Julie Owens (Parramatta, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am pleased to rise to speak on the Anti-People Smuggling and Other Measures Bill 2010. This bill will strengthen the Commonwealth’s anti-people-smuggling legislative framework, supporting the government’s ongoing work to combat people-smuggling. I am particularly pleased to speak on the bill because, by strengthening action against people-smuggling, we work to protect an incredibly important refugee settlement program in this country, a longstanding settlement program which in fact started in 1959 with 10,000 refugees from Europe after the Second World War. We have in fact been doing it at roughly the same number for a very long time and our program plays a very important part in the world resettlement of refugees.

The bill creates a new offence of providing support for people-smuggling, an offence that did not exist in Australian law. It harmonises people-smuggling offences under the Migration Act and Criminal Code to strengthen our criminal framework. Importantly, it extends mandatory minimum penalties for people-smuggling. In a very real way it increases our capacity to deal with people who smuggle people and those who assist people smugglers. I am proud to stand to support this bill, because we must fight to stamp out the organised crime of people-smuggling to reduce risk to the victims of the smugglers and because people-smuggling and the response to it in Australia weaken public support for Australia’s very important refugee program.

I am very proud of the role that Australia plays in the international refugee crisis. It is a special role and one played by very few countries. We as a nation take refugees for resettlement through the UN process, and that is very rare in the world. A tiny fraction of refugees are resettled in third countries. The UN estimated that the number of people forcibly uprooted by conflict and persecution worldwide at the end of 2008 was 42 million: around 16 million refugees and asylum seekers and 26 million internally displaced people uprooted within their own countries. The UNHCR estimates that some 5.7 million refugees are living in a situation of protracted displacement, having spent five years or more in exile. Only 121,000 refugees were proposed for resettlement to third countries in 2008. That is less than one per cent of the world’s 16 million refugees and less than 0.3 per cent of the total number of 42 million displaced people.

Resettlement is very rare and Australia is one of a relatively small number of countries with longstanding resettlement programs. As I said earlier, we have a very long history in this, and we should be proud of that. There are other countries that do it also. Canada, New Zealand, the Netherlands, Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden, the United States and a small number of very small countries—around 12 in all around the world—have longstanding resettlement programs. Recently some new countries have joined: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Iceland, Ireland and the UK, on quite a small scale. On the resettlement program in 2008 the United States took 56,700 refugees; Australia and Canada, around 6½ thousand; Sweden, 1,900; and the other countries, between 500 and 1,200—very small numbers from a very small selection of countries.

It is quite a dilemma that countries like ours find themselves in. We have longstanding resettlement programs but we do not have what the rest of the world would see as refugee problems. Most of the countries with strong resettlement programs like ours have something in common, but essentially we do not share borders with strife torn regions. People do not flock across our borders in large numbers and our borders are not easily crossed. Most of us are separated from war torn areas by miles of ocean or miles of land. It is perhaps easier for countries such as ours to sign refugee conventions and to accept resettlement than it is for countries that see thousands of refugees fleeing neighbouring countries and crossing their borders.

Sections of our community respond with such fear at a few hundred people on boats, but how would we react to the circumstances that Pakistan finds itself in? At the end of 2008 Pakistan hosted the largest number of refugees in the world, with 1.8 million refugees, mostly from Afghanistan. Now that is a refugee problem. In the same year Syria was host to 1.1 million Iraqi refugees, making it the second-largest refugee-hosting country in the world. Iran hosted 980,000; Jordan, 500,000; Chad, 330,000; Tanzania, 321,000; and 320,000 refugees flocked across Kenya’s borders. The economic and social load from hosting refugees is overwhelmingly carried by developing countries, who hosted nearly 8½ million refugees, or 80 per cent of the global refugee population. Forty-nine of the least developed countries in the world provide asylum to 18 per cent of the world’s refugees. In our region, the Asia-Pacific hosts around one-third of all refugees in the world.

Some of the most important refugee-hosting countries in the world are developing countries that host hundreds of thousands of refugees that flee into their countries from neighbouring conflict zones or from neighbouring countries that will not accept them as refugees. They cross porous borders made up of coast land and land borders. We, who handle, in slow years, a few hundred and, in more difficult years like this one, a few thousand, ask those countries to help us stop people-smuggling. Over the last decade, through the previous government and through the Rudd government, those countries have helped and we have made substantial progress. This bill moves us further along the process of working with our neighbours to stop the pernicious trade of people-smuggling, which risks the lives of refugees on a daily basis.

