Daniel Mulino (Fraser, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I begin by thanking the member for Warringah for raising this motion and to echo the words of previous speakers on this side by saying that I suspect this is probably the most serious MPI that most of us have been engaged in. I also thank her for passing on the story of Betelhem and Ismail. As the member for Fraser, my electorate may not be quite as diverse as the member for Bruce's electorate, but I think it would be on the podium. I've heard many similar stories. I haven't met with Betelhem and Ismail, but the stories that she recounted resonated very strongly with me. I feel that during my first term in parliament I've heard many similar stories. Certainly, I've learnt a great deal, and it's informed my approach to the issues that we're dealing with today. These are wickedly complicated issues, but I think we need to listen to people, like the people who have been raised in this debate, if we're going to make humane and sensible decisions.

I'd also like to say, on a broader level, that Fraser is, I believe, a powerful reflection of refugees and the migrant story more generally. The single largest election commitment that I made was $4.7 million for the Vietnamese Museum Australia. That museum, of course, celebrates 110,000 people that came to this country between 1975 and 1995. Many of them—I suspect the vast majority—were refugees, many making perilous journeys. And at the announcement of that investment at the beginning of that project, Ian MacPhee gave a very powerful speech. What, perhaps, was most powerful for me was the fact that politicians from right across the political spectrum paid tribute to him and, in a sense, paid tribute to a previous age. In that sense, I echo the words of the minister, in saying that, as much as we need to grapple with the content of this issue and the wicked complexity of it, we also need to adopt the appropriate tone. That will help us get to the right solutions in the right manner.

It was very powerful for me that there were individuals who I knew well and who are now leaders in my community that had been in refugee camps in the late 1970s and 1980s and remembered Ian Macphee as the minister visiting those camps and, ultimately, making the decision to let them enter this country. Of course, for people at that event, the events in Ukraine resonated very, very powerfully, as I think they have in today's discussion.

I think this is an issue where we should be able to reach across the aisle. We're not always going to agree, and there are clearly elements of how we deal with this policy that people in the government are probably not going to agree on with people on the crossbench, such as our commitment to Operation Sovereign Borders. But there is a great deal that I think we can agree on and work productively on.

I also wanted to make some observations, before we get into some of the detailed policy conundrums, on the fact that, in its platform, Labor is committed to some overarching principles that I think are absolutely critical to this debate. These are that any conditions of detention should reflect the inherent dignity and the safety of the human person. That was something very important to me, as somebody that put a lot of work into the process that led to the platform in the lead up to the last election. Also, of course, that detention is not indefinite or arbitrary. The way that policy operates in practice can often determine whether that is something that works or not. That comes down to issues such as the amount of resourcing that goes into processing. So we have the broad principles that are governing the way in which we want to approach these issues, but in order to have detention that is not indefinite in practice, we need to put more resources into processing people and ensuring that the way in which we treat them is in fact reflective of their inherent dignity and of their safety.

Finally, I would like to reflect the observations of the member who preceded me in this debate, which is that this is a wicked problem. I think many on this side struggle with some of the challenges of balancing our obligations under international conventions with the fact that we are all seeking to find a solution that does not provide an environment or incentives in which people unduly put themselves at risk. As I said, I suspect that people in the government will probably, in general, land on a different position to those opposite, but I very much think that we can all find a common solution, working productively together.

See this speech in context