Laurie Ferguson (Reid, Australian Labor Party, Parliamentary Secretary for Multicultural Affairs and Settlement Services) Share this | Hansard source

As previous speakers have detailed, theAnti-People Smuggling and Other Measures Bill 2010 has a number of ingredients. It seeks to enhance ASIO powers of activity in this area. It creates a new offence of providing material support and resources towards people-smuggling in the Migration Act and the Criminal Code. In that context it is important to note that it covers those people who are reckless as to whether money and resources that they provide could be used to assist such ventures. The maximum penalty in that case will be imprisonment for 10 years or 1,000 penalty units—that is, $110,000—or both. It also harmonises people-smuggling offences between the Migration Act and the Criminal Code to strengthen the criminal framework and to provide greater consistency. It also extends minimum penalties to the Migration Act. That has been detailed by a variety of other speakers.

Indisputably, this is a very complex and difficult area of public policy. On the weekend—I know I will be attacked by some journalists who are opposed by foreign films—I saw the French film Welcome, by Philippe Lioret, at the French film festival in Sydney. It was an interesting detail of the situation of, in particular, Kurdish refugees in France attempting to enter Britain. It had all the ingredients that are in some ways part of this legislation. It had the reality of people smugglers, the people who exploit this need; the desperate situation of people living in Calais in northern France who have come all away from the Kurdish part of Iraq; the conditions they live under; the French government’s attempts to dissuade people from taking that course; and the support by people in that town for refugees. All of those ingredients were there.

No doubt, there is a very great degree of difficulty in this policy area. Anyone who follows it knows that a reality in this country is that neither Labor nor Liberal is in the immediate future going to increase the intake of humanitarian refugees to basically make provision for those people who enter by boat or, for that matter, plane. In reality, the nature of the intake by boat will have a decided eventual impact on us seeking a diverse intake, because we aspire to have people who are refugees from many lands coming here. It is in the nation’s interest that we have diverse settlement. We do not essentially want to have refugees from only one country or one part of the world. The previous government had a new focus towards Africa which the current government has supported.

Unless we can have a degree of control over the intake we cannot do things such as, for the first time, join the UNHCR in settling the Nepalese minority from Bhutan. They were in camps for 17 years after facing harassment in Bhutan, and they are proving to be extremely model citizens in this country. You cannot denigrate others—there is a danger in saying that one group of refugees is better than others—but throughout their 17 years in the camps they were taught English. When they come here we do not have to spend much time on migrant English. In actual fact, they are the only ethnic group I have run across in the migration intake who, when I saw them in Adelaide, said: ‘Please, Laurie, stop giving us English. We want to get out and go to TAFE. We want to go to university. We want to go on to employment.’ Unless we can have some control over the nature of the intake, we cannot go out and take those people—and we are taking thousands of them over a five-year period—if all the places are going to be taken up by boat people. So there are difficulties here, indisputably.

But where the opposition really goes off the track is in trying to connect in some way all of our current boat arrivals to an alleged softening of policy here, saying that we are a magnet and that essentially we are encouraging the people smugglers by these soft policies. In actual fact, as Professor Mary Crock said at a debate recently—I was there with the member for Cook—if anyone is promoting the image of Australia as being in any manner an El Dorado or nirvana for people smuggling and for refugee claims, it is the opposition. They are getting up on tables with megaphones and telling the world that in their view the country is a soft touch.

I heard the figures from the member for Cook and his analogy about Britain’s situation now and Australia’s and the decrease in certain European countries et cetera. There are a multitude of reasons why countries have a level of intake or not. There is no doubt that measures in a country can, in some way, affect demand. They can discourage people from coming to that land. There are questions of transportation patterns of the smugglers et cetera. There is the question of whether a country on the way through suddenly gets strong on its borders et cetera. There is the question of employment patterns in countries—whether people feel that going to Poland or France this week is actually a better bet than going to another country where unemployment has worsened. This kind of analogy and the idea that all of a sudden the boats have come because the Labor government have brought in more humane measures and because we got rid of temporary protection visas and therefore people suddenly decide that this is the place they have got to go—particularly those fleeing Iraq, the Tamils from Sri Lanka and the Hazaras from Afghanistan—is pretty preposterous.

When the opposition starts talking about a cost, it is equally questionable. Let’s look at the outcome of the TPV ‘solution’. Virtually all these people eventually came here, they are moving towards citizenship and they have been accepted as genuine refugees. That was also a great cost to Australia and it was a great cost to those individuals, with that degree of insecurity for all those years for people who the determination process finally decided were refugees. We turn to some of the specific situations that are really causing this. I heard the views from the member for Cook. I prefer an article by Ahmed Rashid that I happened to be reading during his contribution. It is in the current edition of The New York Review of Books. It says:

According to the UN, in 2009 there were an average of 1,200 attacks a month by Taliban or other insurgent groups—a 65 percent increase from the previous year. Over the twelve-month period, 2,412 Afghan civilians were killed, an increase of 14 percent; of those, two thirds were killed by the Taliban, a 40 percent increase. In addition, US and NATO combat deaths rose 76 percent, from 295 in 2008 to 520 in 2009.

               …            …            …

According to Major General Michael Flynn, the NATO military chief of intelligence in Afghanistan, the Taliban now have shadow governors in thirty-three out of thirty-four provinces—they serve to organize the movement at a provincial level and disrupt government initiatives in their area—and the movement “can sustain itself indefinitely.” Flynn has described US intelligence in Afghanistan as “clueless” and “ignorant.”

The article further made the point:

… it has been difficult to recruit Pashtuns for the Afghan army and police from the southern Pashtun provinces that are largely controlled by the Taliban …

The reality is that the situation in Afghanistan has deteriorated. That is why there has been a debate in the US about a surge. That is why the United States has decided to do so. To pretend that there is no connection between this deterioration of the allied situation and the push factor of refugee claims in this country is preposterous.

I heard the member claim that there are a million Hazaras in Kabul. Firstly, I think the figures are questionable. The total population of the country is about 28 million and Kabul is about three million plus. Any growth in Hazara numbers in Kabul is related to the harassment they suffer in parts of their historic homeland. I have had Hazaras come to me about the fact that Pashtun nomadic groups have basically, through military force, forced them from part of their ancestral homelands. Yes, there was a return to Afghanistan at an earlier stage. There were millions of people who went back from India, Pakistan and Iran because they thought the country was getting more secure. But the reality now is that Hazaras, despite a few ministers in the government, despite the allegedly democratic process in the country, are still gravely harassed. That is why we are having increased numbers of Hazara claims in this country. That is why our population of Afghans is 90 per cent Hazara whereas they are only, at a maximum, 10 per cent in Afghanistan.

I have a close relationship with the Hazara community in Sydney and they have been to my office. They say two things to me. To be brutally honest, they say that this country has to be vigilant about some of the people coming on the boats because they, the Hazaras in Australia, believe that they are from Quetta in Pakistan and a number of them lived there for a hundred years. But at the same time they say that there are manifestly grave dangers to Hazaras in Afghanistan.

The member for Cook briefly made some references to the Tamil situation and to people leaving camps. Anyone who is following the situation in Sri Lanka knows the level of harassment of Tamils at the recent elections there. The reality is that thousands upon tens of thousands of them are still in camps. The world has been trying to force, pressure, cajole and persuade the Sri Lankan government to treat the Tamils better after the civil war outcome. The UNHCR is apparently looking at the situation and seeing whether they will adapt their list. But to say that there is no push factor for Tamils at the moment is, once again, ridiculous—and this was not the situation during many of the years in which—

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