Bob Brown (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

Senator Abetz, for the record, is denying that happened. Well, I do not know how you deny such an obvious piece of history, but sending people off to Nauru or to Manus Island for that effect and to Malaysia is not only a huge trial upon the wellbeing of people who try to come to this country to escape persecution elsewhere but the wrong thing to do. We are a nation that is mature and that is part of the common global community of nations and we ought to be taking on our responsibilities—and the High Court pointed this out when it turned down the government's legislation effectively to bounce people back off to Malaysia. But it was not just the Malaysian solution that the High Court was ruling out; it was the Nauru solution and the Manus Island solution as well, for example, on the basis that these abrogate Australia's obligation under the refugee convention—which Sarah Hanson-Young has so rightly brought into this debate because it is front and centre—to give people fleeing persecution and coming to our shores access to Australian laws. Whichever one of these offshore options you are looking at it cuts across that requirement of the refugee convention. I notice Senator Abetz, in his delivery, said words to the effect that we swap one illegal entrant for each five of theirs. Let me pull him up on that again—and we must have done that so many times in this chamber. These are not illegal entrants; these people are asylum seekers.