Annette Hurley (SA, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Citizenship and Multicultural Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

Today Mr Don Randall, the member for Canning, linked the migration bill with last week’s events in Britain. He believes that the threat of terrorism means that all boat people should be turned away. This attitude, which harks back to the old days of the Tampa bill, is something that I believe the government has been trying to revive. Yet it is funny that only last week Mr Don Randall himself, in his local newspaper the Canning Examiner, was exhorting groups in his electorate to apply for federal government funding under the Living in Harmony Program. He said this would:

... promote Australian values, address intolerance and build mutual respect.

He said that Canning was a diverse region and home not only to Indigenous Australians but to people of many different nationalities and faiths. It is this kind of mixed message that is making life very difficult for migrants and refugees in Australia today.

I think a lot of people in Australia do not realise the extent of the refugee problem around the world. In fact, Australia gets very few refugees in the way that the West Papuans came to Australia—directly, as a first port of call. Australia does get the opportunity to pick and choose the refugees and humanitarian entrants it brings in from refugee camps around the world. Sure, Australia is a very generous country; it does bring in 12,000 to 13,000 migrants, and compared to our population that is a reasonable number. But I think we should learn to be a bit more generous in our attitude to refugees and understand how many countries around the world are in receipt of refugees in dire circumstances. I heard the Minister for Immigration and Multicultural Affairs, Amanda Vanstone, say that the refugees from West Papua should go to Papua New Guinea because that was their closest country. But, according to the UNHCR, by early 2005 there were 2,677 West Papuans at the East Awin camp in Western Province, 138 stateless persons in Daru, Western Province, another 5,400 people dispersed in five unofficial camps along the border and a handful of refugees in other urban centres. So this country, Papua New Guinea, is taking many thousands of refugees. It is not a rich country; it receives a great deal of aid from Australia, in fact. It struggles with infrastructure and it struggles to feed, house and clothe those refugees. This government baulks at bringing in 43 refugees from West Papua who managed to make it in a boat.

In our region we are not the only ones who have refugees, and in other parts of the world there are a great many refugees. For example, in Malta, data from the National Statistics Office show that last year 48 boats brought a total of 1,882 irregular immigrants to the tiny island, which I believe only has about half a million people. So this small island has to cope with that kind of influx. Not far away, Spain had nearly 12,000 people, mainly sub-Saharan Africans, arriving by boat this year. So our refugee intake in Australia is matched in one year by the number of illegal refugees pouring into Spain. An article by Fiona Govan in London’s Daily Telegraph referred to this in a very personal way. She wrote about people in Tenerife:

The sun was sinking and the bathers were packing up and gathering in a bar at the end of the beach for a chilled beer when someone shouted: “Oh my God, there’s another boat.”

Within moments the calm of the beach was shattered as a large canoe-shaped fishing vessel pitched through the breakers and ran aground, tipping its cargo of African migrants into the surf.

Later in the article, she writes that the captain of the port authority rescue boat in Los Christianos, Tenerife’s southern port, said:

... help cannot come soon enough. “We are struggling to cope,” he said.

Many countries are struggling to cope with refugees, and they do the best they can. In the European Economic Community countries such as Spain, Malta and Great Britain are struggling to stem the tide of irregular arrivals. They are attempting to turn the boats back because many hundreds of people die each year attempting to get to some safe haven.

I think that the government should be educating Australians about the situation of refugees. There are many conflicts going on around the world and many refugees who are escaping terrible situations and terrible torture and trauma, as well as great disruption to their lives. The minister for immigration has been failing signally in this area in not standing up for the people who she brings into this country. The refugees and humanitarian entrants who make it to this country and who should form part of our country’s future are getting these mixed messages from government members instead of the welcome which on one hand many government members say that they are giving refugees; but on the other hand these government members make off-the-cuff statements linking them with terrorism. I think this is something that is impacting on all migrants to Australia. In my experience going around the country it is not only refugees and humanitarian entrants who resent this kind of mixed message; it is also the skilled migrants.

The government has made much of the Labor Party attacking aspects of the skilled migration program when we believe that skilled migrants are being underpaid or not being given the same conditions as normal Australian workers. But we do need skilled migrants in this country, and this government should perhaps pause to think that some of its mixed messages are not going unnoticed among those people who are considering migration to Australia—especially those people that feel they might be a target for some of the distrust that is being fermented in the Australian community by some members of the government.

Indeed, the minister has had the temerity to accuse the Labor Party of some form of racism in our attack on the 457 visas. If she goes around and talks to members of many communities, she will see that they feel that they have been profiled and that they are not getting the support that they deserve from the government of Australia. It is all very well to say that we are generous and take in 12,000 or 13,000 refugees, but we need to also extend that generosity to our dealings with them when they come into the country and to our attitude towards refugees. It is the responsibility of the government through initiatives like Harmony Day to ensure that this is widespread and to not allow their own backbenchers to go out and give mixed messages to the community.