Michael Keenan (Stirling, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Before my contribution to the debate on the Migration Amendment (Designated Unauthorised Arrivals) Bill 2006 was interrupted by question time, I was discussing Australia’s offshore processing arrangements. These arrangements guarantee proper care and protection for asylum seekers as well as access to the refugee assessment process, and the changes contained in the amendments in this bill today will in no way erode those guarantees.

The offshore location of Nauru will be given additional government support in order to continue to meet human rights standards in providing protection and care to people while their claims are being assessed. This protection will also extend to those people found to be genuine refugees who are awaiting resettlement. Anyone found to be a genuine refugee will be able to remain in the location to which they have been processed until resettlement is arranged for them. Protection will also be offered to those who are planning an eventual return to their homeland.

The Australian government will ensure that there is continued access to a reliable refugee assessment process for all groups who claim refugee protection. This process was developed by Australian officers in conjunction with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and mirrors that used by the UNHCR itself. There are existing provisions that will continue to protect people being processed offshore, including the commitment that if anyone needs urgent medical attention they will be brought to Australia and looked after.

For people brought temporarily to the mainland for periods extending to more than six months, the right to request an assessment of their refugee claim by the Refugee Review Tribunal will also continue. Obviously people who are not meant to be caught by these new arrangements will not be defined as designated unauthorised arrivals. These include New Zealand citizens, permanent residents of Norfolk Island and anyone brought to Australia for the purposes of the Customs Act.

The bill will also allow the minister to declare that specified persons or classes of persons are exempt from being classed as unauthorised arrivals, which will allow important flexibility within the range of the complex circumstances that can arise when we are dealing with controlling our borders. This bill will also introduce a requirement for the Secretary to the Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs to report annually to this parliament on the offshore processing arrangements and refugee assessment outcomes. These reports will be tabled in both this place and the other place.

Processes are already in place that will put us in a state of readiness with regard to the processing arrangements for any unauthorised arrivals. However, let us remember that this is a measure designed to operate as a deterrent. It continues the existing arrangements that we put in place in October 2001, which have successfully deterred further arrivals. These changes will undoubtedly go even further in reducing the incentive for people to arrive illegally in Australia, and they are an important measure in strengthening the control that the government has over our borders.

These amendments are simple, sensible, and flexible. They are a reasonable approach to dealing with the continued protection of our borders. They will ensure that there are appropriate and effective measures in place so that Australia can continue to provide for an orderly and fair process to allocate the generous number of places that we do for refugee arrivals into the future.

Maria Vamvakinou (Calwell, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I just want to reassure my colleague the member for Stirling that there is nothing simple about the Migration Amendment (Designated Unauthorised Arrivals) Bill 2006. It quite simply is a very unfair and extreme bill that seeks to radically change the way we process refugees and asylum seekers in this country. It is for this reason that I join my colleagues on this side of the House and members in his party who, thankfully, are on the side of the member for Stirling and who have become very vocal and active in their own opposition to their government’s proposal of this bill. I join with them to oppose this migration bill, which effectively excises the Australian mainland from Australia’s migration zone for people arriving by sea without a visa.

There is much hope from our side, and from all other Australians who are also opposed to this bill, that government senators who are fundamentally opposed to this bill will vote against it in the Senate. But, if this bill is passed, it will see all asylum seekers who arrive by boat removed to a designated third country for processing. Nauru is obviously the country that is particularly favoured by this government. It is quite obvious that the government very much favours the continuation of Nauru as a centre for consolidating its offshore processing regime. People who are found to be refugees will remain offshore until resettlement in a third country is arranged. An interesting aspect of this bill’s intention is that the government intends to exclude Australia as one of those third countries for resettlement. That introduces an unprecedented aspect to our refugee policy. That aspect potentially condemns refugees or people who are seeking asylum to a state of existence akin to a twilight zone.

This bill is an extreme measure. There really is no other way to describe it than as an extreme measure taken by this government at a time when it was thought by many people—by many Australians and indeed by many members—that the government was prepared to restore some common decency to the processing of our unauthorised arrivals. We all remember that last year the government made some significant changes to its immigration policy. Indeed, the Prime Minister hailed those changes as an indication that he was prepared to listen not only to members of his government but also to public opinion. He indicated that he was prepared to listen and to make changes. A lot of those changes were driven by the very good work done by the member for Kooyong, the member for McMillan, the member for Pearce and others in this House and in the Senate. Those changes effectively forced the Prime Minister to make changes to the method and the manner in which the Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs dealt with asylum seekers.

The amendments that were introduced last year meant that children in particular would not be placed in detention, that indefinite detention would cease and that case managed mental health would be introduced. More importantly, the Commonwealth Ombudsman became the Immigration Ombudsman and gained independent oversight of people in detention. This was particularly important given the litany of horror stories that were coming to light about the treatment of people in detention.

The bill before us will reverse these important steps taken to restore humanity and decency to detainees and their families, and it will most certainly destroy whatever is left of our reputation in the international community as a welcoming and compassionate country.

The government’s harsh, punitive and expensive detention policies have inflicted tremendous human misery and despair on many vulnerable people. As a result of these government policies, we have subjected many vulnerable people to incarceration in prison-like accommodation for long periods of time and in some cases years. These vulnerable people include children and people who have been suffering mental illness. Also, let us not forget that suffering has been inflicted on some of our own citizens. Let us not forget the experiences of Cornelia Rau and Vivian Solon.

It appeared that this inhumane, punitive and even paranoid treatment by immigration officials, who were of course responding to the requests of government policy, was to be a thing of the past, until the government pulled this latest stunt—and it is a stunt. The excision of the Australian mainland from its own migration zone and the intended removal of Australia as a settlement country are measures that have no precedent. They are so ridiculous and so extreme that you have to wonder just how far this government is prepared to go in the treatment of asylum seekers.

According to the parliamentary secretary who tabled the bill in this place, the government’s intention in presenting this bill is to remove lingering incongruities in the former legislation under which asylum seekers arriving by boat at excised places were subject to offshore processing while those whose boat arrived on the mainland were able to access onshore protection arrangements. The parliamentary secretary identified the arrival of the Papuan refugees as the reason for picking up these incongruities, and I quote him:

The landing on mainland Australia of a group of unauthorised boat arrivals from Indonesia in January 2006 highlighted this incongruous outcome.

We are therefore expected to believe that these amendments serve as some kind of finetuning to improve our immigration policies. That is not the case. This is a serious and reckless change to our immigration policy that will have serious consequences for Australia’s international reputation, so reasonable people would have to ask themselves: what drives this bill? I think the Minister for Immigration and Multicultural Affairs herself stated the real motives behind the proposed changes when she said:

Should there be people who would, were this change not made, seek to use the Australian mainland as a means of voicing protests about other countries—

they—

will not be able to do that. We will not allow that to happen.

I believe this is the real intention behind this bill. This government does not want people coming here and voicing concerns about human rights violations, especially when doing so might cause irritations and tensions of a foreign policy nature between Australia and our neighbours.

Refugees tend to flee homelands and regimes usually because there are issues of political or religious persecution, serious human rights violations and oppression in countries where there is no freedom of speech and there is plenty of censorship. Therefore it is not uncommon for refugees to seek refuge and asylum and to also take the opportunity, when they are in a democratic country like Australia, to express themselves, to voice their concerns and to basically tell their story. They do this in the hope that stronger democratic countries like Australia can use their influence to help remedy the situation back home. If we no longer want refugees to do that when they get to this country, because it may not suit our current foreign policy agendas, then what kind of a democracy do we uphold here and what kind of free speech are we as a democratic country advocating?

The government also tells us that this bill—and the member for Stirling made this point—is about border protection. My response to that is that I think it is a bit of a joke. Under this bill, Australia does not really have a border. What is really going on is that the government is trying to cover up for the fact that it was spooked—and we must not forget this, although it did happen some time ago—by the ferocity of Indonesia’s response to the granting of visas to the 43 Papuans and decided that it needed to take action to placate our neighbour. The fact that the government is prepared to sacrifice what few gains were made last year, vis-a-vis the humanitarian changes to our processing of refugees and asylum seekers, shows just how little it valued those changes in the first place.

It is important that Indonesia’s concerns be taken into consideration and, where possible, addressed—no-one would disagree with that. But the government’s response to Indonesia’s reaction, which has resulted in changing our laws, abrogating our responsibilities and sullying our reputation, is fundamentally wrong. I understand, like everybody else does, that we need to have good relations with Indonesia. Those good relations are essential to our overall national interests. But I do not believe, nor do my colleagues believe and nor do many other Australians believe, that we should sacrifice our principles and obligations on human rights in order to pursue so-called Realpolitik policies that in the long run further strip us of our international credibility and indicate our weakness in diplomacy. It is imperative that asylum seeker claims from any country be processed fairly, independently and free from any political or diplomatic interference.

Under this proposed law—and I know this has been said before, but it will be said again and I shall say it again in this House—Indonesia decides who comes to this country and the manner in which they come. This is quite a change from the Prime Minister’s assertions over the past few years that he—or Australia—decides who comes here and on which terms they come. There was no demand from Australians, the Australian public, for this legislation to be introduced—and that is the reality. The only demand for change came from Indonesia. History has taught us that policies of appeasement do not work—and this apparent acquiescence will be no different.

We should not be trying to deal with diplomatic tensions by essentially fiddling with and abdicating responsibility for the formulation of Australian law. Once you open this can of worms, there is no telling where it will end. A number of people and organisations have spoken out quite strongly against this bill. I want to refer to some of the comments that were made by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. In fact, I think good guidance on the appropriateness of this bill can be taken from the UNHCR’s commentaries on this bill.

Peter Slipper (Fisher, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Why?

Ian Causley (Page, Deputy-Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The member for Fisher will have an opportunity in just a second to reply to that.

Maria Vamvakinou (Calwell, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker, and I look forward to listening to the member for Fisher’s response to that in his speech to this House following immediately after mine. I think we could take very good guidance from the UNHCR because, after all, they are the body charged with overseeing the processing of refugees on a global level.

In a statement released after the announcement of this bill, the UNHCR spokesperson Jennifer Pagonis expressed concerns that this offshore processing proposal was ‘dramatic’, ‘penalises refugees’ and is tantamount to contravening the refugee convention. Her specific concerns include the issue of reintroducing indefinite detention, which is undeniably a penalty for people who are seeking refugee status; the fact that Nauru, which is the government’s favoured place for establishing its ongoing offshore processing, is not a signatory to the Geneva convention on refugees; that this bill introduces diplomatic discrimination against refugees; and the fact that refugees processed offshore would be denied access to courts of law. All of this neglects our own responsibilities as a democratic, law-abiding country under the refugee convention. Finally Ms Pagonis was emphatic that asylum seekers should be able to live in humane conditions which respect not only the basic human rights of individuals but also the importance of the family unit. I am sure there is no disagreement that this bill will not accommodate the importance of maintaining a family unit. The UNHCR has indicated that this bill is so fundamentally flawed that it will try and block its passage.

