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

who over the last 30 years have come here as refugees, many of them on boats. I know families who have been separated from their two-year-old child by armed men and do not know where she is. They now live in Australia, and they do not know where she is. I know a man who, along with his four brothers and sisters, was granted refugee status. They are all now citizens, but they are citizens of five different countries—they have not been together as a family for over 10 years. I know a man who had to pick up the body of his 17-year-old sister, and the description of her injuries should not even be in a person’s mind as a description, let alone as a memory. We are, of course, talking about people here. We are well and truly talking about people, and as we talk about boats and snipe at each other I think it is worth remembering that.

I think it is also worth remembering that, in spite of the differences in the way each side of politics has approached the issue of refugees and in spite of the bad record at times of both sides of politics over the last 20 years, as a nation we subscribe to the UN convention and that nobody is suggesting that we reduce the number of people we ultimately accept under the humanitarian program. We have been accepting around 12,000 people—give or take a few—for quite a few decades, and we have done it well. As I understand it, neither side is talking at this point about reducing the number; we are simply sniping at each other about how the people got here. So I think we should just take a step back and recognise that the things we agree on are essentially the key issues here and that we do actually agree on a great deal.

We as a nation have had had moments of great nobility in this debate as well as some terrible moments. We have had times when the greater characteristics of humanity have won the day and times when our less noble characteristics have won the day. There was a time during World War II when we, like many countries in the world, turned back boatloads of Jews; we told them to go back to Germany. We all did that, and after that time we—along with many nations—decided that we would never let that happen again. We were one of the nations that fought hard to establish the UN Convention. It was established in 1951, and we took 12,000 refugees from Eastern Europe quite soon afterwards.

Then there was the time in the 1970s under the leadership of Malcolm Fraser. He is not a person I have a great regard for in many areas, but I have a great regard for him in this area. He was the person who led Australia through a time when we received one boat from Vietnam every eight days for over a year and a half. Malcolm Fraser led this nation by saying, ‘We will not fear this; we will accept this and we will handle this,’ and we did and we did it well. The Vietnamese refugees who live in my community and no doubt in yours are great Australians, and they were our first boat people.

There have of course been times when we have not been as noble as that. Again, we on both sides of politics have had moments when we have not been as compassionate and generous as we could have been. I believe that we can afford to be generous in this. I believe that we can afford to allow our more noble characteristics to surface in this argument, because I know, as you know, that the number of refugees Australia takes every year is achievable and supportable and that we have been doing it for a long time. We have been taking around 12,000 refugees on the humanitarian visa, and relative to the rest of the rest of the world the number of refugees is actually very, very small. When people who are broken as a result of war, of violence, of torture and of fear have fled their country and sought another place and arrived on our shores by plane or by boat or via resettlement, decent people have put out their hand out to help.

I believe we can afford to be decent, because the number of people coming to our shores is actually relatively small. There are 45 million displaced people in the world at the moment, and about 15 million of those are refugees. Less than one per cent of those will be resettled in Third World countries, and Australia is one of a handful of countries that allow the resettlement of people from a third country. By the way, my calculation of that figure of 15 million refugees is that, for every 2,500 of them, one tries to get to Australia by boat in our heaviest year—one in 2,500 tries to get to Australia.

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