Graham Perrett (Moreton, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak about something that I've heard about every day for the last five years. Every single question time I've been in since the coalition came to office, I've had either the member for Cook or the member for Dickson take a question from the backbench and talk about asylum seekers and borders, and many of the answers to the dorothy dixers given to the former immigration minister and the current immigration minister have involved politicising the fact that people sometimes seek a better place, a safer place in the world.

I want to offer a few words to counter that daily tirade from the member for Dickson. A few weeks ago, I went on a delegation with the member for Mallee; Tim Watts; and Luke Hartsuyker—I've forgotten their electorates. The delegation was led by the member for Mallee, Mr Broad. It was a small delegation to Kenya and Ethiopia. We mainly went to Nairobi and Addis Ababa, but in the first part of the delegation we travelled north to Kakuma, a refugee camp with 189,000 refugees, in the northern part of Kenya not far from the South Sudan border. That makes it a large city—twice the size of Toowoomba, shall we say, for people that are familiar with that town. All of these people had fled war, murder and hardship and were seeking a safe haven.

The delegation, ably led by the member for Mallee, consisted of two members of the National Party and two members of the Labor Party. The member for Gellibrand, Tim Watts, and I have inner-city seats where many asylum seekers have been settled over the years. Most of the asylum seekers in Gellibrand and Moreton—or in Australia, I guess—have arrived in those electorates by jet and have been part of our longstanding commitment as an Australian government to taking people from the hellholes of the earth. We're a wealthy country. We're a secure country. We're an island country. To be able to take asylum seekers from a hellhole is something Australia should do, and we do our fair bit. I just wanted to do that callout to those many asylum seekers who are often demonised in this parliament.

See this speech in context