Other organisations have also indicated their strong opposition to this bill. Amnesty International has condemned this bill, stating that the law skirts our international obligations to refugees and human rights. In addition, the Senate Legal and Constitutional Legislation Committee basically unanimously canned the bill. The government has totally ignored a report from the Senate committee, which included its own members. As I mentioned earlier, by kowtowing to Indonesia this government is sweeping away all the positive changes that it introduced last year in regard to the treatment of asylum seekers. We have a responsibility to treat all asylum seekers with fairness and to uphold our humanitarian obligations. This bill does not reflect these responsibilities, and nor is there any real, serious justification for it. Surely, at the end of the day, the minister cannot expect us to accept the incongruence argument, especially not when the fallout from this legislation will result in further damage to our international reputation in the long term—and be assured that our international reputation will be damaged further. If we pursue this legislation, Australia runs the risk of being seen as a selfish country bereft of any moral conscience.

If we abrogate our moral duties, as we do with this bill, then how can we speak out and advance the cause of human rights in other parts of the world? If we shirk our responsibilities to those fleeing oppression or violence, how can we claim to speak for the persecuted and oppressed in other nations? How can we encourage other countries to get their house in order when our approach to human rights is based on convenience and spin? It is the ultimate irony that, by the government’s actions of forcing this bill through the parliament, we will simply reinforce the negative perceptions of Australia by the very people we want to build better relations with in order to secure our national security and foreign policy interests. It reinforces the perception that we are a discriminatory, compassionless, unwelcoming nation—one that is dismissive of our moral and legal obligations and weak when it comes to defending our principles.

If we want to improve our relations with our neighbours, we should draw on the strength of our multicultural community and our migrant history, confident in the knowledge that we have a cohesive, caring society based on a fair go and equal opportunity. We should base our foreign policy strategies on this resource, on winning the confidence of our neighbours by showing that we truly respect the dignity of human beings. We should aspire to being a moral power that leads by example. Historically, Australia has rightly enjoyed a reputation as a peaceful, welcoming democracy. We have had the good fortune to have developed our nationhood in relative peace, without the civil and political unrest that has so marked other nations and so plagues, sadly, our smaller neighbours. Australians enjoy freedom of speech, political democracy, the rule of law and the protection of human rights. We also enjoy a political system built on accountability and transparency.

We have built this nation with, and as, migrants and refugees from around the world, seeking peace and a new and better life. So why are we compromising this reputation by adopting a practice of censorship and disregard for human rights? That is certainly what this bill threatens to do. I am disappointed and sad to say that under Prime Minister Howard we are no longer a welcoming country. Despite what the minister says about the level of refugee intake, we do what we do out of sheer obligation—and even that we do with reluctance and resentment. The fact that this government is prepared to renounce our responsibilities is proof of the lack of respect and disregard this government has for refugees in need.

In conclusion, Labor do not support this extreme and unjust change in immigration policy and will oppose this bill. We believe it creates an unnecessary, expensive and inhumane way for Australia to administer its refugee policy. We believe it is wrong to shirk our international responsibilities and change our laws to placate another country. Governments are increasingly judged by their stand on human rights, and more than ever the world needs those countries with power and international influence to behave in a responsible way, one that values respect for human rights above all else. Instead our country is playing political games with human rights. All commentators agree that successive waves of immigrants and refugees have made Australia richer and stronger. Some of our greatest achievers were refugees. We should be welcoming these people who seek out our country because they share and aspire to our democratic ideals. We should be welcoming them, not incarcerating them and their children. Certainly we should not be ignoring our responsibilities to them. We should have confidence in our country and in our hard-earned reputation as an honest broker and an honest player. This will serve our national interest better in the long run. (Time expired)

Peter Slipper (Fisher, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

As I rise in the House today, I want to say at the outset that I have not crossed the floor in relation to any item of legislation since I was elected as a member of this place. However, that is not to say that, were circumstances to occur in which I felt so strongly opposed to the position taken by the government of the day or by the opposition—if I happened to be part of an opposition—I would not take the very strong stand of crossing the floor to publicly witness the values and principles that I strongly support.

I will not be crossing the floor on the Migration Amendment (Designated Unauthorised Arrivals) Bill 2006, for a good reason—that is, I support it totally. But I would like to make a plea to those colleagues in the government parties who are considering taking that very strong course of action. Having said that, I very much respect the decision-making processes that each of them will come to and I also respect the decision that they will make. But, in relation to this bill, I would ask them—particularly any senators who might be looking at crossing the floor—to recognise that the government collectively has made a decision and that, having made that decision, it ought to have the right, as it is the elected government of Australia, to have that decision implemented into legislation.

If one were to take on board the comments made by various honourable members opposite, one would think that this is an uncaring government, entirely disrespectful of our international obligations and entirely disregarding of the rights of refugees and those people who seek a better life in this country. When one looks at the facts, one appreciates that that is in fact a long way from the truth.

I am particularly proud to be associated with a government that is committed to making this nation the most comfortable place to live for all of our citizens and residents. We are a relatively large country by area, with a relatively small population. We have finite funding resources that must be divided sensibly to meet as many needs as possible of as many groups in the Australian community as possible. This is not an easy job for the government. It is a challenging job, it is an interesting job and it is certainly a responsibility that the government does not take lightly. With that comes the responsibility to manage immigration in a manner that reflects the reality that Australia is a multicultural nation and a democracy that believes in fair treatment for all. We are also, however, a sovereign nation with specific legislation to determine who is allowed to come into our country, who goes and who stays.

The speeches made by opposition members indicate how out of touch with community sentiment the current Labor opposition is. I would challenge members of the opposition to walk down the main street of any city, town or suburb in Australia and talk to constituents about how they feel on this important issue. I have done exactly that. On the Sunshine Coast I have walked down the street, spoken to residents and taken soundings on what local community people are saying. I would like to take this opportunity to advise the House that people on the Sunshine Coast and, in my view, in other parts of the country say very strongly that they recognise Australia’s excellent reputation as a country which does accept a high proportion of genuine refugees, but equally they do not want Australia to be a soft touch. They want in place very strong laws that respect the integrity of Australia’s migration system.

The reason we do not have the problems that certain other countries have is that we have sent a very strong message to the world that Australia has laws which must be respected by those who seek to join our Australian society. The honourable member for Calwell, in her speech, suggested that we ought to have almost open slather, that we ought to accept anybody who wants to come to Australia. Clearly that is not economically or socially desirable. A community can only absorb a certain level of migration, and I think that is recognised on both sides of the House. The way to guarantee that our migration system has integrity is to have rules and to have those rules strongly enforced. The member for Calwell should appreciate that only Australian citizens have the unrestricted right to travel freely to and from Australia and to remain in the country and that all other people, with a small number of exceptions, must have the authority, in the form of a visa, to travel to, enter or stay in this nation.

We are proud to be a nation that respects human life and that respects all those of various cultural backgrounds. The member for Calwell, in her speech, spoke about the UNHCR and their view of this legislation. I am supremely unconcerned by any partisan comment made by a spokesperson for the UNHCR. Further, if you talk to the ordinary, average Australian who goes about his or her life working hard to make a future for his or her family, you will find that that ordinary, decent Australian will tell the UNHCR: ‘Butt out. We are not remotely interested in the way that you endeavour to dictate to the sovereign parliament of this country or, indeed, to the government of this country on what ought to be the laws which allow people to enter or not enter Australia.’

Australia’s processing of unauthorised arrivals is of the highest integrity. The process is modelled closely on the process used by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. It is amazing that the spokesperson for the UNHCR criticises Australia, when Australia as a democratic Western country, respectful of human rights, dots our i’s and crosses our t’s and, along with Canada and the United States of America, is consistently ranked in the top three nations for offering refugee resettlement. In fact, as I go around my electorate I am told over and over again that Australia is excessively generous, that we ought not to accept the proportion of refugees that we do in Australia. Honourable members would be interested to know that our refugee program costs $2,000 million every four years. That is a cost borne by the Australian taxpayer.

I am one of those who believe that we as a nation do have to accept a proportion of refugees, and I think it is always necessary in such situations to get the balance right. Even though the government is probably leading public opinion in this area by accepting more refugees than the community at large would want, I think it is the right thing to do. We work closely with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees to determine the priority for those seeking resettlement. The opposition appear to be supporting those people who want to jump the queue. They seem to think that somehow, if a boat is able to arrive on mainland Australia, those people ought to have rights above and beyond those people who are intercepted before they reach the mainland of Australia.

Duncan Kerr (Denison, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Mr Kerr interjecting

Peter Slipper (Fisher, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I know the honourable member for Denison will speak after me. I know he will strongly disagree with what I say. I strongly respect his integrity in that he has come to a different point of view. But this is an issue where nobody has a monopoly on humanity, nobody has a monopoly on good ideas, but the government is endeavouring in a practical way to solve a major problem confronting the country.

We can be proud that our nation provides one of the most generous refugee resettlement programs in the world. I mentioned before that we accept a large number of refugees and we are consistently up there with the United States and Canada in accepting refugees, when many other countries in the world simply do not. Our past record reflects our commitment to fair and just processing of those who have arrived without authorisation. The provisions of the bill before the House will mean that people who arrive on mainland Australia by sea, without authorisation, may be moved to offshore processing facilities in another country for the assessment of any asylum claims. That does not mean that those claims will not be considered carefully and compassionately. But, under this process, those seeking asylum will be taken to offshore processing centres that are safe. They will be cared for and they will have access to a trustworthy process, whereby their refugee status will be determined.

It must be noted that the facilities in these countries are assessed and must meet the criteria set out by the Australian government. Those persons who are taken to the processing centre in Nauru will be accommodated under a visa from that country. Those who, after processing, are found to have legitimate cause for refugee status will be provided with protection while they are prepared for settlement in a third country, and some of those who are processed and found to be genuine refugees may be resettled in Australia. Others may be assisted to plan voluntary return to their homeland.

This bill is all about a balance. It is not extreme legislation. There is an absolute anomaly or incongruity between people who are intercepted before they reach mainland Australia being treated in one way and those who manage to evade that net and land—as recently happened with some Indonesians—in Northern Australia being treated in another. The Migration Amendment (Designated Unauthorised Arrivals) Bill 2006 will not affect Australia’s strong commitment to helping those in need, but it reinforces the fact that while Australia is a large country it has a relatively small population and it has finite resources. We need to establish a principle so that everyone throughout the world knows that the only people allowed to cross our borders will be people who cross the borders with our consent. We will accept a proportion of refugees, as the government has outlined, but we simply cannot subject ourselves to a situation where anybody who happens to get here can stay here. I support the bill and I commend it to the House.

Duncan Kerr (Denison, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

When the government proposed the excision of offshore islands, the Minister for Immigration and Multicultural Affairs responded to claims that the next thing the government will think of doing is excising parts of mainland Australia. It was said that that was a ridiculous red herring and it was dismissed as unthinkable. Now not only is there an excision of parts of mainland Australia but the Migration Amendment (Designated Unauthorised Arrivals) Bill 2006 proposes the excision of the whole of Australia so that persons who land onshore, in any place within this country, are treated as though they did not. That is a gross violation of the fundamental tenets of the refugee convention, which states: ‘Those who come to any country will not be treated with any less degree of concern by reason of the manner in which they arrive.’

I think it is very important to squash at the outset the idea that this is an exercise of the sovereignty of this parliament. The sovereignty of this parliament was exercised some 12 months ago when, as a response to concerns from within his own party, the Prime Minister brought forward a package of legislation which was significant in ameliorating and reducing some of the adverse harsh consequences that had flowed from previous legislation. It meant that families with children would be able to live ordinary lives in society, that any person who was the subject of a refugee claim would be entitled to have an independent review as to the merit of their application and that no person would be detained indefinitely. Those were important steps forward, which were recognised as such—albeit, they did not go as far as many in this House would have wished but, across the whole of this House, they were recognised as significant, important and welcome. That was the will of this parliament. That was expressed as a result of the measures that we passed. The measures we are presented with today are not the act of a sovereign parliament; they are the act of a coward government overreacting to the foreign policy concerns expressed by a near neighbour.

