Adam Bandt (Melbourne, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. No-one wants to see people die, whether it is at sea, whether it is from torture or whether it is from starvation. I think we all want to see people have the right to safety and to have their lives and liberty preserved. If they choose to flee because they do not get that safety in their homeland, then we have signed up to laws to ensure that they are treated with dignity and that their safety is preserved as they flee and seek asylum or refuge somewhere else.

What is clear is that the protection system which we have signed up to has some holes in it. It has holes in it big enough for boats to fall through. One has to ask: why is it that people are getting in these boats and risking their and their families' lives? One only has to look at the state of Indonesia and the Indonesian camps and the fact that some people have been waiting there for over a decade. The United Nations has two people there processing asylum claims for the whole of the country. The budget for the UNHCR in 2013 is going to be less than it was in 2011. We need to understand why people, who do not understand the system they are facing, look at their future and cannot see a safe pathway out and then take the ultimate step where they put their lives at risk. Over many years the debate on notice asylum seekers in this country has been characterised by negativity. There was talk under the previous government of 'queue jumpers' when in fact we know in many places there was no queue at all. We focused on people who were coming here by boat and ignored the thousands that arrived each year by air and the tens of thousands of backpackers and tourists who overstayed their visas and were the true illegal immigrants.

We have come to a point where it is seen that the only answer is offshore processing. I, along with many others, had hoped that in this parliament we might see a change in approach. The member for Wentworth said that politics is the art of the possible. We used to do things differently in this country. One only has to look back 30 years to see a regional solution that involved some onshore processing and some offshore processing and allowed up to 100,000 people to resettle in this country after the Vietnam War. We saw people coming by boat and said that that was an appalling situation and that we needed to do something to fix it. We worked regionally—we stopped the boats—and we allowed people to resettle here because we had the protection of the people who were fleeing persecution as the central factor. We did not try and demonise them; we did not engage in a race to the bottom. The key factor was their protection.

This morning I sat in a room with some people who I felt shared that glimmer of hope that we might use this opportunity again to craft what might be a real regional solution based on protection—a solution that would stop the deaths, that would uphold international law and that would protect people's rights. Instead we have a bill that rips up the refugee convention and would allow future governments to send people to Syria, Iraq or Afghanistan. We are at a key moment. Do we lift the standard of debate, do we lift the standard of protections and do we uphold laws or do we trash the refugee convention and push down the standards of protection that apply in this region?

I conclude with one point: if we as an advanced, wealthy country with resources and as a country which has signed the refugee convention and committed ourselves to upholding human rights tear up the convention, how can we with a straight face ask our neighbours to comply with it? (Time expired)

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