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

Labor is dancing to the Liberals' tune. Labor is letting the Leader of the Opposition write antirefugee legislation and then rushing it through parliament for him. This is the man who made a career out of attacking refugees and migrants and punching down, and he now gets to run the show. Labor might as well be done with it and just make Peter Dutton the Minister for Home Affairs.

Labor seems to have learnt nothing from the last week we were here, when the High Court made a significant decision. We should all have reflected on that decision soberly and worked out how to construct an immigration system in the face of a very clear finding from the High Court. The High Court said you can't just lock people up indefinitely in immigration detention and put them in a warehouse and think that's the answer, because that is illegal. In response to that, the opposition ran a fear campaign and said, 'Oh, the government's letting people out,' when in fact it was the High Court that did it. So what did the government do? Instead of saying, 'Well, let's have a discussion in this place about how we construct a proper refugee system and migration system based on the new High Court findings,' they panicked. The opposition ran a fear campaign and Labor caved in.

We, the Greens, were the only ones in this place to vote against Labor and the Liberals were doing. We said at the time, 'Don't engage in a race to the bottom with the opposition, particularly the Leader of the Opposition, because there's no low he won't sink to,' and that is exactly what has happened. Here we are back again the next week, and already the opposition is saying, 'Oh, no, it's not good enough, you've got to do more.' If you give in to this guy, he is going to keep coming back for more, Labor. So have some spine. Stand up to the Leader of the Opposition and argue for a principled approach that respects what the High Court has said and gives us the time to work out what a response to that would be and what a decent migration system that respects what the High Court has just said would look like in this country. In an effort to appease the Leader of the Opposition, Labor has rushed legislation in here, and already the opposition are saying, 'Oh, it's not good enough; we need more.' This is exactly the point that we were making: don't engage in a race to the bottom with the Leader of the Opposition, because he will just keep asking for more and sinking lower and lower and lower.

It may have escaped the attention of the government, but at the last election their vote went backwards, and we now have a situation in this country where less than a third of the country votes for the government, a bit more than one-third votes for the opposition, and a third votes for someone else and says, 'We're sick of these dirty deals that get done between Labor and Liberal when you're acting in a way that is not in the public interest and you're not bringing integrity to politics.' With a third of the country now saying that they want the magnifying glass put over what politicians do in this place, Labor, instead of listening, just caves in, comes here and says, 'You've got an hour to debate a very significant piece of legislation that's potentially about giving the High Court more powers.'

We're talking about changing the relationship between the parliament and the High Court, on what limited information we've got from Labor, and they want us to debate it in an hour—a bill that we haven't even seen for a day. Well, I say this to you, Labor: this legislation may well end up back in the High Court. You may well come here again, wanting another piece of legislation to tidy up the errors in the first piece of legislation that you did because the Liberals rushed you into it.

This is no way to run a country—to hand over the keys to the opposition. Labor are handing over the keys to Peter Dutton and then wondering why it is that they're suffering as a result. Well, no. If you want to deal with the challenges this country faces, then think about them soberly, do it in a way that puts the public interest first, that respects this place, and then you might start getting a bit more respect from the people. But you are asking us to rush through legislation that we saw for the first time this morning, dealing with one of the most significant issues in this parliament, and that is something that we will oppose.

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