Kerry Nettle (NSW, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you to the minister for the indication that there are around 7,000 people on bridging visa Es in the community. If she is able to at a later date provide us with some more information about how many of those people do not have work rights, that would be appreciated. The minister spoke about her belief that people who need it have access to the Asylum Seeker Assistance Scheme. The minister may well be aware of a report into people on bridging visa Es carried out by the Hotham Mission, in which they make a number of recommendations, including that asylum seeker children should have access to the Asylum Seeker Assistance Scheme throughout the protection visa and the 417 stages from the time of lodging to final outcome and that that should include asylum seekers released from detention on bridging visas. These are recommendations that have been made by one of the organisations involved in the asylum seeker project in Victoria to ensure that people do have access to the Asylum Seeker Assistance Scheme that the minister has spoken about. I would question whether everyone who needs it has it—otherwise, why would these organisations be recommending that children have access to that particular scheme?

The minister spoke about the need for people to accept final outcomes, which is something that we have heard her say here in the Senate on a number of occasions. One of the great difficulties for asylum seekers who are in this situation is that throughout the process they are given a number of decisions which are presented to them as final outcomes. I think of one asylum seeker that I spoke with recently, who was on Nauru for several years. He was given a number of final outcomes, in which he was told that he was not an asylum seeker. He had the experience of having departmental officials talking to him about a scheme known by the government as ‘voluntary repatriation’, whereby he was offered either $1,000 or $2,000—I cannot remember which it was—to go back to his country of origin. He did not accept.

Some time later, he received another final outcome from the department—one which, after the several years that he had spent on Nauru and the three previous final outcomes he had been given by the department of immigration, said that he was now being recognised as a refugee. And there are numerous asylum seekers throughout the community, many of whom I and I am sure others have met, who have gone through the experience of being given decisions by the department of immigration that are presented to them as final outcomes. After sometimes years in detention and in Nauru they are given a different final outcome—one which says they are a refugee.

That is one of the difficulties that I have with the minister’s comments that these people should accept the final outcomes. The track record of her department is not one which is able to give me as a parliamentarian or indeed asylum seekers in this country confidence that the final outcomes, as the minister puts it, that are being given are based on genuine and expansive investigations into the circumstances of each case. If that were the case then we would not see people who have sat in Nauru for many years, when they finally get access to some legal advice or when a migration agent is finally able to go to Nauru to hear their cases, all of a sudden getting a different final outcome, which says: ‘You are asylum seekers. We have kept you on Nauru for however many years and told you that you were not refugees, but now that you have been able to have access to a migration agent we have found that you are refugees.’ So, when the minister says we need people to be accepting these final outcomes, I think—and certainly the Greens think—that we need these final outcomes from the department to be accurate. Then we would have a situation which would increase the confidence of people going through the refugee determination process and members of parliament that decisions are being made accurately.

I read in the Sydney Morning Herald today about one such asylum seeker, a gentleman from West Papua. This man’s father was one of the thousand chosen by the Indonesians and asked to vote on whether West Papua should be part of Indonesia. Unsurprisingly, the father, like the other 1,025 hand-picked individuals, said, ‘We will comply with the threats being put to us and say that West Papua should be part of Indonesia.’ His son—who was being threatened and intimidated in the village that he lived in in the south of West Papua, in Merauke—travelled with his wife and children over to Papua New Guinea.

According to the Secretary of the Department of Border Affairs in Papua New Guinea—whom I met with some weeks ago, when I was there—the man was in Papua New Guinea for fewer than seven days before he arrived by boat in the Torres Strait. At that point, he and two colleagues handed over a letter which indicated that they were claiming asylum. They were taken in a helicopter by the Australian government and department of immigration and put in a hotel, where they had no access to Amnesty International, to the Red Cross, to lawyers, to human rights advocates or to journalists who wanted to speak to them. The department of immigration provided him with an Indonesian interpreter, who said: ‘Do not raise your concerns about the issue of the independence of West Papua. You should not raise in your discussions with the department of immigration, which has employed me as an interpreter, your concerns about the independence of West Papua, because that issue has been dealt with.’ So, he was provided with an interpreter by the department of immigration whose advice was: ‘Do not talk about the persecution you have experienced in your country at the hands of my government.’ Of course, that was the Indonesian government. As a result of that, some discussions occurred between the Australian government and the government of Papua New Guinea. Australia has signed agreements with the government of Papua New Guinea in which the Australian government has said that if people spend more than seven days in Papua New Guinea fleeing persecution in West Papua then the Papua New Guinean government must agree to take them back. The Greens do not agree with those agreements, but we have signed them.

