Helen Haines (Indi, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to second the Refugee Protection Bill proposed by the member for Clark, and I do so knowing that so many people of my electorate of Indi and so many people of Australia stand beside me. I believe this because this is the issue on which I receive the most correspondence and personal calls for action from the people in my electorate, and the people are calling for a better response than what our leaders have given us.

The Rural Australians for Refugees Group, that is so active in my community, has called on me to work with this parliament to do better, and I am committed to doing just that. For too long in this country we have been sold the idea by our successive governments that to be kind we must be cruel, that if we want to avoid people drowning at sea we must detain those who don't. We've been told that if we want to end people smuggling then we must keep people who arrive by boat in indefinite detention. But we know, as evidenced by the large number of people arriving by plane, people are still coming and will continue to come. Offshore indefinite detention is a cruel stopgap that should have been dismantled long ago and replaced with a system that actually creates a fair, orderly process that gets people safely and quickly settled into our communities.

People I meet are devastated by what we've become. They want better than this. They want better than this because so many of us see ourselves in these people—convicts forced to board boats to Sydney, Jewish people leaving Europe as fascism dawned, the Vietnamese evacuating Saigon, the South Sudanese fleeing the war with their northern neighbours. Australians want a better solution, because when we see people in these camps we see ourselves. And we know that, much as they deserve better, we deserve better.

Australians want a nation that has control of its sea borders but does not leave desperate people to languish indefinitely in prisons. The Asia-Pacific asylum seeker solution does both of these things at once by creating a network of centres across the region. People no longer have an incentive to risk their lives on boats. By enabling people to apply at these centres we have a single, virtual queue where we are completely in control over who is granted asylum to this country.

As an Independent, I see my role as advocating for sensible, compromised policies that reflect what Australians actually want their politicians to do. This is an elegant law that meets the objectives of the government without debasing the fairness and egalitarianism that mark us out as Australians. I commend the bill to the House.

Debate adjourned.

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