Don Randall (Canning, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Local Government) Share this | Hansard source

No, these are people who have returned to Sri Lanka. They have been contacted and this is the response. This gentleman spoke to his sister, who stated that 'he arrived at his home and was living without any problems for his safety.' These are real examples of people who have been either deported or voluntarily returned to Sri Lanka.

Another gentleman said he was a crew member, and therefore he did not get any payment like others, and he said he was living normally. Where is the persecution, the lock-ups and the beatings that are claimed? Another gentleman, Pakeewaran Sanmkan, was contacted and said that he was interrogated on arrival but was released, he is living at his home safely, he bought a motorcycle with the money he received and he is living happily. So much for being returned and being treated so badly.

Further, when I travelled to the north, I made it my point to go and visit the aid agencies like IOM and the UNHCR. From the aid agencies, I met with Mr K Vedharaniyam, the Coordinator North of the International Organisation for Migration, Kilinochchi office and Antoine Waldburger, Humanitarian Affairs Officer, UN Office of the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, and I said to them that there were these allegations that people are being beaten and tortured when they returned to Sri Lanka. They said, 'What rot! We are given the job of resettling them on behalf of the Australian government. We do it because they've sold everything to get to Australia, and we resettle them because they have nothing.'

They just said it was a fallacious argument, and this one of the top migration resettlement agencies. So I go down the road and I speak to UNHCR. I spoke to Yoko Matsumoto, the associate field officer, and Viktoriya Talishkhanova, from the UNHCR office in Kilinochchi, as well. They said the same thing to me—no issues with people returning; they just help resettle them.

When I was in Trincomalee—and after having been on the boats that I just showed you—I had been lucky enough the night before to meet some people that had been returned. Thirty-six people had been returned from a boat that had tried to get to Australia. This gentleman here is a Tamil gentleman who luckily enough spoke perfect English, so he interpreted for me, so nobody can say it was misinterpretation. Here, for the member for Chifley's case, is a Sinhalese fisherman with his wife and a five-week-old baby that they were trying to take on that boat and that could have perished at sea. When I asked the Sinhalese fisherman—not a Tamil fisherman—why he was trying to get to Australia, he said it was because they got paid more money. I went through the whole group of people that I have here—I was able to speak to all of them. Not one of them said that they were coming to Australia for any other reason than that could get more money. In other words, they are economic refugees. I asked each one of them whether they had any issues with being returned in terms of escaping or coming to Australia due to human rights. Not one of them said so, but they did say that should they get to Australia they might have to talk to some of their advisers about applying for visas, which is code for, 'We'll have to find an issue for claiming a human rights visa or refugee status.'

Just to demonstrate the hypocrisy of this, in the Australian recently we had the case of the first Tamil asylum seeker deported from Australia since the end of Sri Lanka's civil war, when Dayan Anthony was released. Mr Anthony had claimed that he had been kidnapped and tortured in 2009 and that he had been seized and thrown into the back of one of Sri Lanka's notorious white vans used in many cases of disappearance. He also claimed he had suffered back pain as a result of beatings sustained in Sri Lankan custody and had even given evidence at a hearing by the UN special rapporteur on torture last year. But yesterday, at home from the Sri Lankan people when he returned, he withdrew all his claims of torture and mistreatment, saying he had lied on the advice of a Malaysian Tamil people-smuggling agent in order to secure a refugee visa.

So that is what is going on. Genuine refugees, yes—for genuine humanitarian entrants. But those coming from Sri Lanka are economic refugees claiming to be humanitarian refugees. They are opportunists trying to get into Australia's soft welfare system.

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