So I was very interested to have the meeting I had in Papua New Guinea with the secretary of Border Affairs. He indicated to me in our discussions that the gentleman we are talking about, whose story was in the Sydney Morning Herald today, had not spent seven days in Papua New Guinea before arriving in the Torres Strait on his way to Australia. During that period of time, his wife and children were in a village near the border with Papua New Guinea. And, during that period—in which he was being held by the department of immigration in a hotel in the Torres Strait without access to lawyers, human rights advocates, journalists or support—his youngest daughter died.

The man is now in East Awin settlement, which is one of the most remote parts of Papua New Guinea. To travel there involves an extraordinarily expensive flight to one of the nearby towns. Then you go along the Fly River by canoe. And then, if you have a tractor with a big enough axle, you go along the muddy road that takes you in the direction of the refugee camp. But you cannot get a tractor all the way down the road, so you have to get off and walk into the camp, which holds 2,500 West Papuan refugees, who have been found by the UNHCR to be refugees.

Some people have been living there for 20 years. When I was in Papua New Guinea I met a 25-year-old woman who was living on the edges of Port Moresby. She had spent several years of her life in this settlement, where this man who was held by the department of immigration in the Torres Strait is now, and I asked her what it had been like there. When I asked her that question tears started rolling down her face. She apologised to me. She said: ‘I’m sorry. When you ask me that question it reminds me of how horrible it was.’

She and her family come from a small island in the north of West Papua. They have been fisherpeople all their lives. That is how they have survived. They were put into this settlement which, as I described, is in a completely remote area, a landlocked area, of Papua New Guinea. They were put there without the capacity to survive. Some families have been there for 20 years and are still there. She was lucky. She had an uncle in Port Moresby who was able to fly her and her family to Port Moresby, where they now struggle to survive. The day I saw them they were cooking food for a soccer team they had set up amongst the West Papuan refugees living in that area, because they wanted some activities for the young men to do so they could have a meaningful engagement in their lives and not get caught up in any criminal elements in that area.

This was her experience and this was the experience of the man who arrived on an island in the Torres Strait seeking the protection of the Australian government. He is now in that refugee camp. He did not spend more than seven days in Papua New Guinea. No, the secretary of that department in Papua New Guinea told me he spent less than seven days there. But the Australian government made a special arrangement to allow this man and his two colleagues to be taken back to this remote settlement where they are now. This arrangement was made at a time when the Australian government was proposing in legislation to this parliament that all asylum seekers who arrived here by boat should be taken to Nauru—legislation that came out directly as a result of the arrival in Australia of 43 West Papuans and the response and the criticism of the Indonesian government.

While this was going on, some West Papuans arrived in the Torres Strait. They were held incommunicado from any people in the community they wanted to engage with. They were given an Indonesian interpreter who said to them, ‘Don’t raise the issues of the independence of West Papua.’ Then a special arrangement was made with the government of Papua New Guinea to take these people back. This man now lives in a remote settlement where the only resources provided are as a result of the goodwill of the Catholic Church in that area. The UNHCR recently bought some water tanks so they could get water while living in that refugee camp.

Those are the circumstances in which this man has found himself through his interaction with the department of immigration. So when the minister says to me that she wants asylum seekers who go through this procedure in Australia to accept their final outcome, I think about that gentleman and I think about the many other people in Australia and elsewhere who have had similar experiences with the department of immigration. Vivian Solon, Cornelia Rau: I wonder what confidence they have in the department of immigration to make genuine decisions on their final outcome.

If the minister spent more time ensuring that her department could make accurate final outcome decisions perhaps she would have some success in the area in which she seeks success. But right now I have no confidence that the minister and her department will be able to make accurate final outcome decisions with the raft of asylum seekers that they deal with. When the minister asks me and asylum seekers to have confidence, I believe she needs to look at the track record of her government and her department. (Time expired)