Andrew Wilkie (Clark, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

I take this opportunity to remind honourable members that the global refugee situation remains dire. In fact, by the UNHCR's own figures dated June this year, there are 79.5 million people forcibly displaced worldwide, of whom 26 million are refugees, 45.7 million are internally displaced people and some 4.2 million are asylum seekers. Indeed, approximately one per cent of the world's population have currently fled their homes and are displaced in some way or another as a result of conflict and persecution. They are almost unimaginable figures, but they are real figures.

But at this time Australia is actually reducing its global contribution to addressing this humanitarian crisis. In fact, in the recent federal budget for 2020-21, the humanitarian program has been cut by some 5,000 places to a fairly paltry 13,750 people, while all the time we are failing to address the situation both on shore and in our detention centres. I'd remind honourable members that there are still some 290 people held in PNG on Manus Island and in the Republic of Nauru. In Australia, over 200 people are held in locked immigration detention centres or are imprisoned in alternative places of detention such as hotels, and there are tens of thousands of asylum seekers and refugees in the Australian community without a safety net. Indeed, over 1,000 women, men and children have been transferred to Australia from offshore detention centres, mostly for critical medical treatment, and now live in transitory visa limbo. I remind my colleagues that the Minister for Home Affairs has recently decided to move hundreds of refugees, who have been medically transferred from Nauru and PNG, onto bridging visas with no access to any financial safety net. I remind my colleagues that a recent report commissioned by the Refugee Council estimated that nearly 19,000 refugees and asylum seekers in our community on temporary visas will lose their jobs due to COVID, with homelessness among those people projected to rise to some 19 per cent. Some of these people, who are eligible for status resolution support service payments, are going to lose their payments or have their payments cut by some 50 per cent.

This is a dreadful situation. We can do so much better. For a start, this country has to finally start acting with integrity and compassion, and we have to start abiding by international law. Heavens! The list of international agreements that we are in breach of currently is mind-boggling. It's not just the Refugee Convention but also the refugee protocol; the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights; the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment; the Convention on the Rights of the Child; the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights; the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women; the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities; and the Rome Statute. It's a long list, and we are in contravention of all those international agreements to one degree or another.

We need to take practical steps. We need to end offshore processing, we need to end mandatory detention, we need to end temporary visas and we need to end tow-backs. What we should also all be turning our minds to is the campaign Time for a Home. This is a campaign by a coalition of over 90 legal, medical, community and human rights organisations calling on the Morrison government to release and resettle asylum seekers and refugees held in indefinite detention by World Refugee Day in June 2021. I certainly support this, and I call on all honourable members to support the Time for a Home campaign. Let's get everyone out of detention before World Refugee Day in June 2021. That would be the right thing to do as a country. It would show compassion, it would show integrity and it would show our respect for international law. It would be the right thing to do, and it would be a great example for other countries that often look to Australia to see how we behave and what we do. They might follow our lead.

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