Scott Ludlam (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

It is with some dismay that I rise yet again; this is the third parliamentary sitting spell in a row where this issue has been brought before the chamber, and it just feels as though we go further down the rabbit hole each time. I have listened very carefully to the contributions of the coalition, and I would like to note for the record—perhaps things will change—the fact that not a single government senator has turned up to defend this policy apart from Senator Lundy, who carried the can for the minister in this place the last time this issue was debated. Where are they? Out there defending the policy?

One thing I will acknowledge is the insufferable smugness of the coalition senators who have turned up in here to claim the policy as their own. I will acknowledge that. Understood. I get it. You are broadcasting loud and clear that the government has taken on your policy, so you are in here doing the government's job of defending the miserable state the debate has got to. Senator Bernardi and those who contributed before him have made it very clear what the talking points are here: 'We've got the Labor Party on offshore processing and now we're going to have them on temporary protection visas and towing the boats back into open waters.'

I heard the minister earlier during question time say very clearly that the government will not be following the coalition down that particular rabbit hole, of temporary protection visas and towing boats back into open waters. But guess what? I have no idea what to believe anymore as far as the government is concerned. Maybe they will join Senator Bernardi and his other two legs of the stool, terrifying contraption though it is. For all we know, Senator Cash, perhaps you will get your way and the government will follow you down to the bottom of the bucket and reintroduce temporary protection visas, though probably, for the sake of argument, they will call them something else. Maybe they will even go against the express advice of the Australian Navy, who have said, 'Do not force us to turn boats back, because it is dangerous to the people on the boats and it is dangerous to naval personnel.' Who knows—maybe the government will complete the triple backflip and go where you are insisting they go. And guess what? The boats will keep coming.

I was expecting—and call me naive—some degree of reflection on the fact that, since this policy was announced and then introduced, several thousand people have continued to put themselves in harm's way on these boats to come to this country, despite the fact that these prison islands are now being made mandatory. These tents in the jungle and these tents on concrete pads are being prepared even as we speak. We know that that news is percolating through the camps and that people are still attempting these journeys, because even a tent on Nauru is safer than the places which they are fleeing from. So you could introduce TPVs, if you want to, and you could introduce towing back the boats against the express advice of the Royal Australian Navy, and people will still come. I will not expect anybody to come in here then and admit that you were wrong—but you are wrong.

We hear a lot of talk about a regional solution to the movement of displaced people. Senator Bernardi, in the middle of the spite and polemic of his contribution, did actually raise some points about why people come, and I think those are worth addressing. To have any chance of success, a regional solution will involve supporting human rights in the countries of refugees and, of course, in those countries which they pass through on their way to Australia. So let us cease and desist from future invasions in far-flung parts of the world that we barely understand and which then lead to outflows of refugees who then find their way to Australia. Let us stand up for human rights in places like Sri Lanka, where there was ethnic cleansing and the massacre of hundreds and then thousands of people who are still making their way in varying degrees of trauma to Australia.

Perhaps most important is the reforming of Australia's asylum application system abroad, so that it is no longer so prohibitively slow, and the boosting of Australia's humanitarian intake, because I think that hope rather than fear is the answer. Senator Hanson-Young and Senator Milne have made this point over and over again, but it seems worth repeating because those on the other side of the chamber do not appear to be hearing it. Rather than the department circulating these daft little YouTube videos that say how terrifying Australia is and how much barbed wire we have surrounding the country, why not circulate in the transit camps the fact that we have lifted the refugee intake and that we will need to lift it again, I think inevitably? Why not say that there is safe passage out of these camps, that you can turn up there and you will not be buried there indefinitely and that eventually you will be given a safe place to resettle and a safe way to get here? That is the kind of news that undercuts the business model of the people smugglers, if we want to descend to that kind of language. That is what will give people hope.

People know very well the kinds of risks that they are taking when they put themselves on those boats. It is broadcast from one end of the region to the other. If the department thinks that cooking up these dopey little YouTube videos to persuade people that Australia is a place of crocodiles and sharks and that it is scarier than politically motivated violence in Iran, ethnic cleansing in Sri Lanka or war in Afghanistan, they are absolutely delusional. Those policies were not the solution when they were introduced by the coalition.

It is remarkable the degree to which the coalition just pretend that the SIEVX never occurred. The reason they do that, of course, is that it does not fit with the narrative that they stopped the boats. Those harsh policies were designed to deflect people from seeking our shores and were not in fact effective in the first place, because the SIEVX sank two months after the Pacific solution was introduced. Nauru did not deter them, and it will not deter them again. We now have more than a month's worth of evidence, if you take it from the announcement of the policy. This form of deterrence simply will not work because, as I said in my contribution the week before last, it has to be more of a deterrent than war, violence, ethnic cleansing, torture and the risk of drowning.

Maybe Senator Cash and Senator Bernardi, who have led the charge on this, have some ideas for how Australia can be scarier than those things. And heaven help us all if you end up on the front bench in a future government. The policies that you introduced were not the solution then and they are not the solution now, because since the announcement with so much fanfare we are seeing both major parties backing away from the instantaneous deterrent value that was meant to be applied with the passage of this policy—2,049 more people have arrived by boat, seeking refuge in this country from exactly the same dire international circumstances from which they were seeking refuge before this policy was introduced.