Let me go back and try to address the principal issues that go to the whole area of our responsibility for the protection of refugees. It is not true, as the Prime Minister has said, that the refugee convention is a product of the Cold War. Indeed, it is not. The refugee convention is a product of that violent struggle that consumed all nations in World War II and the experience of those who sought to flee repressive and totalitarian regimes. One of the terrible things that anybody who has followed what happened during World War II will know is the plight of those who sought refuge from Nazi Germany in its neighbouring countries: Jews, communists, homosexuals—whoever they were—fleeing from that regime. If they went to, for example, Switzerland, there are heartbreaking stories of the way in which the Swiss, because of the fear that their neighbour would regard them as acting in a manner hostile to their interests, closed their borders and refused to allow those persons sanctuary or refuge in that country.

The refugee convention came about so that countries would be able to say, ‘This is not an act of hostility towards our neighbour but a recognition of an obligation’—largely, an obligation that is universally undertaken, although there are a number of countries which are not signatories to the convention—‘to extend protection on an objective basis to those seeking refuge and claiming to be the subject of persecution.’ The refugee convention came about so that, when a circumstance arises and people flee, it would not be necessary to make political judgments about the sentiment of the other country. Rather, a country would be able to say: ‘We are acting in accordance with international law and extending protection. We are not making judgments about your sovereignty. We are not making judgments about your status as a national partner. We are not condemning you. But we have a commitment under international law, which we have adopted as an act of our sovereignty, to apply the convention universally—not just to you, but to everyone.’

This act of the Australian parliament—if passed—is a complete reversal of those fundamental premises. It would mean that, when people seek refuge in this country as a first point of asylum—not people who may have had some comfortable place to stay and who have then been smuggled to Australia as boat people through second and third countries—we will change our laws because our neighbour has interpreted our act as a hostile judgment about its sovereignty. It never was that—and nor should it be perceived to be. But we did not explain that. We did not respond in that sensible way. Instead, we permitted ourselves a knee-jerk reaction. We said we would suspend our sovereignty and overlook 50 years of commitment to human rights law because our near neighbour, with whom we have always sought to have a good relationship, has said that the acceptance of a handful of persons from West Irian seeking refuge in this country would be an undermining of its sovereignty. What nonsense!

Let me give you some history on the people and circumstances of West Irian. Across this parliament we accept that West Irian is part of the sovereign territory of Indonesia, but there would hardly be a person in this chamber who would say that the act of free choice that was carried out in West Irian, before it was joined to Indonesia, can justifiably be called a fair act of democratic choice. A handful of persons, headmen, were taken from various parts of West Irian under Indonesian control and placed under enormous pressure. That choice was made on the basis of some thousands of persons who were not representative of the whole country. From day one, there was an indigenous resistance movement, later calling itself the OPM. At various times Indonesia has sought to crack down on that movement. It has had a large transmigration program displacing the indigenous people and there has been conflict on the ground.

This is not the first time there has been a significant refugee exodus from Indonesia. In fact, the handful of people who are the subject of this legislation are only the most recent who have sought to flee from that troubled province of Indonesia. Some four years ago I travelled to Papua New Guinea as part of a delegation from the International Commission of Jurists that included former Chief Justice Elizabeth Evatt and a number of other significant lawyers, including judges. We went to see what was happening with the forgotten refugees along the Fly River—people who had fled from West Papua into Papua New Guinea some decades ago and still trickle across the border from time to time.

It has been said that Australia is a relatively small country with relatively limited resources. But what of Papua New Guinea? In the order of 20,000 people displaced from West Irian still live along the Fly River and in other parts of Papua New Guinea as a result of the earlier displacements. It is true that, at the moment, they have an uncertain status in Papua New Guinea. Some have been accepted for citizenship, but the majority cannot be accepted because of the technicalities that are in their way. But when they fled in various waves—and there have been a number of waves of refugees into Papua New Guinea—the Australian government said to the government of Papua New Guinea: ‘We expect you to protect them as refugees even though you are not a signatory to the refugee convention. We expect you, a country with the most limited of resources, to provide a support network for them and incorporate them into your strained social infrastructure.’

And I have to say that there are real difficulties. Largely, it is the Catholic Church that looks after these people in Kiunga and various parts of Papua New Guinea. There is a degree of goodwill which has meant that those people are able to continue some form of agriculture on land which is the traditional land of the people of the Western Province.

But might I say I suspect that those circumstances are limited in time and that Australia has forgotten those people. The circumstances are limited in time because, when Western Province was first opened up, the life expectancy of people there was in the low 20s. It was the poorest, hardest place to live in the world. Life expectancy has expanded—I think it is in the low 40s now—largely because of the money and the better diet as the community has been able to reap the benefit that has come largely from the mining operations that have occurred. But the population has also exploded as a consequence. The majority of the population is aged below 20. There are huge numbers of young people in Western Province. When the money that comes to Western Province from those mining operations runs out, as it must in the mid-term because the trust fund will cease to be able to provide the backing that it has in the past, we will have a densely overpopulated, immensely poor community trying to support some 20,000 refugees.

So this is not the first time that people have found themselves in these circumstances. It is perhaps surprising that fewer have fled from West Irian or West Papua into Australia directly, but the reason is largely simple. There are cultural reasons why people in the main would prefer, if they could, to travel to an environment where they could be more easily integrated and become part of a society. But you will never stop people needing to leave countries which are in turmoil. An argument that has been addressed to us is that through these measures we can stop people coming to seek refuge. The reason people stop coming to seek refuge is that the circumstances which cause them to flee are removed.

The Indonesian government has done much over the years that have passed to improve the human rights record in West Papua, but nobody, least of all the Indonesian authorities themselves, claims that it is perfect. It is no judgement that I make in relation to these matters; it is simply a statement of fact. People who are the subject of persecution will flee. Some will flee, if they are close to the border, across that border to Papua New Guinea. Others with the means to do so will flee to Australia. We will not stop it. But what this legislation does is say that those who flee here will be treated badly; those who flee here will be treated in a manner inconsistent with the obligations we as a sovereign parliament said we would extend to all those seeking refuge as a part of our act of sovereignty only a year ago.

We will not make certain that families with children will be able to live ordinary lives in the community. That will be removed. We will not make available to them the protections of a right of appeal as to the merits of their application to an independent body under the Australian Constitution. Remember that the Refugee Review Tribunal has set aside 33 per cent of all decisions—and, in the case of Afghanis, over 90 per cent. Of course, in the case of West Irian, in the one instance where the original decision maker refused the refugee status, that was also overturned. Wrong decisions are endemic when they are first made in the hasty process of assessment by departmental officials. But if refugees go to Nauru there will not even be departmental officials. I doubt that the UNHCR will provide that processing. Who is going to do it? Presumably, the government will seek to contract some other body without international status to perform this task, but we do not have the memorandum of understanding. We do not know who will be tasked with doing that. We do not know the care or the standard of decision making that they will apply. It will not be subject to merits review and it will not be subject to the capacity for scrutiny.

The last point is that we will give no guarantees that, even if they are ultimately assessed as refugees, they will be given substantive protection. They may have to wait for years. There are two persons on Nauru who are still waiting, five years after their removal there. There is no undertaking that even those who are assessed as refugees will ultimately be accepted. We have a situation which is completely foreign to the obligations that this parliament said were the minimum standards for humanitarian processing of those who seek refuge in Australia.

I am anxious that this legislation be defeated. It will grieve me if it is not. I draw the attention of members to the platform statements of the Family First Party, made and issued before they contested the last matter regarding asylum seekers. Family First commits itself to the right of asylum seekers to seek judicial review but wants greater efficiency in the appeal system. There will be no judicial review. Family First talks about the relocation of facilities to locations with freely available legal and medical consultations and other community contacts. That will not be available. Family First talks of management of facilities to ensure that conditions are humane and appropriate to asylum seekers who may have suffered traumatic experiences in their home country or in the process of fleeing. That will not be available. The statement talks about full accountability and transparency. Nothing can be less transparent than what we are provided with now.

We are told that the assessment of and dealings with refugees in the future will be the responsibility of the ‘sovereign government of Nauru’. What nonsense! The sovereign government of Nauru is made up of a handful of second-rate incompetents who were the beneficiaries of huge largesse from the Australian government and pissed it up against the wall. They live on an island incapable of being sustained otherwise than through these kinds of malevolent arrangements and are subject to no outside scrutiny through this process. It is a disgrace.

The immigration arrangements for Nauru are effectively conducted through Australia, although notionally undertaken by the Nauruan authorities. It defrauds the Australian public to say that this is an act of our sovereignty. It is an act of surrendering our sovereignty. Family First says:

...once refugee status has been ascertained every effort ... must be given to those applicants who have had their application approved to ensure their transition into the Australian community is managed with sensitivity and compassion.

In this instance it may not happen at all. They may languish for years and years in a detention centre on Nauru. The rights of men, women and children will be grossly abused. It is contrary to our sovereignty, contrary to the parliament’s statement of will through previous legislation, contrary to the Prime Minister’s undertaking to his own party and contrary to his undertakings to the Australian public. It is a disgrace. It should be voted down, and my heart will bleed if it is not.

Bruce Scott (Maranoa, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Before the member for Denison sits down, I ask him to remove an unparliamentary remark in the description of Nauru in relation to how that money was spent. I believe it was unparliamentary and it would be better if the member withdrew those comments.

Duncan Kerr (Denison, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I have no hesitation about removing any unparliamentary remark I made, but I simply indicate that the government of Nauru is not fit to be mentioned in the same sentence as the government of our sovereign nation.

Ian Causley (Page, Deputy-Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I did not interrupt at the time, but I ask that you withdraw the remark now. Thank you.

Bruce Baird (Cook, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am not the first to say that the measure of a society is the way it treats the weak and vulnerable. In fact, what we are dealing with in the Migration Amendment (Designated Unauthorised Arrivals) Bill 2006 is how this country treats the dispossessed that come to our shores from various parts of the world. It is a measure of this society. This society is often called the lucky country. We have been blessed with incredible resources and economic growth. We have seen a 16.7 per cent increase in the income of Australians over the past 10 years. We have had an average growth of GDP of something like three per cent per year. At the same time that our affluence has been growing and people have been building their houses and buying their plasma screens, we are asked to look at those who are less fortunate than us: the vulnerable in our society.

In this House there are many things that we could address, such as the management of the economy and our customs regimes. But the bottom line is that we need to use our power for those who have no power, and use our influence for those who have no influence. The reality is that this involves families. It involves children. Nelson Mandela said:

There can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul than the way it treats its children.

If that is the case, why would we want to continue to have children in detention centres? We went through this process before, and other colleagues who are here today were involved in that process. I had no interest in the question of the processing of asylum seekers until I went onto the Joint Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade Human Rights Subcommittee’s review of detention centres around Australia. What I saw of modern Australia shocked me: many people who were severely depressed; children behind barbed wire around Australia; people who were woken up in the middle of the night by having torches shone in their eyes; people called by numbers instead of names; and people left in detention centres for years upon years, thereby affecting their psychological stability. That was not something I was proud of. It is something that we as a society should be looking at and saying: ‘This was not a good period in terms of the way we treated the most vulnerable.’

