Tim Watts (Gellibrand, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Recent events in the Andaman Sea have again highlighted the difficulty and complexity of a government response to the large number of people seeking asylum around the world, both from both a moral and a policy perspective. Recent actions by nations in our region to obstruct informal movements of people across the Andaman Sea left around 7,000 stranded at sea. The majority of the people stranded at sea appear to be Rohingya Muslims from Myanmar's Rakhine state, people with good cause to seek asylum in another country. Reports suggest that there are also a not insignificant number of Bangladeshi migrant labourers also stranded—individuals who are not fleeing persecution but searching for economic opportunities.

Whatever the true situation is, there are currently thousands of people who are stranded in what has become a genuine humanitarian crisis. They are stranded because no country will take them. The question for us is what the Australian government's response should be to this difficult and complex regional issue. This is not a simple question. While many have jumped immediately to the question of whether Australia should offer to resettle some of the thousands of people at risk in the Andaman Sea, the issue confronting us is much more complex than the immediate crisis. There are over one million Rohingya remaining in Myanmar, and any response will clearly need to address their future as well as the fate of those who have been able to flee. Members of the Rohingya community in Myanmar and abroad are crying out for humanitarian assistance, but at the same time do not want the international community to facilitate the wholesale departure of their community from Myanmar. It is difficult to see how such a solution would not amount to a form of ethnic cleansing in itself.

The nations in our region are now saying that they want any agreement on resettlement to occur as part of a coordinated response to this larger issue. Encouragingly, Thailand is hosting a meeting with affected states tomorrow to discuss the current crisis, and Indonesia and Malaysia have agreed to temporarily host many of the people at risk. The Philippines government have made plans with the UNHCR to accommodate 3,000 Rohingya, and the United States have agreed to take Rohingya screened by the UNHCR as refugees. Australia already has a large humanitarian resettlement program—around 1,000 places a year—for those seeking asylum from refugee camps in Malaysia, the home of many of these Rohingya asylum seekers. We should continue this, and any requests for further resettlement should be considered as part of a regional response to the broader problem. In considering these requests, we ought to form a position based on careful consultation with the UNHCR, ASEAN nations and the Rohingya community itself. While the way forward on this issue remains complex and uncertain, Australia should support the efforts that are currently underway to develop a regional solution.

One thing that we can say about this issue with great certainty is that our Prime Minister's response has been both foolish, and morally repugnant. When asked whether Australia would offer resettlement to any of the people trapped in this humanitarian crisis, the Prime Minister's response was a simple, 'Nope, nope, nope.' With thousands of lives at risk, the Australian public expects their Prime Minister to at least have the decency to talk about this issue with basic respect for human dignity. We should remind ourselves in this place that, when we are dealing with issues that require complex moral judgements upon which reasonable people can disagree, we need to at least talk about the issue with basic decency and afford them the serious consideration they deserve.

However, the bigger problem than the Prime Minister's flippancy in the face of this humanitarian crisis is what his response reveals about this government's attitude to Australia's role in our region. 'Nope, nope, nope' was not just morally repugnant; it was dumb. We will never be able to develop an effective solution for the millions of legitimate asylum seekers in the world today without intense regional cooperation. As the Indonesian foreign minister noted recently, migration is not the problem of one or two nations; this is a regional problem, a global problem. High-handed unilateralism only makes the practical task of responding to this issue more difficult. A Prime Minister who flippantly dismisses our regional partners with slogans designed for domestic audiences cuts off his nose to spite his face.

Many MPs, including many government MPs, recently spoke in this place to laud the work of the Fraser government in cooperating with the offshore processing and regional resettlement of Vietnamese asylum seekers in the 1970s.

Two-point-five million Indochinese refugees were resettled in Australia, North America, Europe and Asia through this process. Australia alone has resettled 185,000 Indochinese refugees since this time. By engaging with our regional neighbours, we helped transform a regional humanitarian crisis into a shining multicultural success story for our nation—a success story that has changed the face of my own electorate to a great degree. However, this success story would have been impossible if the response from our then Prime Minister was, 'Nope, nope, nope.' Australians demand better from their Prime Minister than what they have seen in response to this humanitarian crisis.

See this speech in context