Kylea Tink (North Sydney, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

I want to start by making one thing very, very clear. It is that, for 30 years, as a nation, we have practised law, and flagrantly so, in the face of international human rights law. The High Court ruling that came down on 8 October made one thing abundantly clear: it is not the place of the Australian parliament to punish individuals. At the moment, we know nothing more than that about what drove the ruling that came on 8 October, but what we do know is that the court said: 'No more.' No more will an Australian government decide that indefinite and arbitrary detention be something that can be exercised by the government. No more will Australians be asked to turn away as people languish in indefinite detention.

The fact of the matter is that there is no such thing as a good crime, and we as a parliament must absolutely make sure that we do everything we can to keep our community safe. The truth of the matter is that we do not have the death penalty in Australia, and we do not have that because we do not support or believe in it. But arbitrary indefinite detention may as well be the death penalty, because these people have no way out. They have no way of knowing where they're going to be and they have nowhere to go.

As a normal Australian, I have been incredibly frustrated by the colour of the debate in this place in the last 10 days.

We have a government that has been handed a High Court ruling, and it is right and just that the government should listen to that High Court ruling and modify the behaviour and the legislation of this place based on that High Court ruling. It is inappropriate to have an opposition come out and make some sort of claim that it's within this parliament's power to ignore that ruling and simply legislate to lock people up. I would say in this place to all Australians: it is a very slippery slope when your government can make laws to lock you up with no recourse to the judicial system. Regardless of who this decision is impacting at the moment, every single Australian should be prepared to fight for the right which sees a separation between the judicial system and our parliamentary system. To muddy it in this way, to use this as a dog-whistling exercise to rally people around something which is inappropriate for our nation, is simply not becoming of this place and this parliamentary context.

I call on all of us here, then, to move forward as a parliament in a calm fashion, debating what is appropriate for our society and deciding what's in the best interests of all Australians, for I fear that, the faster we rush this sort of legislative reform, the more mistakes we will make. We cannot simply legislate our way by applying layer upon layer of mismanagement. It's what got us here in the first place, and both major parties have contributed to that. The High Court ruling gives us an opportunity to hit control alt delete on our detention system in this country, and that's exactly what we should do.

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