Whether or not we use a Christian analogy, certainly we know that we are encouraged to look at the weak and vulnerable as a starting point. While we build our riches as a nation, the danger for us is that, in this process of collecting a glittering prize of materialism, we lose our soul. If this is the result of the bill we have before us, then I think there is a real challenge for us. Clearly, this is a challenge for all of us, including my colleagues here. When you are in here and vote as a group, there is a question of mateship, which is a great Australian tradition, but there is also another tradition we have in Australia: a fair go. It is a tradition of giving a fair go to those who are less well off, giving them a helping hand and saying: ‘It’s okay, mate. I understand that that is the problem.’

Clearly, there are people who rort the system. I spoke to the head of a processing centre in one of the most generous of the processing countries I saw when I went on a study tour to look at how other countries treated their asylum seekers. I asked him, ‘What is the biggest challenge that you have in this job?’ He said, ‘Losing your sensitivity to people who are in trouble.’ And so it is for us. We want to stereotype them as queue jumpers, as the rich who throw away their passports or as people who decide that they are going to get in this country by one means or another. They will pay off the people-smugglers, they will get onto leaky boats to get here—they are economic refugees and not genuine.

If that is the case—and I have heard some people talk about such people—then they do not know the refugees that I have met. They do not know the people I was involved in getting out of the refugee centres, like the young man who was part of a church in Iran, where the militia came and shot up half the congregation. They fled to various parts of the world. He was knocked back by both the principal review process and the RRT, which did not believe that he belonged to an underground church. This man has now become an Australian citizen. I handed him his certificate, and I was very proud of the fact that I did so.

What is this young man doing now? He is doing engineering at university during the day. At night he works in a factory to pay for himself. And at the weekend he works as a translator at a church in the western suburbs so that his Iranian friends can have knowledge about Christian life.

This is the man who was knocked back. This is the type of person who comes here and whom I have seen. It is why I feel so passionately that we should continue to process them in the right way. We should continue to look after the vulnerable in our community and not simply ignore them as some untidy piece of work. Are we to just excise the whole of Australia and not worry about what happens to them—just think that they are in some other place, some other country?

Let me review what was achieved in this House just a short time ago: women and children were not to be processed behind barbed wire. I would go and see a family that I dealt with. It was a family of three. I visited them in school holidays, at Christmas time. They were all behind barbed wire. They could not get out and play like other people there. They were behind barbed wire. We said that was wrong. We said that we were going to have all women and children out of detention centres, that we would not have it any more—and appropriately so.

Those people were put into alternative accommodation. They had to check in once a week. What happened? Did we find these people tearing off to the ends of the world? The answer is no. Not one person disappeared. Why? It was their best chance of getting into Australia.

Secondly, we on that human rights subcommittee decided that we would put time limits on how long it took to process people in detention. People could be in detention for years. People had forgotten about their case. When they went to see the case officer, they were rude to them. Some of them did not speak English. They did not know. When people have that uncertainty, what happens is that it affects them psychologically. If you have people who have been there for four, five or six years, the result is clear: great uncertainty and psychological unbalancing of these people. We decided we would put time limits on—three months for the primary decision and a further three months for review—so that we would not have this situation any more.

Finally, we said that, for any case over two years, we would call in the Ombudsman, who would do an automatic review to decide whether it was appropriate to keep the person in the detention centre. There are some cases when that is the situation—when people should be kept in for security reasons, health reasons or whatever. Usually there is not much justification, but it should be an independent person who reviews it.

We achieved that. The heat was taken out of the community. My view is that most people out there in the community supported it. We made changes for the benefit of this country and, particularly, for the dispossessed people who came by boat to this country. People say that we are letting in terrorists. We asked Graham Richardson—not Graham Richardson; I mean the former head of ASIO.

Bob Sercombe (Maribyrnong, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Overseas Aid and Pacific Island Affairs) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Dennis Richardson.

Bruce Baird (Cook, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Dennis Richardson, now our ambassador to the US. Graham Richardson would be somebody else to ask. We asked him how many problems, in terms of security for Australia, were presented by the 3,000 people who came by boat into this country during this period. The answer was zero. The reality is that people who present as terrorists are not going to find their way on a leaky boat and be processed for several years in a detention centre. With the support they would have from wealthy terrorist organisations, they are more likely to come in a private jet, with fake passports or whatever.

It is the vulnerable and the dispossessed we should be looking after. Instead we want to excise the country. We want them out of sight.

What are we proposing in this legislation? What are the problems? There is no doubt that the Minister for Immigration and Multicultural Affairs has attempted to address some of our concerns about the children and families in detention—having a separate centre but still in the general area of the detention centre. Time limits will be provided; the minister has given a commitment to that. The Ombudsman will have an oversight, but the situation is not clear because the people will be in Nauru and not under Australian law. I am not quite sure how the Ombudsman is going to supervise this arrangement.

What about all the people to provide legal and medical advice, the people from the churches and the people from the various social and charitable organisations? How are they going to get there? The other day a group went up to Nauru trying to get in. They did not have visas, so back they came. They went up and back twice to just get in. What does that mean to the people who are going to support the people there?

Finally, the worst feature of the legislation is the last part. What happens to people who are found to be genuine refugees? The answer is: we do not know what is going to happen to them. They could be sent to New Zealand. But there is a problem there. I was with a delegation over in New Zealand just two weeks ago. The minister there said, ‘I have a message to give to Canberra: if you continue to excise the whole of Australia, we will not take any of the people you process.’ I am not sure of the number of people who were taken by New Zealand before; I have been given one figure of 35 and another of 128 out of the 1,500 people who were on Nauru. I think New Zealand is basically the only country that took other people. New Zealand is saying, ‘Sorry, we are not going to take them.’ Is Europe going to take them, with all the hordes of people knocking on their door? The answer is no.

There are no time limits, so my concern is that we are going to have a repeat—that people are going to be there for an endless period of time. I think the total circumference of the island is about 32 kilometres. People can walk freely around Nauru, we are told. That sounds like a very big deal to me. But where does this whole process go? We had a system that people generally agreed was an appropriate one. A large number of people are saying to us, ‘This is not the appropriate way to go.’ The Catholic bishops said that they opposed it. They said:

We believe that all asylum seekers are entitled to protection under the 1951 convention relating to the status of refugees, to equal access to Australian legal processes and to humane treatment while their claims are being assessed. We also believe that Australia should take the lead in observing international humanitarian law and protecting all people, especially children and families.

At the other end of the spectrum, the Baptist Union of Victoria—normally a conservative organisation—said:

Our primary concerns are as follows. The action is inconsistent with the compassionate decision you made last year about the removal of children from detention which received popular support from the Australian people. We would urge a return to a more compassionate stance.

Bishop Joseph Grech, of the Australian Catholic Bishops and Chairman of the Bishops Committee for Migrants and Refugees, said that Australians would be shocked and disappointed if the government’s new policy saw children especially being sent to detention centres again. The National Council of Churches in Australia wrote:

Dear Prime Minister,

We write with deep concern to express our opposition to the proposed legislation which would see all asylum seekers who arrive in Australia by boat being processed offshore. You would be aware of the longstanding concern of many Australian churches to the so-called Pacific solution.

The Uniting Church said that ‘moral courage was absent in the decision’. In terms of churches, it is normally known as being at the more trendy end of the spectrum, but it still represents the whole spectrum of people who are part of it. Amnesty International said:

Australia would be in breach of its international legal obligations. Genuine asylum seekers, including children, face a lifetime of detention depending on the settlement arrangements made.

A Just Australia published an open letter to the Prime Minister from prominent Australians and community leaders. It stated:

We the undersigned are alarmed at the prospect of asylum seekers being removed from Australia, sent to offshore centres and being held there until third countries provide refuge.

The Refugee Council of Australia expressed concerns that the ‘current review will result in breaches of article 33 of the Geneva Convention’. Conference leaders of religious institutes in New South Wales wrote:

I ask that the Australian government abandon the Pacific solution and the use of Christmas Island. All asylum seekers should be housed in the mainland with access to appropriate medical, legal and other support.

We were told at first that it was not about problems with Indonesia. But, as time went by, it became more apparent that that was on the agenda. Let us look at some of the editorials in the Sydney Morning Herald and the Weekend Australian when the legislation was announced. In the Weekend Australian of 15 April, the editorial stated:

Just as Indonesians rightfully asked Australians to respect their law with regard to the Schapelle Corby verdict, Indonesians must understand that Australia has its own laws as well, and those laws may well see Papuans granted asylum. The sooner Jakarta understands that it cannot drive policy in Canberra, the sooner the two nations can get relations back on the right track.

In the Sydney Morning Herald, under the heading ‘The export of refugees: time to drop a bad idea’, the editorial stated:

However, in its concern for the sensitivities of Indonesia, the Australian Government has been too ready to disregard the rights of asylum seekers.

These editorials highlight the fact that we have, across the spectrum, individuals who are telling us that this is not appropriate behaviour. This is not the way we should be treating the weakest and most vulnerable in our community. This is not the Australia that we know and respect. Australia is a generous nation. It is one that has shown enormous compassion to people in need on an ongoing basis. If we look at the aid given by Australians, its generosity has been outstanding. The level of assistance and aid that has been given by this nation has been quite incredible.

We have to address the issue of the bill before us. For most of us, it is a challenging situation. This is government legislation, and people who sit on this side of the House are challenged by it. I have been in public life for some 19 years. I have never crossed the floor during that time. I have never abstained from a vote. But I have trouble in supporting this legislation for the reasons I have outlined. Antonio Guterres, UN High Commissioner for Refugees in 2005, said:

While every refugee’s story is different and their anguish personal, they all share a common thread of uncommon courage—the courage not only to survive, but to persevere and rebuild their shattered lives.

Our responsibility is about enabling those people who have been dispossessed, who have had their lives shattered, who, in some cases, have been tortured and who are fleeing from the situation in their country of origin to start again. Our responsibility as a country is not to say to these people: ‘We don’t want to know you. We want you to go up to another island, which is not part of Australia, because we don’t want you being touched by Australian law.’ There is no doubt that there is a real problem with people who are serial appealers on every case, who do not deserve to be recognised and who should be expedited out the door. There is no doubt about that.

I think, on the whole, our migration people do a pretty good job. But this legislation is about changing the situation, taking away our responsibility and putting it on another country. I do not believe that we can support this bill. It is very disappointing after the changes we achieved to the migration law.

It is up to all Australians who believe in compassion, who believe in fairness, who believe in equity and who believe in looking after the vulnerable to decide that we cannot go ahead and simply ignore their claims and say it is for somebody else to look after them. The people in this House, in the year 2006, have this moral responsibility. We have had conscience votes on RU486 and other things. This is a conscience vote. I am not in a position to support this bill.

Carmen Lawrence (Fremantle, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

May I first of all express my admiration for the members opposite who are taking what I know for them will be a very difficult step but on the basis of principles that they hold dear. Like them, I believe that the Migration Amendment (Designated Unauthorised Arrivals) Bill 2006 is truly bizarre legislation. It effectively deletes Australia from our own legal coverage and abandons our responsibilities as an international citizen while attempting to foist these responsibilities onto our impoverished neighbours in the region, most of whom are not even signatories to the necessary international conventions for protecting refugees.

