Anne McEwen (SA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

This is the third day in a row that we have had the opposition using question time and taking note of answers debates to demonise people who are asylum seekers and who may or may not be found to be refugees. It is extremely disappointing that instead of using the opportunity that they have to question ministers of the government about issues of genuine importance to Australians—for example, health, education or even, God forbid, climate change—they continue on their unsavoury path of whipping up fear and loathing by again using the emotive and loaded terminology that we just heard. Senator Kroger used words like ‘queuejumper’, ‘rolling out the red carpet treatment’, ‘special deals’, ‘bribes’, ‘ransom’ and ‘being held to hostage’. We have had weeks of this. Instead of constructively engaging in the debate about how Australia and indeed the rest of the world can respond to the global problem of 42 million displaced persons and 15.2 million refugees, the opposition attempt to use the tragedy of global movement of people and those people who prey upon them, people-smugglers, to disguise their own lack of any semblance of compassionate and coherent policy in this area and lack of agreement within their caucus on important matters that the Senate should be debating—for example, climate change. Instead of constructive debate and alternative, sensible proposals about the global problem of displaced persons, we continue to get hysteria, fearmongering and a failure to acknowledge the many facts around this issue.

Here are some of those facts. People movement in our region is not a new phenomenon. There have probably, arguably, always been boat arrivals in Australia from our near neighbours. We know that there have always been surges in boat arrivals, since at least the 1970s, when we first had boat arrivals from Vietnam. Subsequently there have been boat arrivals from China, Cambodia, Iraq and Iran. What are the characteristics of those countries that would have led to a surge in people attempting to flee those countries by boat and seek safe haven? All of those countries at the time were characterised by conflicts, persecution of certain groups of people and increased insecurity for the inhabitants of those countries. They are the classic factors that see people in many countries attempt to find safe haven and a secure future in an alternative country. They are what we call the push factors. Just as in the past, today it is the push factors that cause people to take the fraught step of fleeing their own country and sometimes engaging a people-smuggler to help them find safe haven. The current surge of boat people, as we know, is from both Sri Lanka and Afghanistan—both extremely troubled countries with large numbers of displaced persons.

The fact is that there always have been persons seeking asylum in other countries and there always will be. The important thing for a country to do—countries like Australia, which, I acknowledge, is a target for people seeking asylum—is to treat those people compassionately and, as the Prime Minister has said, in a way that is tough but humane. That is exactly what we have been doing in this situation not just with the Oceanic Viking but with all the other boat arrivals we have seen attempt to come to Australia in recent times. The coalition’s only response is to demonise those persons and make a half-hearted attempt to bring back the dreaded temporary protection visas, which were a mechanism of the former Howard government and which, as anybody who has dealt with refugee groups knows, were a complete failure.