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

On the eve of an election, a bad government with untrustworthy ministers who have no record to run on are trying to ram through a bill that will hurt people and that is completely unnecessary—and the Labor Party is about to support them. This bill, the Migration Amendment (Strengthening the Character Test) Bill 2021, tries to put ministers above the law and says that ministers will now be able to do of their own right, without anyone being able to interfere, the things that they can currently do under legislation but that you have the right to have looked over by a judge. It is completely unnecessary, because the government already has the power under legislation to deport people if it considers them to be a risk. Every one of the examples the previous speakers have gone through are examples where the minister can act. We know that because, in the same breath as they talk about why they say this bill is necessary, the government boast about how many people they have deported already under existing powers. It's why this bill is unnecessary. It's why the Labor Party was right when it said in its dissenting report that this bill is unnecessary.

But this bill is not just unnecessary; it is harmful. It is talking about people who may have been in this country for a very long time, who may now have children who have grown up in this country, who have done absolutely nothing wrong. But their family now faces being split apart and someone being sent to a country they may not have set foot in for a very long time, for decades, simply because the Prime Minister and the government are looking to beat up on people in the lead-up to the election.

This bill will not make this country safer. The government already has—and I stress this—extensive powers under legislation. It has God-like powers under section 501 to deport people on the basis of character. The government already has that power and is using it all the time. What this bill does is say that in certain situations you can't even challenge it. If you have a situation where someone has been here for a long period of time—they might be a New Zealand citizen who's here on a visa, and they might have kids here who are going to the local school. That person may have, in their youth, committed an offence, and it may well have been that a judge said, 'Look, I'm not going to impose a sentence on you because of all the circumstances of the time.' Now, years and years later, when they've potentially got kids going to school who've done nothing wrong, the government, under this legislation, without any oversight at all, can come in and say, 'We're sending you off to a country that you potentially haven't been to for a long time, and we're going to split your family apart.' In situations where someone has really done something so heinously wrong that they are a threat to the Australian community, the government already has the power to do something about it. What the government is seeking here is something more.

In the dying days of a bad government, you've always got to be really careful about the legislation that they try and rush through. That is when bad legislation gets put through and it's when, instead of fighting on the basis of principles, the opposition usually say, 'Yeah, we'll give you what you want.' Write the words 'national security' on the front of a bill in crayon and it's sure to get the opposition's support; they'll wave it through, even as it puts ministers above the law, undermines the rule of law in this country and does potential harm to innocent people. The government will come in time and time again and say, 'We need this to keep the country safe.' You've got to repeat over and over again that the government already has the powers. Why would they be wanting to do this? Why would they want this legislation? It's because not only do they want to have the powers but they want to be above the law.

I am sick of refugees and migrants and asylum seekers being used as political footballs at every election, and that is what is happening again. As we head towards an election with a government in strive, they're saying: 'Who can we kick now? Let's think about kicking kids who've done nothing wrong, who might be attending Australian schools, who might have even been born here. Let's put them at risk.' The Labor Party says, 'Where do we sign up?'

The problem about agreeing to pass bills in the dying days of a bad government is that history suggests that those laws stay on the books for quite a while. They stay on the books for quite a while, because, when there's a change of government—and I really hope there will be one at this election—the new government comes in and says, 'We couldn't possibly be seen as somehow being soft and unwinding it,' and so the power stay on the books. That's why it's so critical that when a bad piece of legislation comes to this place that you don't vote for it but vote against it.

This is an old-fashioned view of mine perhaps, but, if there's a bill in front of this place that you don't agree with, you oppose it. One of the most precious things that is given to each of us when we come here is our vote. It's all well and good to go back to the communities and say, 'I'm going to stand up for migrants; I'm going to stand up for refugees; I'm going to stand up for people who are on visas,' but you can't say that in your community and then come to this place and vote for a bad bill that has the potential to hurt people who've done nothing wrong.

Just in narrow political terms, why give a terrible Prime Minister a win on the eve of an election? Labor did this with the religious discrimination bill as well. Instead of voting against it, they voted for it, thinking that somehow that would help. If there's a bad bill, especially on the eve of an election where we might be about to change the government—and fingers crossed that happens—let's stop them doing bad things before the clock runs out.