The Migration Amendment (Designated Unauthorised Arrivals) Bill 2006, as I am sure many other speakers have already pointed out, represents a massive retreat from the very first steps we saw from the government so recently in the direction of the more humane treatment of asylum seekers. It is a complete about-face. The Prime Minister and the responsible minister have effected a spectacularly craven and abjectly humiliating retreat from what was a recently negotiated policy position—and I can understand why members opposite feel betrayed.

Clearly, as I have said before, it is not the result of some careful reanalysis of the policy position or of strong pressure from the Australian people—indeed, generally speaking, the Australian people have shown they are not supportive of these moves—and nor is it the result of a sustained campaign from MPs in this place. It is basically to accommodate another government, and that makes the measures even harder to stomach. It is designed to shut up the critics of that other government—Indonesia—and to move them from the public gaze and from access to the media to the now infamous camps of Nauru and Manus Island.

The minister repeatedly told the West Papuans who were given asylum that they could not expect to come here and use Australia as a platform for criticising the regime that they had fled—not on Nauru they won’t, when they are sent there. Any further refugees from West Papua will be effectively silenced. There is no doubt about it. There will be no more embarrassing images of independence flags and songs on the tarmac, and no exposure of the reasons they sought asylum and the reasons why their asylum was accepted.

As we now know, the about-face followed protests from Indonesia about the group of West Papuans who were quite properly granted protection visas. As a result of that pressure, the Prime Minister announced that the government will no longer process asylum seekers who arrive on the Australian mainland under Australia’s migration system. That is effectively what this legislation does. In an attempt to appease the Indonesian government, the Howard government bizarrely excised the Australian mainland from Australia’s migration zone and announced that any future asylum seekers would have to be processed in countries other than Australia.

In other words, at the first whiff of disapproval of the proper administration of Australian law, the Prime Minister, our so-called man of steel, folded in what was a pretty humiliating acquiescence. We have seen the same pattern in other areas of foreign policy, particularly in his relationship with the US President, George Bush. He was not prepared to defend our own laws and to explain to Indonesia the quite proper processes which led to the refugees from West Papua being granted asylum here in the first place. That was our law in operation—laws passed by this parliament and accepted by the wider community.

Disappointingly, the Prime Minister was not even prepared to mount an argument about the importance of our own sovereignty or to advance the reasons why we, as a nation, are committed to the proper protection of genuine refugees, why we are signed up to those conventions, let alone to insist to Indonesia that they should desist from treating the West Papuans so brutally that they actually do have to flee for their lives and seek asylum in a country like Australia.

Instead, we saw the Prime Minister set aside what I am sure all of us thought were once universally agreed standards of human decency so as not to offend a neighbouring country. Not for the first time, sadly, he trashed our values to accommodate other nations. He took us to war in Iraq, for example, with the grotesque consequences that we see every night in the news. That can hardly be considered a success. Certainly, the poor Iraqi people know that it is not, as they sacrifice their lives and their livelihoods.

Despite the monstrous destruction of Lebanon, the most recent example, and the mounting death toll in that conflict, the Prime Minister has so far failed to do the right thing and add his voice to the many who are calling for an immediate ceasefire—in other words, to speak from the pulpit that he has as Prime Minister for an immediate end to the killing, the violence and the hatred. Instead, again, he and his foreign minister mimic the Bush administration in both their analysis and the spin they place on the events that are going on there now. In the Prime Minister’s eyes, it would appear, people in all of these examples are disposable for political advantage; yet he should know just from observation that violence breeds violence and that it is madness to try to build our future on the misfortunes of others, whether it is the West Papuans, the Iraqis or the Lebanese people.

But I guess I was not surprised by any of this. Why? Because this government’s treatment of asylum seekers is the inhumane template which governs their behaviour in so many areas of foreign policy. This is not novel. They continue to trample on what I regard as those core Australian values and to repudiate international norms while all the while, I must say, hypocritically lecturing the rest of us about such values. Live by them, I say. If you are Christians, live by those values. How can you treat other human beings in this way? How can you stand up in this parliament in the morning and say the prayers that bring down the blessings of the Christian God upon your heads and then treat your fellow human beings like so much rubbish?

Australia’s interests in the region are not served by showing that we can be bullied into abandoning these cherished values of freedom, independence and decency and into abandoning the idea that we should respect the human rights of all comers by setting them aside so lightly. The clear message the government is sending to anyone who will listen, and to the community as well, is that these values of care, compassion, freedom, integrity, responsibility, honesty and trustworthiness—the ones the government would have students plaster on the wall alongside images of Simpson’s donkey—are no more than words and that the government does not really mean a word of it. I think by now Australians understand this duplicity. On the 10th anniversary of the election of the Howard government, an opinion polling taken at that time showed that the majority of Australians now believe that, under Howard, we are a meaner and less fair society than we once were. They can see what has happened to those values.

What is amazing about all of this and why some of the government’s MPs are so disaffected—and I do not blame them—is that just last year there was a unanimous vote in this parliament to amend the Migration Act to effect what was a much needed overhaul of Australia’s detention and asylum-seeking regime. These much needed changes followed very extensive and protracted discussion and negotiation with colleagues on the opposite side.

I think what the Prime Minister has shown, as he did when he made a deal with Mr Costello, the Treasurer, to transfer leadership at an appropriate time, is that direct negotiation with him is not worth a lot and that he is actually not to be trusted at all. This backflip certainly shows that. To me it looks as though the Prime Minister was waiting for the first opportunity to throw off the cloak of decency which he had assumed, to throw off at the first opportunity the facade he had conveniently put on, reluctantly it appears.

Even more incomprehensible is that, in all of these proposed changes, the government’s decision effectively repudiates the lessons which I think everyone thought they had learnt from the Palmer and Comrie reports, not to mention all the others, which so comprehensively documented the destructive effects of prolonged detention. We should not really have to go over this again. It is extraordinary that in this parliament we still need to point out what happens when you keep children in detention for extended periods and what happens when you put people on an island like Nauru, or on Manus Island, for year after year. It is quite simple, and the Prime Minister should understand this: it simply destroys them. These are human lives that are being destroyed. That is not overdramatising it. It is what has happened. I have met with some of these people, and many of them will never recover their lives.

What a lot of people cannot understand, me included, is how this government, with what I regard as its degraded human rights standards, can so shamelessly revert to a system that they know will keep innocent children in detention, even if they are allowed to roam around Nauru. Go and have a look at the place: most of it is blighted by the mining that has taken place there. The people of Nauru have a tough enough time. We know they will be kept in circumstances that will cause them serious harm and uncertainty and that they will be away from the normal community and away from the supports that could assist them to assimilate and begin their new lives. It is truly unbelievable, although we are contemplating it in this legislation, that the government, knowing all these things and with all this evidence, can reintroduce the disgraceful regime of indefinite detention, for which so many people are already paying right now with their sanity.

Not satisfied, in my view, with having trashed Australian standards of compassion and decency, the Prime Minister has shown himself willing to barter our independence as well. By asking the country of origin of asylum seekers, in the case of the West Papuans, to actually comment on the legitimacy of their refugee claim, Australia is placing its own short-term domestic interests ahead of proper determination of refugee status—and, by the way, is breaching all the relevant conventions in the process. They actually suggested that the Indonesian military—for God’s sake!—be allowed to assess the refugee claims of West Papuans. As one commentator put it: that is like asking Saddam Hussein’s regime to review Iraqi asylum claims, or the Taliban to check the Afghan Hazara claims or the Nazis to look at the 1940s Jewish claims for assistance. As another commentator put it: ‘This is an idea which is either short-sighted or wilfully cruel.’ I will leave you to reach your own conclusions.

It is bad enough that these proposed changes to our immigration policy were dictated by another nation, as they clearly were, but their representatives then made sure it was done by coming here to this parliament. If we were truly a friend of Indonesia, as the government clearly wants to suggest we are, we would not be afraid to stand by our own standards and our commitments to treat asylum seekers with at least residual decency, and we would speak the truth to the Indonesian people instead of capitulating to their unreasonable demands. If we were true friends we would tell them what we know about what is going on in West Papua. I have said it in this place before but it bears repeating: we should tell the Indonesians that, yes, we have read the reports and heard the witnesses who attest to the fact that Indonesian police and military have engaged at various times in violence and killings in West Papua. I am sure many of the members here have seen the photographs and images. We should tell them that we know they have been responsible as governments over time for torture killings of detained prisoners and that political, cultural and village leaders have been killed. We should tell them that we know that some detained people have suffered electric shocks, beatings, pistol whipping, water torture and so on. We should tell them that we know these things and that we have seen the evidence.

We should tell them that we are aware of systematic resource exploitation, the destruction of some Papuan resources and the forced relocation and use of unpaid labour. We would tell them these things if we were truly friends to Indonesia. We should tell them that we condemn such actions and that we will protect anyone who flees in terror and we will give them appropriate asylum. If we were true friends we would argue, importantly, that there are other ways to govern the territory. We would support those members of the Indonesian government who are trying to proceed in other ways and to do better. We would tell them that we understand but cannot defend their reluctance to face the facts of what has gone on in West Papua. But the tragedy is that we cannot talk like that to Indonesia. What moral authority do we have when the government actually refuses to respect the human rights of refugees appealing for our help? Why would they listen to us in these circumstances?

As many people have pointed out, this legislation will now be worse than it was before those last hard-won changes were made. I want to consider a number of the deficiencies: now, all unauthorised boat arrivals will be transferred to the offshore centres to have their claims for refugee status assessed; Australia is no longer Australia; and, in what is a truly ‘Alice in Wonderland’ extension of the act, ‘A person is taken to have entered Australia by sea if the person has entered the migration zone by air.’ Figure that one out; talk about the Mad Hatter’s tea party.

Secondly, by deciding only to take asylum seekers as a last resort, and under severely circumscribed conditions, Australia has clearly reneged on its obligations and responsibilities under international law. So many people have commented on that, but it bears repeating: the policy breaches the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Racial Discrimination, the refugees convention and the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment—all of these are arguably breached. Although I know the government really does not give a toss about such conventions—it has shown that over a decade—perhaps some of the MPs on the other side, as well as those who have indicated their unwillingness to support this legislation, should pause for a moment and remember that those conventions were drafted as a reaction to the horror of the Holocaust and the conviction of the international community that it should never be allowed to happen again. The Australian government is, in this legislation, sending another clear message, a sad one, that we do not attach much importance to these obligations. In doing so I think it is opening the door for other countries to disregard them as well. It is a very bad example from a wealthy, mature democracy.

Thirdly, in these remote locations, which are not Australian territory, there can be no guarantees about the quality of care. The government cannot give us any guarantees about the quality of care, which we know has been seriously deficient in the past. I think the Dutch psychiatrist Maarten Dormaar, who worked for IOM on Nauru for a period, hit the nail on the head when he described the experience as taking him ‘to the heart of darkness’.

Tragically, children will again be detained, as I have mentioned, with the well-documented and adverse mental health effects which I know the government has tried to consistently deny. But—and I want to underline this—the only documented incidents of pre-adolescent suicide attempts in Australia have occurred in immigration detention. And there have been many. Previously healthy children as young as five have deeply cut themselves, starved themselves, hanged themselves with bedsheets and drunk cleaning fluids to try to end their own lives in detention. That is what happens when you put children in these circumstances. The HREOC report of the inquiry into children in immigration stated:

Children in immigration detention for long periods of time are at high risk of serious mental harm. The Commonwealth’s failure to implement the repeated recommendations by mental health professionals that certain children be removed from the detention environment with their parents amounted to cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment of those children in detention ...

