Michael Danby (Melbourne Ports, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I want to commend the member for Lindsay on her heartfelt valedictory, particularly on the things she said about family. Those things, I think, are felt widely on all sides of this House. I know the sacrifices my better half and my children make on my behalf to enable me to be here.

Today I want to talk about a subject that has been close to my heart ever since I have been a member, and indeed since before I was elected: the subject of refugees and asylum seekers and the unfortunate—indeed, shameful—way this government has treated some of the most wretched and unfortunate groups of people in this category. I know I am far from being alone among members of this House in being the child of immigrants but I think that, apart from my good friend the honourable member for Throsby, the member for Banks and the honourable member for Fairfax on the other side, with whom I had the privilege of travelling to Hungary last year to mark the 50th anniversary of the Hungarian Revolution, we are perhaps alone in being the children of refugees.

When my father arrived at Station Pier in Melbourne in 1939 as a refugee from Nazi Germany, without his family, without his assets, without even his name—which he had to change before he was allowed into Australia—he was part of the outpouring of 150,000 German Jews who followed the Kristallnacht pogrom of November 1938. Few countries were willing to take them in. As the great leader, Chaim Weizmann, said, the world at that time was divided between ‘countries where Jews could not live and countries which Jews could not enter’.

The Australian government in the 1930s had a quota system for refugees. Under the Evian agreement of July 1938, Australia agreed to take a grand total of 1,500 German and Austrian refugees of the hundreds of thousands of desperate people who were seeking to find new homes after being forced out of their old ones. We had a delegate at the Evian conference who infamously observed that Australia ‘did not have an aliens problem and did not seek to import one’. This disgraceful so-called refugee conference—the Evian conference—directly led to the 1951 United Nations Convention relating to the Status of Refugees, to which Australia is a signatory. Under that convention, signatories are obliged to provide sanctuary to refugees. A refugee is defined as ‘a person who, owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country’.

I will say one thing for the Australian government of the 1930s. They did not take my father and the thousands of other people trying to find new homes at that time and pack them off to remote Pacific islands in the hope that people would forget about them, nor did they refuse to allow boatloads of refugees to enter Australian waters. Nor did they exploit the plight of these refugees for cheap electoral purposes by whipping up a bogus fear campaign about Australia being swamped by refugees. That happened in some places, but thankfully not here. Let us remember who some of the people were on that Tampa ship. They were Afghan refugees—from the country that we now have troops in, trying to prevent the re-establishment of the Taliban, the very people who caused those people to flee—the very victims of Islamist violence we are righteously fighting who were packed off to the Pacific.

Since 2001 the Howard government has been guilty of the things I have mentioned. It was guilty of them in 2001 and it is still guilty of them today. This government’s record on asylum seekers has been, to put no finer point on it, a disgrace to Australia. It has done great damage to Australia’s good name around the world. If you say ‘Australia’ to the people of Norway, they do not think of kangaroos or the Barrier Reef. They think of Captain Arne Rinnan, the Norwegian captain of the Tampa, who rescued 439 Afghan and Iraqi refugees at sea and then was not allowed to land in Australia and whose courageous actions were shamelessly exploited by the Prime Minister and the then Minister for Immigration and Multicultural Affairs to win the 2001 election.

I hope this is the last time I will have to make a speech on this subject; in fact, I am confident it will be. After this coming election, I hope we will have a government which, while being tough on border protection, meets its obligations towards genuine refugees. I do not just hope that will be the case; indeed I know it will be. The Leader of the Opposition said last month:

The vast majority of asylum seekers sent to Nauru end up being brought to Australia anyway, despite this government’s extreme rhetoric to the contrary. Individuals simply suffer in the interim in order to protect the pride of the Prime Minister. The Howard government’s use of Nauru as an immigration detention centre is not only a waste of money; it is inhumane. I believe that Australia is better than this Howard government policy. Labor would immediately shut down the Nauru and Manus Island detention centres and end the so-called Pacific solution.