So, sure, you folks are getting to score some very interesting points in the domestic media. You are probably getting great runs on talkback radio, on Alan Jones's station in Western Sydney—and good luck to you for that. However, it is making no difference whatsoever in the real world, in the terrible circumstances of wars and displacements which are forcing people to seek asylum in places like Australia. If you think a YouTube video is more frightening than Pashtun nationalists or Taliban insurgents in the Swat Valley in Afghanistan, if you think a YouTube video is more frightening than the Rajapaksa government of Sri Lanka, which has been implicated in war crimes, or the way that the Iranian state treats pro-democracy dissidents in Iran, you are out of your minds. Statistics can be dry but the figures that are involved are, I think, quite instructive. It was delightful to hear Senator Humphries refer to the proud Liberal traditions of allowing people into this country. Of course he was referring to changes that were made when the Fraser government was in power. Former Prime Minister the Hon. Malcolm Fraser was sitting in the public gallery when Senator Hanson-Young made her contribution in the last dishonourable phase of this debate, and he certainly was not cheering on Senator Humphries or the arguments that are being made now. You have so unmoored yourselves from the principles of liberalism that your former Prime Minister has now utterly divorced himself from the direction in which you have taken the debate.

But it is worth taking a look at what was done then, when huge numbers of people flowed of out of Indochina fleeing a war—another war that Australia was implicated in, where there was carpet bombing of South-East Asian cities by our great and powerful neighbour, the United States. After a relatively high number of asylum seekers arrived by boat in Australia subsequent to the end of the Vietnam War—one of the last disastrous occupations we allowed ourselves to get dragged into—there was actually a prolonged quiet period. From 1981 until 1992, the number of refugees arriving by boat never exceeded 214 in any given year. In 1999, seven years after the mandatory detention of asylum seekers was introduced, there was a spike in numbers to 3,721. I know that amnesia does tend to prevail in this debate, but let us remind ourselves that the whole concept of mandatory detention was supposed to be the disincentive. Does anybody remember that? That has just failed dismally. We no longer have room on the mainland to put people. That is what provoked the idea that we can simply divorce ourselves from the problem and dump people in concentration camps on Pacific islands. It was because the deterrent value of onshore processing, of dumping people in cages in the desert in Australia, was so utterly ineffective. But we can let amnesia prevail. Perhaps it does help you folk in getting hits on Alan Jones' radio program and in the Daily Tele, but it has no bearing to reality at all. If mandatory detention was needlessly introduced after a decade of very small numbers of people arriving, then why did the numbers go up seven years after the 'deterrent' started? Kabul fell to the Taliban in 1996. In 2011 the number of people seeking asylum in Australia fell by nine per cent—almost all of which, incidentally, was in boat arrivals—from about 6,500 to 4,500. That happened without temporary protection visas, it happened without Nauru, it happened without the Malaysia solution. There has been no analysis from either side of this chamber as to why that could be the case.

I would be interested to know whether in fact anybody else in this debate is even interested in that steep drop in boat arrivals or why the number went up again this year despite no change in policy from one year to the next. In fact, it is more to do with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; the presidential election in Iran and subsequent protests and crackdown; the Saffron Revolution in Burma, which saw huge numbers of people flow across into Thailand and elsewhere; and the end of the brutal civil war in Sri Lanka. These things are what have played crucial roles in flows of people seeking to escape violence and repression.

You hear it sometimes dismissed with a wave of the hand as, 'Oh, yes, the push factors; we've thought of those.' But they do not play on talkback radio stations that are used to dog whistle the Australian people into submission—believing, as everybody in this country believes, that if only the parliament could do something we could stop the flow of people away from the horror of war. I think it is readily evident that people in this chamber do not see any political capital in acknowledging the fact that the ebb and flow of people out of war and disaster zones has nothing to do with the degraded state of domestic policies or the way that this debate, from the Prime Minister down, has been conducted.

There are more than 8,000 asylum seekers in Indonesia. In fact the unofficial figure is much higher than that, but the UN refugee agency's annual budget in Indonesia is a mere $6 million. I am fascinated to hear the numerically illiterate Senator Bernardi telling us that the Greens policies of not building these prison cages all over the Pacific and remote parts of Australia will cost billions of dollars. I have just been informed that it has been estimated that to put Nauru together is going to cost $1.5 billion a year for the next 10 years. How Senator Bernardi comes to the conclusion that simply raising the humanitarian intake and dismantling the suppressive infrastructure of barbed wire cages and surveillance cameras would somehow be more expensive than what the act of this chamber today would seek to establish is absolutely beyond me.

An immediate increase in UNHCR funding of $10 million from Australia, which is a rounding error compared to what we are proposing to spend on these new institutions, would greatly increase their capacity to assess asylum applications. Australia accepts 60 people, on average, from Indonesia and Malaysia every year, and the pressure to risk a dangerous boat journey builds to boiling point quickly. As many of us have said before, people are arriving in these camps and what they hear from people who have been there a while before them is: 'You're stuck, you're not leaving. There is no queue. It's just a dumping ground for people.' But imagine if news were percolating through those camps that if they are patient they will eventually be resettled. That was exactly the situation that prevailed during the years of the Fraser government. It was not immediate; it was not instantaneous that people arrived and they were instantly shipped to Australia or other resettlement countries. But people knew they would be safe, they would be fed, they would be looked after, their human rights would not be abused and eventually they would find a home where their applications could either be assessed directly or be assessed in the places where they were.

That is what a former Liberal Prime Minister did, and it is kind of horrifying to hear Senator Humphries invoke that tradition in defence of the degraded state of the debate today where the coalition have managed to drag the Labor Party across to their side of the debate, to completely own and control the terms of the debate, and they are now sitting there with smug expressions on their faces, looking at an empty ALP bench because nobody has turned up in here to defend this atrocious policy. No wonder they feel smug.