That is a very damning report from HREOC—from anyone, for that matter. But, in order to send its strong message, the government has decided that the suffering and permanent damage of children is a legitimate means to achieving a policy objective. That human beings are political objects has to be unacceptable and must not be allowed back into Australian law.

In addition, in this legislation, despite some of the government’s advertised concessions, there is effectively no review of indefinite detention. What is going to happen to these people if no-one takes them? We know what happened in Australia already with stateless people. Some of them were in detention for five or six years. Some of them remain in limbo right now, effectively under house arrest on very unsatisfactory visas. The government really have not dealt with the problem at all. And, although the government finally saw some sense and removed all but two of those who were remaining on Nauru—those damaged people from Nauru—since the Tampa scandal, they are now preparing to do it all over again. They appear not to have learned a thing. Of course, under the new regime, even if people’s claims succeed, they can stay locked up with no remedy.

The new system offers no guarantees anymore that people found not to be refugees will be returned to a safe country. That, by the way, is something that the government has failed to do already with the refugees who were on Nauru, who ‘volunteered’ to go back to Afghanistan, with the results that we now see documented by the Edmund Rice Centre. Nine of the Hazara people there sent back to Afghanistan have died as a result. At least two of them, children, were almost certainly killed because of the political stance that their father had taken. They were killed on their return, in clear breach of our international obligation not to return people to places where their lives might be endangered—and I put in brackets here: with the cooperation of the International Organisation for Migration.

The International Organisation for Migration is a body that deserves very close scrutiny. It acts as the arm of governments in returning people to places that are not safe. It acts as the arm of government in holding people in these detention centres. It is not an organisation that enjoys the respect these days of Amnesty International, for example. It is not an arm of the United Nations, as some people wrongly suppose. It is a mercenary organisation, paid for these services.

In this legislation there will not—indeed, cannot—be any access to the Australian legal system. Asylum seekers are going to be denied access to any fair and impartial reviews via the process of the Refugee Review Tribunal, which has, as we know, reversed thousands of the government’s decisions in recent years. They are not error free. The recent concessions the minister announced, which might allow for retired RRT members to adjudicate, as far as I understand it have no legal force. There are a range of other deficiencies which I am sure other members will mention.

This is appalling legislation, costly in both monetary and human terms. It represents another retreat from our obligations as decent international citizens. If every country behaved in this way, there would be literally nowhere for people to flee persecution and to find some peace, safety and security. If everyone behaved like the Australian government, the world would be a much more appalling place. This legislation is a travesty. (Time expired)

Louise Markus (Greenway, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak today on a range of amendments in the Migration Amendment (Designated Unauthorised Arrivals) Bill 2006, which reflects the government’s strong commitment to effective border control while ensuring that we continue to meet our international obligations. This bill is important to achieving that goal.

This is about ensuring that it is Australians and the government of Australia who decide who comes to Australia and who does not. This is about ensuring that Australia’s immigration program is managed in a manner that is in the best interests of all Australians, including new migrants, many of whom are refugees. It is about ensuring that we have a well-managed, coordinated immigration program covering skilled migrants, family migration and also those requiring refugee protection.

We cannot assume that all people coming by boat will arrive safely. Indeed, many will lose their lives and have done so. We also cannot assume that people arranging their transportation are not benefiting at the cost of the people seeking asylum, whether that be financial cost or even the loss of their lives or the loss of their families. While there may be genuine refugees, and many people are seeking to come to the nation of Australia because they are suffering hardship, we cannot assume that everybody who might or will seek to arrive by boat will be a genuine refugee. Some will be; others may have other motives for seeking to be in Australia.

The bill seeks to be inclusive. A key principle is to eliminate the distinction between unauthorised boat arrivals at an excised offshore place and those who reach the mainland, regardless of their nationality. That inclusivity is, for example, reflected in the proposed new arrangements for housing families, women and children during the processing and resettlement phase. The changes offer improved conditions for people in offshore processing centres. It is the government’s intention that women, children and families be housed in residential-style accommodation on Nauru and in other host countries. The government is committed to negotiating with host countries to establish similar arrangements. Other inclusive changes will see the minister having a discretionary power to issue visas to people taken to offshore processing centres, where the minister is satisfied that it is in the public’s best interest to do so.

In essence, the changes are saying that the people in offshore processing centres have an equal right to the same levels of consideration, access to services and protection as people arriving on the mainland. The proposed changes also improve the timeliness, accountability and protection measures of the offshore processing program. A three-month time frame will be implemented, where possible, for the processing of applications for refugee visas. In addition, there is a commitment that no asylum seeker will be left on Nauru indefinitely. Resettlement will be completed as quickly as possible without compromising security and other relevant factors. The Australian community is looking to the government to ensure that the security of this nation and the lives of those already living here are indeed protected. In the cases of greater complexity where all other options have been reasonably exhausted and the processing time has been prolonged, there is now an opportunity for the government to exercise its discretion to bring genuine refugees to Australia. Asylum seekers that are refused will be provided with a written explanation of the reasons.

Let us talk briefly about protection. What people in my community want to know, and what I want to ensure, is that people in vulnerable situations—people who have for whatever reason fled their own country and sought a better life elsewhere—have the right to a proper, fair and humanitarian resettlement system. One of the reasons that I support the changes is that a key principle in Australia’s refugee program, that children should only be detained as a measure of last resort, will also apply to offshore processing. A far-reaching aspect of this change is the government’s commitment to working with host countries to seek to uphold that principle wherever possible.

One of the ways of ensuring that people in offshore processing centres are treated fairly by the system is to ensure that all the essential principles of processing of people in detention centres in Australia are extended to all people arriving in boats regardless of their nationality. The provision of publicly funded migration agent assistance will be available to protection visa applicants in offshore processing centres. There will be discretionary power for the minister to issue a visa to people taken to offshore protection centres where the minister is satisfied that it is in the public interest to do so, taking into account health and security issues.

The government has responded particularly well to the challenge of families in offshore protection centres. The special health, welfare and education needs of children remain foremost in the government’s considerations. A priority is to establish appropriate accommodation for these groups. With the changes in the bill, the minister will have the power to direct that Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs staff work with host governments to seek to put in place similar accommodation arrangements. Staff will be trained in child protection issues and the education needs of children will be appropriately addressed, including through their attendance at local schools. Staff with suitable child education skills will be employed. School-aged education within the offshore protection centres will be in both English and the children’s national language. These changes will make arrangements for managing the needs of families and children consistent with those that now apply in Australia.

One of the most effective strategies for best practice is to implement a reporting time line to ensure that the system is working well. I am very pleased to see that the bill’s amendments include reporting on a number of critical actions. An independent merits review panel will be established to report to the minister and subsequently the parliament. A time frame of three months for completion of the review will be implemented. The review will report on arrangements for review of refugee status determinations, including the qualifications of the reviewer, the number of claims for refugee status not determined within 90 days and the reasons for this, and the number of reviews not completed within 90 days of their commencement and the reasons for this. An independent review will be commissioned, two years after the commencement of the legislation, to report to the minister, who will table the report in both houses of parliament. The report will include alternative approaches or mechanisms in relation to the operation and effectiveness of the bill.

A significant initiative is the expansion of the powers of the Ombudsman to both investigate the actions of DIMA officers overseas in relation to refugee assessment processes in offshore processing centres and review the cases of people in the centres who have been residents of them for more than two years. Importantly, the government is committed to negotiating appropriate access arrangements with host countries to allow the Ombudsman to fulfil his role. Once the Ombudsman’s report has been received by the minister, the minister will report to parliament. Such an action provides oversight of the system and will address many of the concerns raised by the community. I understand the bill will include a sunset clause that has the effect of reverting the legislation to its current position. This clause will activate after five years.

In supporting the amendments, I note that there are other outcomes that the amendments achieve. Firstly, there is certainty. People in offshore detention centres will be cared for appropriately. Their visa assessment process will be dealt with quickly. They will be found a place to go. They will be assisted to resettle. They will receive all the help that other people who have made it to Australia receive. Their host country will be encouraged to adopt the same care and administrative principles and benchmarks that reflect the Australian program.

Secondly, there is fairness. Changes to the bill put our refugee laws in context. An article by Adrienne Millbank states:

Australia however, also provides a model—possibly world’s best practice—of generosity and inclusiveness to refugees, through its highly developed humanitarian migration and settlement assistance programs.

Australia’s refugee policy is based on four principles: recognition of Australia’s humanitarian commitment and responsibility to admit refugees for resettlement; acceptance that decisions regarding refugees will always remain with the government of Australia; that special assistance will often need to be provided for the movement of refugees in designated situations or for their resettlement in Australia; and that it may not be in the best interests of some refugees to settle here in Australia and their interests may be better served by resettlement elsewhere.

The Australian government makes an annual contribution to the UNHCR, which is the main body associated with the settlement of refugees. Australia has a generous humanitarian refugee program, settling between 12,000 and 13,000 refugees per year. These refugees—women, children and adolescents who have lost both parents—face many challenges. Many of them come from the Horn of Africa. Many from countries such as Sierra Leone and Sudan have viewed atrocities that it would be almost impossible for us to imagine. I have heard many of these stories personally. A significant number of refugees have settled in my electorate in Blacktown. I have been working with many of them for several years now and talking to them about the challenges they face—the challenges of settling into Australia. They have to adapt to and learn about a new culture and a new education system that is different. Many of them have been in refugee camps in Africa for up to 20 years. Some children have only known life in camps. Many of these families, individuals and adolescents have waited for more than a decade to come to Australia. They come here and they are so keen to integrate and to become strong contributors to Australia. They are so grateful that Australia has opened its doors and welcomed them.

The federal government has delivered and continues to deliver significant assistance to help them settle. For every person who arrives in an unauthorised way there is a genuine refugee who remains in a refugee camp waiting, with no alternative route to come to Australia except to go through the proper channels. I would like to add that, having over 100 different nationalities represented in my electorate, on a daily basis my staff and I deal with people from all over the world who are seeking to come to Australia. They come in and say that they have family, spouses, uncles or fathers who are waiting in refugee camps or in difficult situations in other countries or are seeking family reunion. They are waiting in queues. They say to me that they want people who are seeking refuge and seeking to migrate to this country to go through the proper channels.

The bill and amendments to the bill mirror the principles of Australia’s refugee policy. While the bill addresses the needs of unauthorised arrivals, the bill also makes it very clear that Australia is a country of last resort. We as a government need to consider all those people who do the right thing and are prepared to go through the correct channels. We also need to consider that it does take resources, time and effort—which we are more than willing to contribute—to ensure that these people settle. The balance of having them settle and the broader community adjust is something that we need to consider. Through a best practice model such as this bill and the amendments, Australia does ensure fairness to refugees and to other prospective migrants who apply through the migration pathway. This solution serves the national interest and would have the support of many in the Australian community.

