Teresa Gambaro (Brisbane, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Citizenship and Settlement) Share this | Hansard source

This government has lost control of our national borders and it has turned our national immigration policy into an international humanitarian crisis. The Prime Minister’s fixation with the 24-hour news cycle and short-term political fixes has destroyed whatever humanity was left in the system, since the Rudd government’s fundamental changes to the system saw large and unsustainable numbers of unauthorised arrivals.

Prime Minister Gillard used to head media releases, when she was the shadow minister for immigration, with ‘Another boat, another policy failure’. Besides the various aspects of the failure of the Labor Party to maintain our borders which some of my colleagues earlier—the member for Cook and the member for Stirling—outlined, there are other issues of dire importance. Those are the issues of offshore refugees.

Offshore applicants for asylum and relocation to Australia are treated like second-class citizens compared to those who come by boat, under Labor’s approach to the special humanitarian program and to aspects of our annual refugee intake. This problem has been caused by the gross increase in the number of illegal boat arrivals which, I might add, only started to become a problem when this government came into power in 2007.

The government’s policy on immigration shows that the government does not care about people stuck in overseas detention camps. These people are trying to escape harsh and unjust treatment by following the UNHCR’s legal processes. This government does not care about people living in tent cities in the Sudan, in Ethiopia or in Kenya, or about those who are fleeing religious, economic or social persecution. The government does not care about refugees on the borders of Burma, Iraq, Bhutan or the Congo who have fled for their lives from oppressive regimes and are trying to settle through the UNHCR and who are doing so through the legal processes of the UNHCR.

This government does not care. Why? Because these refugees are not one of the 9,000 irregular maritime arrivals or other arrivals to Australia since they watered down the policy in 2008—they are out of sight and out of mind. But the people who are in refugee camps on the edges of war-torn regions of the world and those fleeing persecution through the appropriate legal channels are just as worthy of Australia’s protection as those who have come and will continue to come to Australia illegally by boat. A particular visa that I want to speak about—

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