this as a fact rather than a mere allegation. I rang Mr Steve Cook from the International Organisation for Migration in Jakarta yesterday and he told me that the claim that there was a surge in illegal boats coming to Australia was not made by him. If you are going to make such grave allegations, given the history of this debate in Australia, you ought to check with an important international public servant working for an important, fair minded organisation such as the International Organisation for Migration before you make such an allegations.

As the member for Isaacs pointed out, there is no such surge. There have been four unauthorised arrivals with 48 passengers so far this year. Since it is now December, that is probably the total for the year. Last year, which was the last year of the Howard government, there were five boats with 148 passengers and the year before, 2006, six boats with 60 passengers. In other words, the total of unauthorised boat arrivals in the first year of the Rudd government has been lower, not higher, than it was in either of the last two years of the Howard government. The trend in unauthorised boat arrivals has been downwards, not upwards.

The member for Isaacs exposed the allegations that the Rudd government has somehow weakened our surveillance of Australian waters and allowed this mythical surge of unauthorised arrivals to take place. In fact, no boat containing unauthorised persons has reached the Australian mainland since the Rudd government was elected. The last time a boat reached the Australian mainland was in November 2006, when a boatload of 83 Indonesians arrived at Cape York. That was when the Howard government was in office. It is of course true that people smugglers are active in our region. It is also true that, before the election of this government, Australia continued to work with its South-East Asian partners to deter people smugglers. A number of groups have been intercepted in the region recently.

As we all now know, rather than locking up thousands of people in remote parts of Australia in detention centres like Baxter and Woomera as some kind of deterrence, the effective way of managing Australia’s sovereignty and borders is to have good relations with our neighbours, particularly with neighbours like Indonesia. One thing that we learnt during this report was that the activities of the Navy, of Customs and of Immigration, integrated with the same organs of the Indonesian state, are the really effective way of making sure that people do not endanger their lives by putting to sea in the types of boats that previously came to Australia. Moreover, seen from the perspective and context of Europe, the arrival of 4,000 people in these boats in the beginning of 2000 was not something to be hysterical about anyhow. I recently met with the deputy chair of the German Bundestag in parliament house, and he asked me to describe the nature of the problem. After hearing of those small numbers of arrivals in 2000, the deputy chair responded in a very surprised tone, saying, ‘Mr Danby, we received 350,000 from Yugoslavia in that one year.’ So you have to see this in context.

Australian law enforcement and immigration agencies continue to work with our counterparts in South-East Asia to respond to people smuggling. There has been no diminution of Australia’s efforts in this respect under this government. The government has maintained patrols of our borders by the border protection command and has maintained a system of mandatory detention and excisions. The fact that we have shut down the Howard government’s Pacific solution does not mean that we have abolished mandatory detention for unauthorised arrivals, as the member for Kooyong has vociferously pointed out.

It is deplorable that the opposition has again sought to drag the Royal Australian Navy into a political debate. They claimed falsely that the Royal Australian Navy supported their version of events during the ‘children overboard’ affair. We know now from the documentary that has recently been on television that the Navy did not. Now they are trying to do it again. The Chief of Navy has repeatedly assured the public that extending the traditional six-week leave period by a further two weeks will not have any impact on operations. The opposition has virtually accused the Chief of Navy of lying and dereliction of duty. The opposition should stop these insinuations and show some regard for our hardworking Navy.

I mentioned the assertion of Mr Stephen Cook of the International Organisation for Migration that there was no surge. I do think all this is really regrettable. You have to be very serious if you are going to make the kinds of allegations in parliament like those that led to such political trauma in Australia during the Hanson period. You ought to try and establish that these facts are true yourself, as I did with a simple phone call. That is what you have parliamentary staff and researchers for. This allegation was not fact; there is no surge, according to Mr Stephen Cook of the International Organisation for Migration.

The member for Makin made a very good point. All the committee members agreed with the majority of the recommendations. However, despite my best efforts and those of the deputy chair, there were a number of issues on which consensus could not be reached—particularly on the issue of judicial review. Regrettably, some of the media has focused almost exclusively on that minor issue to the exclusion of the benchmarks and guidelines set out by the committee. The committee majority believes that extensive reforms to existing immigration detention procedures and cultural change in the Department of Immigration and Citizenship will bring the best outcomes in terms of national security as well as just and humane treatment of immigration detainees.

