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

I do apologise to the ALP members who are here, and I invite you to stand up and defend what you are doing. I suspect you will not, but you would be entirely welcome to do so. But I do acknowledge there are two ALP senators in here who have stayed silent and avoided eye contact for the entire duration of the debate.

Offshore detention is as harsh as it is pointless and it will not stop people coming. All it will do is damage the people who are locked up: people who are locked up without knowing when they will be released, why they are being locked up in the first place or even if they will be released. They are locked up without breaking any law—international or Australian. As has been established time and again—and the Leader of the Opposition can remind his Senate colleagues if they ask him, because he has fortunately been taken to task on this once or twice—asylum seekers are not illegal immigrants. The way international law has prevailed over the last few decades is that it is not illegal to seek refuge in a country that is not your own if you have been forced to leave by those kinds of circumstances. It has been repeated so often that, again, I believe that amnesia simply prevails.

The fact is that reinstituting temporary protection visas will simply increase the number of women and children who find themselves on these nasty little boats in the open ocean. But that has not deterred the coalition from saying to the government: 'We've got you on offshore processing; now you need to come at us with temporary protection visas and towing boats back. That'll fix things.' It will not, but it serves your purposes and it serves your talking points for today. We know that temporary protection visas were the reason that so many children were onboard the SIEVX when it went down with everybody onboard. The idea of temporary protection visas is simply bankrupt. Of course we support government spokespeople, and Senator Evans was eloquently at it again today, as he has been over the last little while, saying: 'The Australian government won't be doing that. The Labor Party won't be doing that.' If only we could believe the government when it says that, because maybe in six weeks time the coalition will have dragged it even further down into the gutter. Lastly, on turning back the boats, for heaven's sake, if you are not going to listen to the Navy and to the personnel who have done this under previous governments, who have faced the risk and the situations invoked when towing boats full of desperate people back into open waters—noting that the talking point says 'when it is safe', except it is not. These boats are being towed back without adequate navigational systems and without decent crews, and are patently unseaworthy in some cases, into open waters. The Indonesian government has said, 'Don't you dare,' and has confirmed that it will not accept the towing back of asylum seeker boats to its shores. The Indonesian government also does not have the search and rescue or the inshore naval capacity to look after these vessels if they are dragged back into Indonesian waters.

The Royal Australian Navy itself has said to Tony Abbott: 'Don't be stupid. Don't put our personnel at risk in these situations.' This is not hypothetical. This is not some kind of abstract argument. The Navy was involved in 11 attempts to turn back boats between 8 September and 11 December 2001. So we have an interesting little slice of when people like Senator Bernardi and Senator Cash had their way and boats were being towed back. It is very easy for Mr Abbott to just wave his hand and issue another one of his empty slogans, as he is so wont to do. We know what happened. On SIEV5, a riot erupted among passengers and a fire was lit on the boat, endangering passengers and the naval personnel. When told of their return, a number of passengers on SIEV7 jumped into the water and then had to be rescued by Australian sailors, putting their wellbeing at risk.

According to the Navy, a couple of the boats were turned back with relatively little trouble. On one of them, SIEV12, fires were lit on the vessel and passengers jumped overboard. In the other seven interceptions a return was abandoned because of damage to the boats, danger to naval personnel or passengers or because of other safety of life at sea obligations. We have heard senior naval and ex-naval spokespeople who have been on the front line of the kinds of policy blunders that the coalition is trying to lead us straight back into that it is operationally extraordinarily fraught and risky not just for the people on the boat, whose welfare everybody in here has professed that we are trying to look after, but also for the Navy.

Donald Rothwell, Professor of International Law at the ANU, has also put on the record that the policy of towing boats back is utterly contrary to international law. We recognise that the coalition long ago abandoned any pretence of caring. It has been extraordinarily disappointing to see the government go into bat to basically overturn a High Court ruling which emphasised that treating people in this way was unlawful. But here we are, for what it is worth, turning boats back at sea, which apart from being risky to the people on the small boats and the people in the Navy doing the work is also illegal at international law.

The European Court of Human Rights affirmed that earlier this year in the Hirsi case when they found against an Italian policy of intercepting migrant boats in the Mediterranean and returning them to Libya. Australia is not alone in this. We can do better than this and this will not be the last time that this issue will have to be dealt with in this chamber.