Judi Moylan (Pearce, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Sixty years ago, Australia was the sixth country in the world to sign the United Nations refugee convention. Since the convention came into force, 750,000 refugees have made Australia their home. As this motion says, refugees have contributed to every aspect of Australian life, bringing with them unique cultures, skills and values which have enriched our culture, economy, social fabric and governance. I strongly support this motion and I thank the member for Fremantle for bringing to the attention of the House the celebration today of World Refugee Day.

For me, however, the day is one that comes with deep sadness and a sense of shame, knowing that the Australian government will implement the so-called Malaysian solution. For those fleeing persecution, war and ethnic cleansing, there are few options but to flee their homeland. We are dealing with the worst of human conditions and, as a parliament, we must resolve to craft a durable, humane and regionally based response that is proportionate to the dimensions of the problem. I particularly endorse the call in this motion for a return to bipartisan support so that this debate is both reasoned and principled.

As it stands, the current approach is both a human and a diplomatic disaster. Do we not stop to consider how our approach may look to neighbouring countries? Malaysia, for example, has registered 93,000 refugees. Yet our political rhetoric is that we are being swamped by refugees—in fact some have even called it a tsunami. As this motion points out, Australia took in 8,250 asylum seekers in 2010 compared to the 358,000 people seeking asylum in 44 major industrialised countries in 2010. Do we not stop to consider what might happen to this very important convention if every other country in the world were to seek to shift their responsibility onto states which are not signatories to the convention and which are less well-equipped to manage the resettlement of refugees than we are in this country? We whip up fear and fervour with the use of slippery slogans and puerile prose, such as being 'swamped' and 'tsunamis of refugees', along with 'queue jumpers' and 'illegals'. Such language is unbecoming of our leadership and should be banished from our lexicon.

The spectacle of a mother, with her young child, having arrived on Christmas Island seeking refuge, being threatened with separation from her husband and the father of the child and with being sent to Malaysia is cruel beyond belief. The action demonstrates a yawning moral and legal deficiency in our policy approach to refugees. This case was widely reported over the weekend.

In my view, it is time to return to the foundation principles that should be the hallmark of all policymaking—the robust defence of human life and human dignity. Neither the Malaysia nor the Nauru solutions fit the criteria and both should be immediately abandoned, as should the cruel practice of arbitrary, indefinite mandatory detention. It is still a matter of grave concern to me that several years—in fact, it is about five and a half years—after having negotiated with the Howard government to make sure that families with children were removed from detention centres, we still have hundreds of children in detention in this country. We had an agreement with the Prime Minister at that time, which was enshrined in legislation, to only put children into detention centres—and let us be honest here; we call them detention centres, but they are really prisons, and in some of those prisons there are people awaiting deportation for murder, for rape, for violent crimes—as an absolute last resort, yet we still have children locked up in these centres. From my point of view, I think it is time to honour the commitments made by both governments to only detain children as an absolute last resort. Let us get those children out of detention centres and let us, for once, join together to put an end to arbitrary, indefinite mandatory detention.

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