Tim Watts (Gellibrand, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

A number of constituents have met with me in recent weeks as part of the #LetThemStay campaign that has emerged in response to recent High Court proceedings regarding the fate of 267 asylum seekers. I always welcome engagement on this complex and difficult issue from people in my community who are motivated by a sense of compassion. I thank the people who have contacted me about this issue, even those who disagree with me strongly about it. This is a complex issue on which reasonable people of good faith can disagree. Given the stakes, we are literally making life-and-death decisions here. We should expect these disagreements to be passionate at times; however, there are some fundamental principles around which there should not be disagreement.

Firstly, the recent High Court proceedings are one part of a much larger global issue. The number of people who have been forcibly displaced from their homes around the globe is the highest it has been since the Second World War. There were 15.1 million refugees worldwide under the mandate of the UNHCR at the close of 2015. Approximately 2.6 million of these people are children under the age of four.

In this context, we should all be able to agree that Australia has an obligation to do more to help to address this unprecedented global refugee crisis. That is why a future Labor government will almost double Australia's annual humanitarian resettlement intake and increase our funding to the UNHCR to $450 million, making us one of the top five global contributors to the agency. It will mean dramatically more refugee children coming to Australia and a better life for refugee children waiting for permanent resettlement in camps like Dadaab and Zaatari. We should be able to agree that, in a world of modern communications technologies and cheap international travel, we need to think about the consequences of our actions in Australia within this global context. As much as we want to, we cannot resettle all 15 million refugees who are in desperate need of help around the world in Australia alone. We can reasonably disagree on how many we are capable of assisting—and, as I said, the Labor Party says we can help many more than we are currently assisting—but there is a limit somewhere. In the global context, we simply cannot have an unconstrained intake of asylum seekers. This is a horrible thing to say, given the stakes, but it is a reality.

How we choose whom to help and how we say no to those we cannot help is an extremely troubling question. We must always be conscious of the 'what happens then' question here. For a global issue of this kind, there are flow-on consequences of each decision we make. Should we decide whom we can help by geographic or financial serendipity, by simply accepting whoever is able to make a journey to Australia? What are the flow-on consequences of this for the millions of refugee children in places like Dadaab who, because of geographic or financial circumstance, are not able to make this journey? What are the flow-on consequences of a policy that encourages refugees to make risky boat journeys, journeys that we know have caused an enormous loss of life in the seas to our north? Judging these consequences and weighing the moral questions is very difficult. As I say, people of good faith can disagree here. The Labor Party has weighed these issues and judged that the greatest moral good can be achieved through a policy that increases the number of refugees in Australia that Australia helps through formal channels and implements offshore processing and resettlement to ensure that people are not encouraged to take risky boat journeys to Australia outside these processes.

This judgement does not, however, imply support for the way the current government is administering offshore processing and resettlement. It should be a fundamental principle that nobody could disagree with that men, women and children in Australian funded facilities must be treated in a dignified, humane manner and housed in a safe environment. However, the current environment that has been created by the Abbott-Turnbull government gives us good cause to doubt this. The near complete lack of transparency, independent oversight and hence accountability within offshore processing facilities makes it extremely difficult to judge whether people are being treated in a dignified, humane way and housed in a safe environment—even for me as a member of parliament. I honestly cannot understand how the Prime Minister can abide a situation in which the Australian people are unable to have confidence in such a basic expectation.

Even absent this transparency, it is clear that the average length of time it takes to process asylum applications has exploded under this government—from around 150 days under the previous Labor government to around 450 days at present. This is completely unacceptable and leaves people awaiting processing in a state of limbo that is driving them to despair. Labor would take a different approach. A Labor government would ensure that people in offshore processing, particularly children, should be afforded the best available healthcare, education, and social support services. We would also implement the independent oversight and transparency necessary for the Australian people to be confident this is happening. We would appoint an advocate independent of the Department of Immigration and Border Protection and backed by the resources and statutory powers necessary to pursue the best interests of those children, including the power to bring court proceedings on a child's behalf. We would require the mandatory reporting of abuse. We would implement a 90-day asylum application processing period.

This is a complex area where reasonable people tend to disagree, but surely we can agree on the fundamental proposition that the Australian public needs to have confidence in what is going on in Australian funded facilities.