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

I hope that the press gallery and the public are paying attention to this, because the day after the parliament unites to say, 'We do not want discriminatory migration practices enforced in this country', the day after we have people reaching across the chamber and saying that the parliament stands united against people who want to do things that most people in Australia would find abhorrent—the day after that happens—Labor joins with the Liberals to stop up to 1,600 people having the right to even apply for asylum in this country, people who have committed no sin other than to come and seek from us protection and a better life. Many of these up to 1,600 people have been kept in detention—and, we now find out, without any legal basis.

And what do we do? Labor comes in here and joins with the Liberals and says, 'We will now pass a law to retrospectively justify the unlawful detention of people.' They dress it up as saying, 'We're going to hold the government to account, because we don't like typos'. Well, this wasn't a typo. We are in this situation because the previous government, a Liberal government, took the step of trying to circumvent the rule of law. The previous government said, 'We are going to circumvent the rule of law by pretending that parts of Australia and the waters surrounding them and islands surrounding them aren't Australia.' They said, 'We will find a place around the Ashmore Reef, 600 kilometres away from Broome, and we'll draw a circle around it and we will say that it's no longer part of the migration zone, so if you happen to come there or through there, then don't seek Australia's protection.'

The fiction that they used to justify it at the time was to say: 'We'll call it a port. We know we're doing something dodgy and taking away a basic human right from people'—namely, the right to seek protection—'How will we justify it? We'll call it a port.' Of course, it's not a port. It's a reef. It's a set of small islands. A court held the government to account and said: 'That fiction that you used to circumvent the rule of law and take away basic rights of people and then subsequently detain many of them cannot be upheld. It is an unlawful fiction.' They said that as a result there are people—we estimate up to 1,600—who now have the right to come to Australia and seek asylum. They won't automatically be granted it, but they've now got the basic right to come and seek asylum. As I said, many of these people have been unlawfully detained because the government never had a legal basis to do it. I think we probably owe these people compensation, because it turns out that we have denied them their basic human rights without any legal basis to do so. But even if you don't agree that we owe them compensation, at the very least we now owe them the right to process their claims for asylum, because the court has said, 'You were wrong, Parliament'—Minister Ruddock and Prime Minister Howard—try to circumvent the rule of law.'

So, we've now got an opportunity to stand with people who have been treated not only harshly but in violation of their fundamental human rights and give them the opportunity to make an application for asylum in Australia and have that assessed according to law. Here's an opportunity for Labor, who came in yesterday and moved a good motion in this parliament, to say, 'We do not support discriminatory migration practices in this country. We support human rights.' Here's an opportunity, the day after that, to do something about it. But what do they do? They say, 'We will retrospectively authorise a decision of a former Howard government minister to circumvent the rule of law, even if it means retrospectively detaining people and taking away their basic human rights.'

The best that Labor can muster, as they walk into this chamber, is to move a second reading amendment to say, 'We're going to support the legislation but, jeez, the government are poor drafters.' What is Labor saying? Are Labor saying that, if they were in government, they would manage this system of cruelty more efficiently and get the drafting right? Is Labor's only criticism of the government that they make typos? Labor should join with the Greens and with the Independents who are standing up for human rights and saying, 'When it comes to basic principles of the rule of law, if the government can't get it right, then the benefit should flow to the individual.' If you are taking someone's liberty away and if you are taking their legal rights away, then you've got to get everything right.

You shouldn't be doing it in the first place, but at a minimum the courts have upheld a fundamental principle of Western democracy. The courts, in this decision that the government and Labor are trying to overturn, have said very, very simply: 'If someone has got a right to do something, especially if it affects their fundamental human rights, and the government wants to try and take that right away, including by locking them up and including by taking away their human rights, you'd better get it right.' No, Labor cannot even bring itself to defend one of the basic principles of Western democracy and one of the basic principles of the rule of law.

Labor is showing itself, at the first available opportunity, to be a craven supporter of the policies of torture that have now become a joint Labor-Liberal stain on this nation. We are wrecking people's lives with this horrendous offshore detention system that has now become a bipartisan policy. We are wrecking people's lives. We now have, as we speak, people on Manus and Nauru who are giving up and who are attempting to kill themselves. We have young children who are now switching off. Doctors and support staff are crying out, saying, 'We have not seen this before. We have not seen young children effectively give up on the basics of life.'

