David Feeney (Batman, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Justice) Share this | Hansard source

Last week Australia saw yet another example of this government's irresponsible exploits when it comes to asylum seekers, with the Prime Minister refusing to deny that people smugglers had been payed to ship people back to Indonesia. This most recent incident follows the Prime Minister extolling the virtues of his 'turn back the boats' policy in relation to the Rohingya humanitarian crises.

It was deeply irresponsible for the Prime Minister to liken the week-long journey from Java to Australia, where boats are turned back to a transit country, to a situation in the Indian Ocean where people travelling for weeks in unsafe conditions face the risk of being pushed back into the open ocean to suffer from malnutrition and even starvation.

Even after two damning reports, we are still seeing children languishing indefinitely in detention and we have even seen babies hours-old returned to Nauru. This comes after the government's inexcusable use of detained children as blackmail to pass their temporary protection visa scheme. In 2014 children in detention had been held for an average of 400 days, a shocking statistic when we consider the impact that indefinite detention can have on the mental, physical and developmental wellbeing of these children. In the United Kingdom the maximum period a child can be detained is three days. No-one wants to see children in detention, and we have only seen the length of detention increase under this government. Where children must remain in detention for any length of time, their health, education and wellbeing must be assured by the provision of adequate services and facilities.

Asylum seeker policy should be driven by fairness, compassion and a determination to prevent deaths at sea; instead, what we are getting from this Prime Minister and this government is secrecy, an ignorance—(Time expired)

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