Some will say, and they have in this debate, that the numbers of people attempting to come to Australia is a factor of Australian immigration law. People-smuggling is a crime. It is committed by people with little regard for the safety of its victims, little regard for the future of the people they prey on and, I suspect, very little regard for the quality of the service. The boats are leaky and I doubt that any sensible person would believe that people smugglers were sitting down every day and studying the immigration law of countries around the world to pick the best country of destination for their victims; they do not even put them on boats that stay afloat. I honestly think that the idea of criminals actually sitting down and studying changes in immigration law is nonsense. The loud statements from the opposition about being soft on people smugglers are far more visible to people smugglers than the legislation.

I also do not believe that asylum seekers are sitting around studying immigration law. I do not believe that is actually about our law. It is about where people are seeking to flee from and the numbers in which they are fleeing. As the number of people fleeing rises, so does the number of people seeking to get on boats. They do, generally, seek out resettlement countries among others. They do seek out the US to a far greater extent than they seek out Australia. Canada receives 10 times the number of unauthorised asylum seekers as Australia. The Scandinavian countries receive far more than us. France receives many more than us. Europe receives many more than us.

The idea that world refugees are all looking towards Australia is simply false. The number of refugees that arrive unauthorised in Australia is very, very small relative to those arriving in other countries around the world. The increases in Australia are smaller than they are in the rest of the world. For example, in Europe there were 290,000 claims in 2008. That was a 13 per cent increase from the 256,000 claims in 2007. In Canada and the United States there were 86,000 claims, nine per cent more than in 2007. But even then, the overall increase in the number of claims was still half of that in 2001, where 150,000 applications were lodged in both countries. It is worth talking about that because we have heard the opposition say that the change in the number of refugees seeking asylum in Australia was something to do with our laws. Australia had very high numbers of what we now call unauthorised arrivals in 2000 and in 2001, with 13,000 claims in 2000 and 12½ thousand claims in 2001. This matched the dramatic increase in Canada and the US for the same years.

The UN reported that the number of refugees around the world declined dramatically by 2005 to 8.4 million. That is half the number that they say we have around the world now. There was a dramatic decline in the number of refugees moving around the world in 2005 and there was a dramatic decline in the number of refugees coming to Australia by boat. Then it started to rise. It rose to almost 10 million by 2006 which was the highest since 2001. The numbers started to increase for Australia. They also dramatically increased around the world. They continued to increase around the world and they continued to increase in Australia. It is illogical to suggest that the increases in Canada or the US had anything to do with Australian law, yet the numbers increased there at the same or greater extent than they increased in Australia.

If you think this is a major problem for Australia, consider Yemen, which had 74,000 Africans arrive by boat in 2009. This was a 50 per cent increase on the 50,000 the year before—a record for that year. There are other countries in the world that have substantial refugee problems, yet we in Australia respond with such incredible fear to the relatively small number of people who arrive on our shores by boat. In spite of that, it is incredibly important that we do protect the Australian community’s perceptions of our resettlement program because it plays such an important role.

I want to talk about a couple of refugees that I know. I live in the incredibly diverse community of Parramatta where over 40 per cent of the population is born overseas. I doubt whether most Australians would be able to recognise refugees, even if they had refugees among their friends, because quite often refugees do not talk about their stories; they deliberately do not. Sometimes it is years before they even tell you about their background or what they went through. Many Australians would not personally know the stories of refugees. I do. I want to talk about a couple of these stories.

There is one young man in my electorate—and I will not tell you his name or where he comes from because he is very well-known. He arrived in Australia from Africa as a refugee at the age of 20 with his four younger brothers and sisters. He studied English when he got here; he later enrolled in law and is now in his final year. Two of his younger brothers and sisters, who he raised, are now at university as well and the other two are still in high school. If you ask him whether his parents are here—I have heard other people ask him that, as have I—he evades that question. I honestly do not know where his parents are and I do not know the fate of his parents. But I do know that this young man came to Australia after many years in a camp with his four younger brothers and sisters and he has raised them incredibly well. That is as much as you can possibly ask of an Australian. He is an extraordinary young man and we are very, very lucky to have him.