The committee’s recommendations make a paradigm shift. We have done exactly what we said in the foreword. The paradigm shift, I am sorry to say to the member for Kooyong, happened in November 2007 at the election. A new government was elected with a completely different Weltanschauung, as the Germans say, or world view of these matters. In June, Senator Chris Evans outlined his criteria for immigration detention and spoke on behalf of the government’s different world view. That is the cultural change that led to the setting out of the benchmarks which implement the more humane Evans criteria, which still address the issues of security for the wider Australian community.

The committee’s recommendations place the onus on releasing people from detention. The onus is on releasing people, not keeping them in. The committee sees the best way of doing this is to give clear deadlines by which further detention must be justified. Specific dates include after 90 days, when, if the identity of detainee is unable to be established, and in the absence of a demonstrated and specific risk to the community, the committee recommends a conditional release from detention. The committee has recognised that it is important to establish the identity of people coming to our country. However, the committee was concerned that, if people had to wait for the conclusion of the identification process before they could be eligible for release, these criteria could potentially discriminate against asylum seekers who may have come from countries without secure identity systems or who may have left their country without documents for reasons of persecution or whatever.

The committee also considers that this 90-day time frame should be reviewed after a period of time with a view to further reducing it if it is possible and practical to do so. Let us be clear about this: 87 per cent of people who come to Australia unauthorised are released within 30 days. We are talking about 13 per cent of those who are here illegally after that. After 90 days, if a security assessment of detainees is ongoing and it is identified that there is little risk to the community, as advised by the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation—who made a very professional presentation, as you would expect, to the committee—the committee recommends conditional release from detention.

The security and identity criteria are linked as it is difficult to know whether someone is a security risk when we do not know their identity. But the available evidence suggests that on balance of probability the security risk posed by unauthorised arrivals is very low. As we have repeatedly been told before in this committee, against the mythology of ‘those dreadful Afghan Hazaras on that boat’, of the tens of thousands of unauthorised arrivals in the last decade only two adverse security assessments have come to public attention—against Iraqi nationals on Nauru, and one of those had the adverse assessment later dropped. If al-Qaeda is coming to Australia they are going to do it in the same way that they did in September 11—in first class, in the front seats of a plane where you will not be able to recognise them. Persecuting poor Afghan Hazaras on boats for political purposes is not going to keep terrorists out of Australia.

I must say I was very impressed by the Director-General of ASIO’s explanation to the committee about the comprehensive way that they assess the small number of people that are kept in detention after 90 days. The committee further recommended that after six months, if a security assessment is ongoing, the Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security provide advice to the Commonwealth Ombudsman as to whether there is a legitimate basis for delays in security assessment. The committee also recommends that the Commonwealth Ombudsman’s six-monthly detention reviews be tabled in parliament and that the Minister the Immigration and Citizenship be required to respond within 15 sitting days. So, quite against what the member for Kooyong said, there is a whole series of new benchmarks and guidelines that would have to be accepted. The onus again is on releasing people, not keeping them in. The minister would have to respond to the Commonwealth Ombudsman’s report after six months and give an explanation to parliament as to why people were being kept in. It is not simply a matter, as in the old days of the Howard government, of keeping them in forever.

Then again, as a further failsafe, the committee recommends that after 12 months, provided a person is not determined to be a significant and ongoing and unacceptable risk to the community, the person should be released from detention onto a bridging visa. The committee noted that length of time spent in detention centres continues to be a concern for many detainees, oversight bodies and advocacy groups. In recent years, and especially since the new government came to office, the number of people in detention for such a long periods has been greatly reduced. The committee hopes that its recommendations are followed and that this number will be reduced further.

With these deadlines in place, the onus will shift from detaining people to releasing people from detention and will mean that the processing of the detainees will be greatly expedited. What some people, I think, cannot accept—and I listened to the member for Kooyong—is that the change in government, the crucial cultural change that happened, has brought about a change in this detention policy. It is all very well, as the member for Makin said, to look backwards to the past and to all of the injustices that happened then. You could have crossed the floor; you could have done a whole lot of things. What we did was elect a different government with a different world view. That is what has changed. There is an essential humanity and rationality in the way in which we have approached immigration detention in Australia—as we said, a new beginning.

The dissenters argue that judicial involvement in the detention process is the best way to expedite the processing of detainees. From the information that we were provided, the committee feels, as has been previously mentioned, that benchmarks, as well as other related recommendations, are the best way to move forward at this stage. Judicial involvement creates its own problems such as greater potential expense, the possibility of clogging up courts and the fact that court procedures take time to occur. (Time expired)

Debate (on motion by Mr Hawke) adjourned.

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