There's one thing we need to put to bed: this idea that somehow the bill has been amended by the government and that's the reason the opposition can vote for it. The technical amendments that the government is moving were already out there when the opposition said previously that the bill is unnecessary and bad and that they were going to oppose it. So these are not new amendments that have been moved to take account of opposition concerns. The bill is in the same position as it was before. What we have here is a decision on the eve of an election to allow a government, a bad government, to do more bad things, and we'll oppose it. We'll oppose it, because bad legislation should be opposed.

One thing that was mentioned in the speech from the opposition, which is going to vote for this bill, is that it will affect our relationships with other countries. The government comes in here hairy-chested and says, 'Oh, why should we care about what those other countries are saying?' Well, it's an easy point to make superficially, but, when you delve into the detail and think about who this is going to apply to, it isn't someone who's come here from another country, been here for six months and done something wrong while they're here, so that the government says, 'Send them back.' The sole reason the government wants this bill is that it's retrospective, so someone from New Zealand who might have been here for a couple of decades, who for all intents and purposes is an Australian resident and whose kids might be going to local schools—I'm sure every one of us knows someone who's in that situation—is now about to be double-pinged for something that happened a while ago. It is, in a sense, double jeopardy, because what the government is saying is that people who have already served their time for something wrong that they did—and it might have been a long time ago—now have to potentially face, for themselves and their families, the additional prospect of deportation, perhaps to a place that they've never visited, especially in the case of their children.

That's why the New Zealand Prime Minister has said:

… send back Kiwis—genuine Kiwis … Do not deport your people and your problems.

There's a ring of truth to that that the government won't tell you about. I repeat: this isn't about people who might have come here from New Zealand or another country, landed here and committed an offence while here on a holiday visa. This is about people who've been living in our community for a very long time and who now have established networks and links.

The government will try to persuade people to vote for the bill by listing a range of heinous offences and crimes, and some of those listed by the government members are heinous offences and crimes. Most people in this country—all of them, I expect—would accept that for someone who's done something like that there is a case, when that person is genuinely not connected with Australia, for saying, 'If you've been here a short period of time, you're not welcome here anymore.' Most people would probably accept that. But what this government doesn't tell you as its members list the examples is that, for every one of those heinous examples, there are other offences which this bill is aimed at squarely capturing and where, when hearing all of the circumstances, a judge or magistrate has said, 'Actually, in this situation, even though this offence might have involved having a fight with another person, it happened, for example, in a pub when you were young, and I'm going to put you on a diversionary program.' The person might have been an exemplary citizen all the way through. The government doesn't tell you about those examples, and they don't tell you about the examples where someone has found themselves in front of a court for doing something wrong and then changed their life. They talk about all of the others, but they won't tell you about those examples, because they know that they wouldn't wash with the Australian community.

Most people would say, 'Oh, if you did something wrong and a judge or magistrate looked at it and decided that you should go through a diversion program and have a small sentence, that's right, especially if since then you've cleaned up your act,' because there is a sense in this country that if you do the crime you do your time and you do your punishment, and you don't then find in 10, 20 or 30 years that something else comes down on top of you. That's what we're talking about—all of those cases where most people in our community would say: 'Oh, no. Hang on. That person is actually a genuine local, and in that particular instance that person should be allowed to stay, and especially their kids shouldn't be separated from their parents.' That's all going to be caught up in this.

If a bad minister—and there are plenty of bad ministers in this government—decides they want to make a political point because they're worried about how they're going in the polls, there will be no recourse if this legislation passes. There'll be no recourse for the kids whose parents now get deported for something that might have happened 20 years ago, perhaps before the kids were even born. There will be no recourse for them. Up until now, you would have been able to go to court and challenge that; under this bill, you won't be able to. You've got to think through all the consequences.

I expect this government to come in here, hairy chested, and say, 'We've got to take away people 's right.' They do that all the time. And I repeat: this isn't about people who are genuinely threatening the safety of the Australian community because there are already powers to deal with that. It's a naked power grab for godlike powers from untrustworthy ministers in government, and we should not be waving it through. We should be opposing it. I call on the Labor Party to reconsider because, if there's one thing that we've learned, especially from the last little period, it's that, when you take on this government and you stand up to bullies and oppose bad legislation, we can sometimes in this place stop it, but the surest way of guaranteeing that a bad government gets its way is by doing what the Labor Party is doing now and voting for it. We won't have a bar of that. This bill should be opposed.

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