I met a young woman and her husband the other day that had a beautiful little baby with them. I call her the beautiful little chocolate baby because she is an African baby and she is just the most gorgeous little thing. I talked to them and they told me they had been in a camp for five years. Before the woman fled her homeland, she was a law student. But now in Australia, she is struggling to learn English, though she is doing incredibly well. I asked her whether the child was her first child and the answer was no. The couple were separated from their four-year-old daughter when they were displaced between two refugee camps. They have no idea where their four-year-old daughter is.

These are horrendous stories. People find themselves in a camp and there is no way out. I hear a lack of compassion on the other side of this House for the circumstances that these people are in. I hear the idea that there is an ordered queue somewhere and you can stand in it waiting to get to the front. The people who fled Vietnam all those years ago were in the front of the queue for awhile until war broke out elsewhere, and then another group was moved to the front of the queue. There are still Vietnamese refugees living in countries in the world who do not have the rights of a citizen. So many years later, they are still living with uncertainty because they were moved from the front of the queue when war broke out elsewhere. When war broke out in so many African countries, those countries were moved further up the queue. The queue moves depending on where the conflict is.

If there actually were an ordered queue that 42 million people could stand in and someone with godlike powers could say, ‘If you stay there for three years, you’ll be able to go home,’ if it were actually possible to do that, then we would be having a different discussion here. But the notion that there is an ordered queue, that people in fear of their lives—people who are facing illness, death, no life for their children, no future for their children, people who have already lost family members, who are already traumatised—rationally would say, ‘I’d better just sit here and wait for someone to come along and tell me where the queue is,’ is nonsense. The lack of compassion that I hear from the other side just beggars belief.

It is because of the stories of these people that the Australian resettlement program is so very important and we need to defend it. We should all be defending it. We should all be standing up today in this House talking about how important this refugee resettlement program is. Rather than demonising people who are desperately trying to seek a new life for themselves, we should be talking proudly about what we have done and what else we can do to assist.

Australia assists in a number of ways, but I will tell you what we cannot do again. I know people in my electorate who spent years in detention centres—five, six years. I know one man who spent seven years in a detention centre. He is half my age; he is in his early 20s. He was in a detention centre for seven years. The Howard government actually started a funding program to assist people who had been in detention centres and needed assistance in resettling, having spent so many years in trauma. We cannot go back to that. I know people who spent years on temporary protection visas and I know what that did to them and their families. They and their children had no security. We cannot go back to that.

There are people in my community—and I despair at these people—who, when the opposition starts to spread this fear, come out with lines like, ‘We should just push the boats back and let them drown.’ We should not accept that. We should not accept those statements and we should not be stirring up that kind of attitude in our community. Yet every time we have this sort of fear campaign on the other side, this demonising of these desperate people, I get that kind of response from some members of my community. I get other members of my community saying, ‘Send them back to where they came from.’ When I say, ‘When they arrive, they might get shot,’ I get the reply: ‘Not my problem.’ I do not think we should be accepting that attitude either and I do not think we should be stirring that up in our community.

We should be talking proudly about the way this country has resettled so many refugees over so many years. We have done it incredibly well. We should be proud of it. We should be talking it up. We should be talking about the contribution these people have made. Does anybody now look back on the Vietnamese boat people—the term ‘boat people’ was coined for them—and not think, ‘What a great contribution this group of people has made to this country’?

Australia contributes to addressing the world refugee dilemma in a number of ways. I will briefly outline some of those now for the people out there who do not know just what Australia does. There are essentially four parts. Firstly, we provide assistance and aid to countries of origin, to stabilise situations and assist people who are able to return safely to their home in time. That is very important. We actually take relatively small numbers. We do not have people flooding across our borders. But we use some of our capacity to assist countries that do have large numbers of refugees to house those refugees and to assist them to return safely when their homelands are safe. That is a very important thing that we do.

Secondly, we support asylum seekers in neighbouring countries as close as possible to their country of origin. We do that in Indonesia, for example. (Quorum formed) (Time expired)

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