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

We are here debating the Migration Amendment (Character Cancellation Consequential Provisions) Bill 2016 because the government will not agree with the amendments passed in the Senate when the provisions in this bill last came before it. The Senate said, 'We'll pass your bill, but we want some changes.' The Senate said, 'We want kids out of detention', and it passed amendments to the bill to get kids out of detention. 'We want to have', said the Senate, 'mandatory reporting of abuse that happens in detention.' The Senate said: 'All child abuse and other assaults witnessed in detention centres must be reported to the relevant independent authorities. Failure to do so should be a criminal offence and currently departmental staff are required to report abuse only to the department.' So the Senate said, 'Let's have applying in our detention centres similar laws to some of the laws that apply here on the mainland, where if you see abuse it is a requirement to report it.'

The Senate also said, when a version of this bill last came before it: 'Let the media into the detention centres to see what's going on. The government say this is being done in our name and we are funding it, including in other countries, so then let's at least be able to test the government when they say everything is fine in this detention centres, when the government say, "We're running them to the best of our ability", but we hear report after report of abuse and of rape. Let us let the media go in and shine a bit of sunlight into these places so that we know what is being done in the Australian people's name and with the Australian people's money.' That is what the Senate said when this bill was last bowled up to it.

And the Senate said, 'Let's also reverse and remove these provisions that make it a criminal offence for people, like doctors, to speak up when they see abuse happening.' Doctors, as well as many other officials, but doctors and other health professionals in particular, are there to make sure people are healthy. They have taken oaths; their obligation is to speak out when they see harm being done to someone. And what is this government's response to that? It is not to stop doing harm; it is to silence the doctor! It is to say, 'We will jail you for a couple of years if you speak out when you see a child being abused.'

The last time this proposal was brought before this place, the Senate said, 'We want some changes.' Faced with that, what does the government do? The government could come back and say, 'Let's debate those changes.' The government, heaven forbid, could even agree and say: 'Yes, we will make it illegal to put children in detention. We will require the mandatory reporting of abuse.' You would not think that too many people would cavil with that. You would not think that too many people, even in the government, would have a problem with saying that, when someone sees abuse taking place in a centre run by Australian money, they have to report it to the relevant independent authorities.

But the government cannot even bring itself to do that. So what does it do? It goes away, parks the bill, with that with Senate amendments, and comes back and cuts out the bits of the bill that it likes and reintroduces the bill. Then it comes in here and talks about events that have happened in the last three or four days to justify this bill that has obviously been sitting there for some time. The government comes back and says: 'No, what we want is just the bits of it we like. We want to continue to run a race to the bottom on refugees. In this bill, we want to give the minister broader power to effectively target noncitizens to be able to cancel their visas.' At the moment, there are provisions that allow the minister to cancel visas, and they are sometimes exercised. But the minister has to be satisfied that the person is a significant risk and is engaging in conduct that people in Australia would find objectionable. Now the minister needs only to reasonably suspect it, whether or not they have been convicted of any conduct of the kind that is objectionable. The minister just has to reasonably suspect something and we will see removal, again, or restriction of appeal rights.

So you have the minister coming back and saying: 'I hear the parliament saying to me that it would like kids out of detention. I hear the parliament saying to me that it would like the media in detention centres. I hear the parliament saying to me that it would like us to mandatorily report child abuse. Forget about that! I just want the powers to be able to beat up on people who come here seeking our help. That is what I want.' Shamefully, in an election year, Labor signed up to it again. Every time the government comes in and says, 'Can we beat up on refugees a bit more?', Labor says: 'How much of a blank cheque do you want? Let's walk hand in hand down the aisle towards the election to make sure that this is another election, yet again, where, instead of putting forward positive visions for the Australian people, where instead of the election being about reaching for the stars, we are going to engage in a race to the bottom. How can we help you? How can we help you so that we in the Labor Party can be "small target" on refugees? As long as you tell us that a piece of legislation has a national security imperative, we will sign up to it.'

We saw that not only with this but also with metadata. Anything that the government wanted, Labor was prepared to sign up to. And now we are seeing it again on refugees. We see it when the minister comes in to this place and defends the treatment of Baby Asha and the treatment of children who are now here in Australia. Some of them are going to Australian schools and the minister still will not give then some basic security that they are going to be allowed to stay here. What do we hear from the so-called opposition? Not a peep! It is left to the Greens, again, to be the real opposition on the issues that matter.