This bill is a measured approach with the right balance of protection, accountability and administrative process applied to a complex issue. It strengthens Australia’s effective border controls while ensuring we continue to meet our international obligations. The bill marks an important milestone in the development of effective migration policy. It delivers for the Australian people in terms of genuine refugees, accountability in getting the system right and a strong position against people smugglers. It delivers for unauthorised arrivals by giving a transparent, reviewable process and clear outcomes. People in offshore processing centres will have access to resources and be treated as if they were being processed onshore, and there will be an ombudsman with the power to investigate any breaches of that process. Ultimately, this system is accountable to the Australian community through the parliament. I commend this bill to the House.

Sharon Grierson (Newcastle, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Migration Amendment (Designated Unauthorised Arrivals) Bill 2006. At the very outset I want to put on the record my absolute opposition to this legislation. This legislation is illogical and it is inhumane. It is illogical because it actually removes Australia from Australia’s migration zone. It is inhumane because it actually puts children back into detention centres 12 months after this parliament voted to get them out. It is also inhumane because it says that Australia does not have any human rights obligations other than the remote processing of people seeking asylum. This is such a lack of compassion from a government that has its fingerprints on the human fallout from the escalating Middle East crisis, the continuing hostilities in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the ever-present war on terrorism. This is the legacy for all of us of being a member of the coalition of the willing—willing to be an aggressor and add to the ethnic and territorial tensions that rack the Middle East and threaten the relationship between two great cultural civilisations: Islam and Christianity.

This is appallingly bad policy that turns its back on our global responsibility to show integrity and leadership in a troubled world. No amount of amendment can fix this fundamentally flawed legislation, which in fact is a source of great shame to many of us here on both sides of the House. It is worth pointing out that only 11 of the 87 members on the other side will even stand to speak on this legislation. Perhaps they do not want their words on the public record for their constituents to read. The limited changes proposed by the Prime Minister to try to win over his backbench are not nearly enough, because the bill’s intentions and outcomes remain the same. It excises the Australian mainland and Tasmania from Australia’s migration zone for people arriving by sea without a visa.

So people arriving by sea without a visa on the Australian mainland will be designated unauthorised arrivals. These people may then be removed to a declared country outside Australia for processing of their refugee claims, where of course they can be detained indefinitely. We will pay the bills, but we do not wish to come face to face with any asylum seekers, apparently. These people will also be prohibited from instigating any legal or appeal proceedings in Australia following any determination of their protection claims. In fact, they will not be able to appeal to the Refugee Review Tribunal from Nauru either. In short, anyone arriving in Australia by boat without a visa will be shipped off to Nauru to have their asylum claim heard and they will not have any recourse to any kind of appeal in this country. They will be someone else’s problem. And because they are someone else’s problem they will be beyond the reach or protection of Australian law.

This will be the undoing of the significant changes the government was forced into last year, when its immigration policy was brought closer to Labor’s. The government’s backflip means that children will now go back into detention centres, but technically not on our soil. It means an end to proper mental health care for asylum seekers and a continuation of the despair of indefinite detention. This would be a terrible outcome for people seeking asylum and for good people in this country as well. It fails the test of fairness and in all probability fails to meet our obligations under the UN Convention relating to the Status of Refugees. As the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees said in April this year:

It would be an unfortunate precedent, being for the first time, to our knowledge, that a country with a fully functioning and credible asylum system, in the absence of anything approximating a mass influx, decides to transfer elsewhere the responsibility to handle claims made actually on the territory of the state.

No other country in the world has tried to shirk its responsibilities in this way. Recently I had the great privilege of joining the Speaker’s delegation to Malaysia. Whilst there we visited the UNHCR in Kuala Lumpur and there we met very dedicated people who attempt to process and assist up to 300 asylum seekers every day. Those people are fleeing places like Burma and other countries in our region where oppression or ethnic persecution is the norm. The Malaysian government accept these people into their community and allow them to work as long as they cause no trouble. Although they have few rights and limited access to government services, at least they are not placed into detention centres and they are not turned away. It certainly makes us look absolutely miserable, mean and very much out of touch with the needs of our region.

Over the past four years, arrivals here by boat accounted for only about three to four per cent of all unauthorised arrivals in Australia. The hysteria whipped up by the Howard government about these arrivals during and after the ‘Tampa election’ has been out of all proportion to the problem. Consider that almost 50,000 people were in Australia illegally in the 2004-05 calendar year. Most of these were people who were overstaying their visitor visas for up to a year. Where is the hysteria from the Howard government about those 50,000 people? There is very little. Instead it is being directed at the 400-odd people on board the Tampa and the 43 West Papuan asylum seekers in their canoe.

This legislation is just a continuation of that same inflammatory hysteria. It is a rerun of Tampa and a rerun of the discredited Pacific solution, which has cost the Australian taxpayer between $3 million and $4 million a month since its inception in 2001. That is $240 million the government has spent to keep asylum seekers out of sight and out of mind. The cost of maintaining our facilities on Nauru is now about $1 million a month, even though only two people remain on the island at present, sadly forgotten.

Let us be clear about this offshore processing. It completely takes people outside of our nation’s legal system. It gives them no recourse under our laws and we cannot check on any complaints or appeals about the detention process in these foreign places. So basically anything can happen. Any human right can be breached. Any abuse of people, of children, can happen, and we just look the other way. What a great nation!

This is just what the US has done with its Guantanamo Bay prison camp. It is run by the US, but those who are imprisoned there do not have the rights or protections of US law. That was the intent, of course, but now the American court system has tried to drag the government back to the proper operation of the rule of law and its judicial system, finding that the inmates are entitled to a proper trial, not some military kangaroo court style commission.

Sadly, this country has been quite complicit in that subversion of the law by the US government by leaving an Australian citizen, David Hicks, in that prison camp. An Australian citizen is being held in a legal limbo outside of the US legal system, outside of the Australian system, and his government has not lifted a finger to get him out. The British government has taken all its citizens back to face trial in their own country. But in June three prisoners at Guantanamo Bay committed suicide out of desperation at being held in detention indefinitely without charge. I do not think many media actually attend at Nauru, but certainly they do keep an eye on Guantanamo Bay. The response to those suicides, you will recall, by the US Deputy Assistant Secretary of State almost defies belief. Ms Graffy declared that the suicides were ‘a good PR move for the jihadi cause’. Unfortunately, that sort of completely insensitive and inhumane comment is one that we would never expect to hear from leaders of any country, but it is one that succeeds when you detain people outside your own country, outside your own legal system, when you dehumanise them, when they are not people but just a part of a process. Of course, you hope the public will forget them too.

That is just what this Howard government has tried to do by dehumanising asylum seekers in this country, first by locking them up in the desert and now by locking them up offshore. When the 43 West Papuan asylum seekers landed, the Howard government desperately tried to prevent them from being photographed. It wants asylum seekers to remain faceless and forgotten—not normal people; not real people; not people with the same emotions, the same fears, the same fears for their loved ones, the same aspirations for the people they care about, the same aspirations we all share as human beings.

Even before those suicides in Guantanamo Bay, Britain’s Attorney-General had been calling for it to be shut down completely. If only we had a government that perhaps had the same courage. But, instead, our Prime Minister goes off to Washington certainly to tell George Bush that everything is fine: ‘Despite $A2 billion spent, five years there and thousands of casualties, everything is going well in Iraq and it certainly is not escalating the desire of people to flee these very unstable places.’ That sort of disregard for legal rights and processes may get our Prime Minister invited to cocktail parties in Washington, but it does nothing for our reputation and it does nothing for our human rights reputation around the world.

This so-called border protection legislation before us today also does nothing for our reputation. The Prime Minister has kowtowed to the United States on Guantanamo Bay and now he kowtows to Indonesia on asylum seekers. The impetus for this legislation is not border protection. The impetus for this legislation is appeasing Indonesia over the West Papuan asylum seekers who landed in this country earlier this year claiming asylum from human rights infringements by the Indonesian government.

According to the law, the 43 Papuan asylum seekers who landed on Cape York in February were processed on Australian soil and under Australian law on Christmas Island. After an independent process, free from political interference, 42 of those asylum seekers were granted temporary protection visas, allowing them to stay in Australia for up to three years. Last week, the final asylum seeker was granted a TPV after the Refugee Review Tribunal looked into his case. That is how the system is supposed to work. Australia has a responsibility to examine the claims of people who arrive here and, if they are found to be genuine refugees, Australia has a responsibility to provide them with asylum. But of course Indonesia was not happy, because Australian law found that these people were genuine refugees fleeing genuine persecution in their homeland. You will recall that Indonesia withdrew its ambassador to Australia and pulled out of joint military exercises. That was on 25 March. Less than a month later, the Minister for Immigration and Multicultural Affairs, Senator Vanstone, announced this new policy. This is a new low, even for this government, which has outsourced its foreign policy to the United States, its trade policy to Saddam Hussein and its health policy to the religious right. I suppose it used to outsource its immigration policy to Pauline Hanson; now it outsources it to Indonesia.

Instead of rolling over on this, Australia should have stood up and been counted as a good citizen in our region. It should have looked beyond the political pressure it was under from Indonesia. It should have looked at the conditions in West Papua that caused these people to seek asylum and it should have entered into concerted diplomacy to be a part of the regional solutions. We should be working with our regional neighbours, particularly Indonesia, to improve the conditions of life for the West Papuan people so that they do not feel that they have to seek asylum. We should encourage Indonesia to address the reasons why people are fleeing in the first place.

This legislation before the House today is a rather cynical political solution to a terrible humanitarian situation and the Australian people are completely opposed to the way the Howard government has handled it. A poll in June found that three-quarters of Australians do not believe we should change our immigration policy to improve relations with Indonesia. In fact, I think the GetUp website has 87,000 signatures, and I hope those 60 or 70 members opposite who were not game to speak on this legislation remember that.

The Australian people do not want this legislation. They are awake to the fact that it is heartless and it is going too far, just as they realise the extreme Howard government is going too far with Work Choices and their lives. Like the Australian people, I completely oppose the shipping of asylum seekers to other countries for detention and I completely oppose the Howard government’s weak-kneed decision to take this course of action. But some might argue that sending asylum seekers to languish on Nauru would actually be more humane than having them fall into the clutches of the Australian immigration department. After all, DIMA is the department which wrongfully locked up Cornelia Rau, Vivian Solon and possibly 200 others. The government tried to hide these people behind a bureaucratic curtain until exposed by public advocates, journalists and opposition members of parliament. Let us not forget that, after public outcry, the Palmer inquiry investigated DIMA and found it to be:

… overly self-protective and defensive, a culture largely unwilling to challenge organisational norms or to engage in self-criticism or analysis.

Clearly, things have not got much better. In June it was revealed that a further 26 Australian citizens had been unlawfully detained. Allegations of rape in detention centres have also been made since that time. Last year, the Australian National Audit Office also released its damning report into the management of detention centre contracts, finding that DIMA had no idea whether the Australian taxpayer was receiving value for money for contracts, worth around $120 million per year, with Global Solutions. Worse, it found that, under the contracts, DIMA have no way of knowing whether the basic needs of detainees are being met or their human rights are being respected. The Joint Committee of Public Accounts and Audit is currently conducting its review of that report and will report its findings to the parliament.