The case for closing the offshore detention centres on Nauru and Manus is primarily a moral and legal one, but there is also an economic dimension to this whole scandal of sending people to the Pacific. As Connie Levett of the Sydney Morning Herald reported last month, the Pacific solution has cost the Australian taxpayer more than $1 billion since 2001. A report prepared by that excellent aid agency Oxfam has calculated that it costs more than $500,000 per person to process asylum seekers in island detention centres. The cost of holding asylum seekers in a mainland centre, according to the department of immigration’s own figures, is a tiny fraction of the costs of the Pacific solution. It costs $1,830 a day to keep someone on Christmas Island, compared with $238 a day at the Villawood detention centre in Sydney. I quote from the Herald article:

“The Pacific solution is neither value for money nor humane,” said Andrew Hewett, the head of Oxfam Australia. “In six years since Tampa the cost of the Pacific solution to the Australian taxpayer has been $1 billion. We are calling on the Australian National Audit Office to investigate the full financial cost of the Pacific solution.”

I cannot imagine that, in what I hope are the dying days of this government, the Audit Office will respond to any such requests at the behest of this government, but perhaps a new government might get the Audit Office to do that.

The current government tries to tell us that the Pacific solution has deterrent value. Indeed, it is true that the number of people trying to come to Australia as refugees has dropped. But, as the Oxfam report points out, this has no connection with the government’s policy. Figures from the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, or the UNHCR, show a similar drop in the number of people seeking asylum in other western countries. This is due to improved security conditions in source countries, particularly Afghanistan.

Let us look at the record of the Pacific solution. In 2001 the Prime Minister said, talking about the people on the Tampa, ‘There is no way that those people are going to be allowed to come to Australia.’ And what eventually happened? What happened to those people who languished in desolate camps in Nauru and Manus for months and, in some cases, years? By 2006 the majority had been resettled in Australia. Of the more than 1,062 people on Nauru and Manus, 615 were resettled in Australia. Most of the rest were accepted by New Zealand. That exercise cost the Australian taxpayer hundreds of millions of dollars, to no good end whatsoever.

Of course, this government is all in favour of immigration in certain circumstances. It is in favour of bringing in workers under the 457 visa scheme as a source of cheap labour which can be used to drive down the wages and conditions of Australian workers. This government sees the work visa scheme as a convenient fix to the current skills shortage, a shortage brought about by its own failure to invest in training Australians and in Australian education.

Under Labor, this abuse of the work visa scheme will end. Labor supports a temporary skilled migration program but not the use of temporary skilled migration to drive down Australian wages and conditions. Labor will require temporary work visa holders to be paid the going market rate of pay. Temporary skilled migration should only occur where the relevant position cannot be filled by an Australian or permanent resident or by a permanent migrant with the requisite skills.

Neither I nor the Labor Party advocates an ‘open door’ policy on migration. Labor believes in an orderly migration program. It is strongly opposed to any form of people-smuggling and supports strong measures against secondary movements of asylum seekers. Labor does acknowledge that it is sometimes necessary and desirable to process arrivals offshore. The government has spent $396 million completing the immigration processing centre on Christmas Island. We acknowledge the usefulness of that centre for processing certain types of unauthorised arrivals, such as the Sri Lankans who arrived by boat last year. The existence of that centre provides another good argument for closing the expensive, makeshift and inhumane centres on Nauru and Manus.

It is a sad fact that, in the current security environment, we have to keep a very close watch on our borders and we need a tough border security regime. That, incidentally, is why Labor advocates the creation of an Australian coastguard. Since our borders are maritime ones, and since the principal path of entry by illegal immigrants is by sea from Indonesia, that gateway must be guarded, and under Labor it will be guarded more rigorously than it is now, by people who are trained and equipped for that specialist task. Our overstretched Navy, which I had the honour of being deployed with on the RIMPAC 2006 exercises with HMAS Stuart and HMAS Manoora can then be deployed for the tasks it is raised and trained for: the maritime defence of Australia and the projection of naval force in overseas operations. (Time expired)