When it comes to the question of immigration, I think everyone understands that it is a complicated issue and everyone understands that we should do everything we possibly can to ensure that people do not die at sea. Of course we should do that. You will not find a member of this place who disagrees with that. The question is: are we really the kind of country that cannot come up with a better way of doing it other than to sanction child abuse? That is what detention is. Not only are we sanctioning child abuse in detention under the government's and Labor's approach; with this bill and with the government's refusal to accept Senate amendments we are sanctioning the nonreporting of it. We are saying that we will not make it mandatory for someone who comes into contact with a child who may have been abused to report it to independent authorities. Can you imagine if that happened here on the mainland? Can you imagine if that happened with one of our kids? Can you imagine any instance of someone living in our community as a citizen here on the mainland in which a government or a political party would sanction the idea that a professional does not have to report abuse when they see it? Of course not! We would all find that reprehensible. Yet, with this bill, we are sanctioning it offshore.

There is yet to be one argument put forward as to why we should not allow the media in. Why not? Why not let the media into detention centres to see what is going on for a bit of oversight? Obviously they are not going to be there all the time, but why not allow them to see what is being done in our name? These are not prisons. These are not prisons in the legal sense. They are prisons in a practical sense, but they are not prisons. The people in there have not committed a crime. So you have people who have not committed a crime, staying in a place, either on an island that they cannot get off or surrounded by cages, and they cannot get out. This is being done in our name. Why not let the media in? Why not have a bit of transparency? There is no argument about that at all. What can possibly be the reason, after everything that we have heard about Baby Asha, for the government continuing to say that it is all right for doctors and health professionals to face a jail term? There are no answers to that, just a request for more powers, and the Labor Party is all too happy to co-sign it.

What could we be arguing for instead? We could be doing a number of things. We could recognise that this country used to do things differently. Look back to the era of Malcolm Fraser, where we had a regional solution where we said people who need processing are going to find somewhere to be processed. Maybe it will be Australia, maybe it will be a different country, but we will strike an arrangement with others who can take them in. And do you know what? It stopped the boats and it ended mandatory detention in the form that we know it now. Yes, people were held for a while and then they were processed, but then they were settled, because the government then looked at people who were fleeing and risking their lives and those of their families and said: 'There has to be a better way. We have to be able to take some of these people in and diminish the risk that people will die at sea.' They did it in a way that did not involve locking people up indefinitely. They did it in a way that did not involve locking kids up until they broke.

That is what we can do again. That is what we should be debating. If you are going to bring a migration bill, listen to what the Senate has told you and ask how we can do it differently and what we could do. We hear a lot about the people smugglers' business model and that we need to break it. People smugglers are again referred to in this legislation. I will tell you one thing: the people smugglers' business model is built on desperation. There are thousands of people in camps in our region—in Indonesia, in Malaysia. Many of them have already been determined to have been refugees, but they are stuck in these camps, waiting for years and years, and they do not see a way out. It is not surprising; despite there being thousands of people in the camps, Australia some years only took a couple dozen of them.

So they are stuck there. Along comes someone who says, 'Tell you what: if you give me a bit of money, I'll hop you on a boat and take you to Australia.' Because they have been waiting there so long and they do not see a way out, many of them do it. What do you do in that situation? One of the things we could do is immediately start taking a couple of thousand from those camps—well within our existing refugee intake—and bring them here. That sends a signal to people in those camps that Australia is taking people again and that maybe, if I wait my turn, I do not need to get on a boat. If I wait my turn, maybe Australia will take me too—or, if not Australia, somewhere else.

Let's immediately take some from the region. Let's put in effort on cooperation like they did 40 years ago with other countries who could take in some of these refugees so that people know that they maybe will not go to Australia but will go somewhere. All of a sudden you start to inject hope again, and then you have discussions about a migration system we can be proud of—one where we accept that Australia, as a wealthy country in the region, has an obligation to take in some people who are coming here seeking our help. It is not a limitless obligation but it is an obligation for which we could do much more than we are doing at the moment. Then, when people see Australia is taking people and other countries are taking people, the incentive to get on boats is reduced. That is what everyone who works in this field and has experience with these people will tell you.

If we did that, we could start having—especially in an election year—a debate about immigration that we could be proud of. Instead we are here racing to the bottom again. It is disappointing to know that the government is doing it. You expect that, but it is disappointing that they are doing it with the full support of the Labor Party.

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