We know this because we have had inquiry after inquiry—even though the government, with Labor's support, tries to keep the media out of what is happening in these hellholes where persecution is happening in our name. We know that what we are doing is breaking people. We say, 'Oh, well, it's somehow justified.' Labor has just stood up this morning and said, 'We accept the government's argument and we accept Minister Dutton's argument that somehow we need to break people and torture them in order to stop deaths at sea.' I, for one, think our country is better than that. I do not accept that the only way to stop deaths at sea is by torturing and killing people—by torturing children. I do not accept that false logic. Labor should not accept it either.

There is a better way. Going back 40 years, the government of Malcolm Fraser knew that there was a better way. If we update what was done then and apply it now, we will find that we can remove the incentives for people to get on boats by increasing the number of people we bring to Australia, by having proper processing of their claims and by supporting, in places like Indonesia and Malaysia, the UN and others to process their claims there. Once the message gets through in many of these camps that Australia is taking people again and once we start seeing not a trickle, not dozens, of claims, as we are at the moment, but claims in the thousands being processed in Indonesia and Malaysia and elsewhere, people will understand that there's no point in getting on a boat and risking their life to come to Australia, because they will start to understand again that there is some order being put back in and that, ultimately, if they wait, their claim is going to be assessed and they may well come here. But that doesn't exist at the moment.

So you've got people languishing in the countries surrounding us and in other countries where they are fleeing war and fleeing persecution. They don't see any way to come into Australia, because we have closed our doors. So when someone comes along to them and says, 'If you give me a bit of money, I'll pop you on a boat and you can come here,' they do, because they see no other way. We're not taking people. We're not processing them. I tell you what, if I were in that situation, if I were stuck in Indonesia where I could only get an appointment with the UN every six months and they told me, 'Nothing has changed,' even though I had been found to be a refugee, I would probably jump on a boat as well if I thought that was the only door that was open to me, if I thought it was the only way of keeping my family safe. If you really are concerned about deaths at sea then invest in processing and start taking more people here.

The fiction that Labor and Liberal perpetuate is that they've somehow stopped the deaths at sea by turning back boats. Labor have got up this morning and said, 'We love boat turnbacks as well.' When you turn back boats, people can still die; they just die elsewhere. It doesn't happen on our watch and it happens out of the media glare, or it means they have decided not to make the trip to Australia and to go to another country, and they die on that journey. We are seeing people dying on boats as they try to get to Europe from Africa. That's because, out of desperation, they have no other choice. It's happening in our region as well. Just because it is happening out of sight does not mean it is not happening. So, this fiction that somehow the government has stopped the deaths at sea is one that has to be punctured, because deaths are still happening. We just don't see them. And the government has stopped counting them, as if those people don't matter.

I have come to expect the Liberals to adopt this approach where they are prepared to torture children for the sake of improving their position in the polls. Nothing surprises me about the Liberals anymore. But what is becoming crystal clear is that every time you think, 'There's a little moment where maybe Labor might change their mind'—no, no. When given a choice, a day after we have a debate about what kind of migration system we want in this country, it's back to business as usual. It's back to backing the death camps. It's back to saying it's okay to torture and maim people, even though there are other decent alternatives.

I must say, I am very, very gutted not to see the member for Batman, who has a good heart, coming in here and speaking against this bill, because this is an opportunity to make life better for roughly 1,600 people who just want to come here and seek our help. It's a concrete opportunity to say to the government, 'You tried to get around the rule of law and you failed, so, bad luck, you have to process their claims.' To the member for Melbourne Ports and the member for Wills, we are going to remind everyone in your electorates that when you had the chance to stand up, concretely, for up to 1,600 asylum seekers, you said no. You failed at the first test. As I said, I do believe that the member for Batman has a good heart in this respect and I believe that she believes what she said, but what matters when you come to this place is your vote. It's no good to say one thing to people to win a seat and then to come up here and shut the door on 1,600 people who are seeking nothing more than the right to put in their claim to seek asylum.

I suspect that this snap-back return to bipartisan cruelty the day after we saw handshakes across the chamber is going to be repeated in the Senate as well, where the prospect of having an inquiry into the condition of these children who are dying in death camps under our name probably won't even be supported by Labor either. I know that this is something that many people in this country feel very passionately about, and rightly so. And what is becoming crystal clear is that Labor and the Liberals will join together to take away people's human rights, justify torture and even retrospectively justify locking people up without authority if they think it will win them votes. Shame on them.

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