Recently, DIMA has spent a lot of money trying to change its self-protective and defensive culture, but nothing of substance will change unless there is a change of attitude from its ministerial masters. As the saying goes: ‘The fish rots from the head.’ The culture that permeates Australia’s immigration department springs from the Prime Minister’s infamous statement: ‘We will decide who comes into this country and under what conditions.’ It perhaps comes from the Treasurer’s statement: ‘Before becoming an Australian, you will be asked to subscribe to certain values. If you have strong objections to those values, don’t come to Australia.’ You have to ask two big questions out of those two statements. Who is the ‘we’ that the Prime Minister is referring to? Is it his government, is it the parliament, is it DIMA and their officers or is it, as it seems now, the President of Indonesia, when it should always be the Australian people? What are the ‘certain values’ that the Treasurer refers to? Who decides those?  I certainly would not want this government to decide when talking about moral values and moral autonomy. Political expediency has no part in that and this government has always demonstrated that it will put political expediency before moral values. Any definition of our values would need to acknowledge that we are a wonderfully pluralistic, multicultural society and that our values of nationhood would see us committing as a global and regional neighbour to fulfilling our humanitarian and legal duties. But this government is rarely true to those values.

Last week the United Nations Human Rights Committee found that the Howard government’s immigration detention regime breaches one of the most fundamental of all human rights obligations: the right to be protected from arbitrary imprisonment. This is the fifth adverse finding against Australia’s detention regime in less than 10 years.

Also last week, the government floated—pardon the pun—another one of its punitive schemes: to purchase some kind of armed detention boat to serve as a prison for illegal fishermen. We used to think the Prime Minister was taking us back to the fifties; this would take us all the way back to the prison hulks of the convict era. While John Howard’s floating prison might be odious—even ludicrous—there was another report this week that was deadly serious. The Edmund Rice Centre found that nine rejected asylum seekers are believed to have been killed after being forcibly removed to Afghanistan. It seems to me that, in these trouble spots, there should be a moratorium for people who are held in Australia at the moment and seeking to have their claims for asylum resolved. One wonders how you can send them back to places where we are deploying more troops. The minister needs to investigate these reports immediately, because, if the government is determined to pass this legislation, we are going to see even more asylum seekers sent away—possibly into dangerous conditions in their country of origin.

We must not pass these laws. We do not want kids back in detention, we do not want indefinite detention, we do not want asylum seekers missing out on mental health care and basic human kindness, and we do not want legal oversight to disappear over the horizon as asylum seekers are shipped off to Nauru. The government backbenchers who were brave enough to stand up to the Prime Minister last year went through a lot of pain to provide some semblance of humanity in our detention system, and the Australian people have followed that lead. I hope it can be assured that this dreadful legislation fails in the House. I congratulate the member for Pearce, the member for Cook, the member for McMillan and the member for Kooyong, who have led the way in standing courageously for what is morally right. I hope we no longer go down the inhumane and uncivilised path of putting asylum seekers out of sight, out of mind and out of the responsibility of the prosperous, democratic nation that we belong to—a nation that is capable of generosity, compassion, integrity and international leadership. I oppose this legislation and I am absolutely ashamed that it has been put before the Australian parliament and the Australian people.

Cameron Thompson (Blair, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It is a pleasure to speak in this debate, which has been quite an emotional one. A lot of heavy rhetoric has been thrown about, and people have taken very strong positions. I want to come back to the core question of what the Migration Amendment (Designated Unauthorised Arrivals) Bill 2006 is supposed to be about and what our immigration policies are supposed to be about—in relation to the refugee program and our humanitarian program, which seek to assist people who might be fleeing for their lives. Given that the problems worldwide are much greater than we could hope to deal with ourselves and that the world community struggles to get anywhere near dealing with the problem, the most important thing has to be that we assist the most needy people first. We must always seek to do that. We must also make sure that our program values the lives of refugees and puts them first. We must also make sure that, in giving consideration, we do not create false expectations and we endeavour to deal straight with the refugees—the people we are seeking to assist—and not mislead them as to our intentions.

I am rather disturbed that in Australia at the moment we have what amounts to a two-speed process of dealing with refugees. We have two groups. Across the world there are refugees in horrible places like Sudan and other parts of Africa—and a little later I am going to read a story from someone in that circumstance. The other group, who are travelling at a different speed, arrive in Australia and seek to make their application for refugee status onshore. What I think is significant about that is that, if you make an application onshore in Australia, with the Refugee Review Tribunal and all the appeal mechanisms that apply in our country, the odds of successfully negotiating and proving a genuine case are a lot better than practically everywhere else in the world, where the processes recommended and approved by the UNHCR are in place but where the mechanisms for appeal may not be as good and other things may apply. So, if you want to maximise your chance under this two-speed system, you do not apply offshore; you apply onshore.

Under the legislation that applies today, we have created a lure for people to come to Australia and make their claims here—and the best and most proven way of people undertaking that path is to throw themselves into an unseaworthy vessel, go onto the high seas with their children, risk their lives and come to this country to get a leg-up to give themselves a better chance of getting refugee status and bring forward the case. Later on I will talk about people who apply for refugee status from war-torn countries in Africa—they can be waiting for four years or a lot longer to get their chance. So, to bring things forward, people hop on boats and take that risk. It really disturbs me that, in this House, the entire Labor Party and people on my own side say this is a good thing.

There was an article in the Canberra Times on 8 April on the arrival of those Papuans about whom we have talked so much in this debate. It describes how they basically built their own canoe in the backyard—a longboat with an outrigger. Over six weeks the boat stealthily navigated almost the entire coast of Papua from Jayapura in the north. They ended up spending five days on the high seas, rather than two. The article states:

They ran out of food and one of the two motors on the big canoe broke down as they hit stormy weather and high seas.

“We just cried, ‘Oh God, help us bring to the mainland. We don’t want to die in the sea,’” Wainggai says.

I think it is illustrative that they say, ‘Oh, God, help us bring to the mainland.’ There is the lure: if you make it to the mainland you get the opportunity to bring forward your case. As it stands under the legislation, if you have children with you—and that group did; they had two children as young as three—you are able to bring forward your application and be released into the community. That is a hell of a better prospect, for example, than the same group would have had if they had done as many other Papuans have done and simply walked across the border into Papua New Guinea and made an application for refugee status from there. Because of laws that stand today, which I believe are flawed and dangerous in their logic, we have a position where we create a lure for them to go onto the high seas and risk the lives of their children.

I do not know if it has been widely reported but, in the very same month that those Papuans set to sea, another group of Papuans set to sea from the same area, Jayapura. Here is an article from the Sydney Morning Herald headed ‘Papuans missing at sea as crisis talks start’:

A boat carrying 21 Papuans suspected of being asylum seekers has sunk with one confirmed dead and 18 more missing, Indonesian police say.

The article goes on to say that the boat had departed from Jayapura and rolled over in the sea. One dead body was sighted. People seeking asylum in our country are being asked to put their lives at risk. I think that is a terrible situation to have, because there is no doubt that there are people in refugee camps in serious danger of their lives who need assistance and who are pushed to the back of the bus to make way for people who have taken that risk, spurred on by what I think is a very false and fundamentally corrupt existing policy. I think it is a dangerous policy and a policy that has to change. We need to have all refugees put on an equal footing: to make all their applications at exactly the same level and to make sure that they are properly assessed.

Chris Bowen (Prospect, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Except if they come by aeroplane.

Cameron Thompson (Blair, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I want to go back to the hundreds of people who died at sea—the member opposite who is interjecting should think about this. They were not people who were perhaps upset by their experience of a detention centre but people, including children, who died at sea. An article from the Sunday Age of 23 July 2000 reads:

Hundreds of terrified refugee men, women and children on three Indonesian fishing boats that disappeared in storms off Western Australia may have been tethered to railings or locked away below decks when the vessels sank.

…            …            …

The biggest of the three boats presumed to have sunk turned back for repairs after hitting a reef on the west coast of Java about March 24.

This was in 2000. The article continues:

It was carrying about 200 people, and witnesses said it was still in very poor condition when it sailed again for Christmas Island in rough weather on March 25.

The boat vanished, and there has been no word of survivors.

Here is another article: ‘Shipwrecked in Indonesia’. It quotes one of the survivors:

‘The smugglers fulfilled every promise until the time we stepped onto the boat,’ Matin says.

…            …            …

But they were to find out later the boat’s hull was rotting, there were no working pumps or lifejackets as promised, and it would have been overcrowded with only a dozen aboard—let alone 138.

Later it says:

When water started to fill the hull, the asylum seekers tried to bail with their hands. Said Sakhi, 20, fell into the sea as waves washed over them. ‘For God’s sake, help me,’ he screamed before slipping away and drowning.

Fatima, 20, clutched her baby ... who had been born in Indonesia two-and-a-half months earlier. But as the boat split into pieces she lost her grip and the baby fell into the water. ‘We could see him. But nobody could reach him’ ...

That is the reality of policies that give priority to ships on the high seas. There are many other stories.

I want to talk now about the reality for people who are denied access to our system to make way for people who are being urged into the system in this way. And remember that those people are not departing from a war zone; they are departing from Indonesia. For the Papuans who I spoke about before, there is the opportunity to move into Papua New Guinea and make an application from there. It is not necessary to take a canoe on the high seas, but if you want to follow the lure unfortunately that is what happens.

The member for Cowper provided me with the account of Abraham Telar Nickanora from the Sudan. He says that when he was an infant his father was away fighting as a soldier and his mother had gone to another town. He said:

The enemy forces attacked the town I was in before dawn, killing thousands of people. My aunt grabbed me and ran off into the bush where we hid for many days ... The bush was a dangerous place, with lions roaming about and little water or food available to eat ... I got sick with malaria and so did my aunt, so she was unable to carry me.

After some time in the bush we decided to head for Ethiopia. But before we could reach the country we had to cross rivers with crocodiles and go through a desert. There was even less food or water to be found in the desert. Some people survived by drinking urine ... After three weeks in the desert we entered a rain forest ... Just before we entered Ethiopia a local tribe attacked our party and killed many of us ... Finally after four months we reached a refugee camp in Ethiopia.

After being in the refugee camp for four years, the Ethiopian government told all refugees that they had 14 days to leave the country. When the time was up the army arrived with tanks, jeeps and helicopters, shooting at the people. I lost my aunt but was able to escape. I joined up with many other boys who had no parents with them.

There were 17,000 boys in the group. He continued:

We were able to cross back into Sudan, this time a journey of two months.

When the Sudanese government discovered that many refugees had come back and were settled in their country, they sent in jets with bombs. The next week the village I was in was attacked ... From there we journeyed to Kenya, to a refugee camp there.

Of the 17,000 boys who began there were only 7,000 left. Abraham writes:

I was one of the lucky ones and I was six at the time.

I thought life would be safe in the refugee camp, but the local people were not happy that we were there. Killings and women being raped were common.

…            …            …

However at the camp I was able to go to school. I worked as hard as I could and was a good student.

…            …            …

I applied for a visa and was accepted to come to Australia, but still there was little hope this would happen because I had no way of paying for air fares and the other costs. But God was answering my prayers. One day while I was walking on the main road in the refugee camp I found a paper belonging to someone else, blown by the wind. On it was the address of a group of Australians who sponsored refugees and helped them with their expenses. I contacted them right away. After much correspondence, I was accepted and found myself on a plane heading for Australia in July 2003.

That is what I call an incredible tale. It is just atrocious that we provide encouragement to people who are otherwise safe in Indonesia to come to Australia in rickety boats, risking their lives and the lives of their children, while people like Abraham Telar Nickanora are left living in those appalling conditions, their lives under immediate threat in places like Sudan.

Debate interrupted.