Sarah Hanson-Young (SA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you. I think it is an extremely sad day today to be standing here and seeing both the Labor Party and the coalition lining up, shoulder to shoulder, as Senator Cash has already outlined, to approve the dumping of refugees offshore on Nauru. It is a mistake. I want it clearly put on the record that the Greens do not believe that this will (a) save people's lives or (b) stop the boats from coming in the first place. It is clear that there has been no attempt by this government to overcome the issues that led to the horrors of the past. We know what happened the last time the Pacific solution was established, under John Howard. People's lives were ruined. Children were turned insane. Many people took their own lives. Depression wreaked havoc across the detention centre. And all for what? In the end, these very vulnerable people were found to be genuine refugees who needed protection and were resettled in Australia. The overwhelming majority of people that we put through the horrors of the Pacific solution mark I were found to be in genuine need of protection, yet we had made them suffer. We had put them in even more dangerous circumstances and pushed many of them to the point of self-destruction.

None of those mistakes have been addressed by this government's designation today—despite the fact that the Houston panel said that, if we were to open Nauru, there would be a list of things that would need to be done to ensure that it was actually in line with our obligations under the refugee convention. I want to list those things, because not one of them has been addressed by the designation put forward by the minister this week. The protections and welfare arrangements would need to include treatment consistent with human rights standards, including no arbitrary detention. There is nothing about this in the designation document or the supporting documents in either the MOU with Nauru or the advice from the UNHCR, which, by the way, is quite scathing of the government's attempts to designate Nauru as a place where we will now be dumping refugees.

The list includes the need for appropriate accommodation. Yet we know that the designation clearly says that for at least six months refugees will be housed in tents, in the middle of the monsoon period. Further, there needs to be appropriate physical and mental health services. There are no caveats on how refugees—people who are suffering from torture, persecution, post-traumatic stress from the experience of fleeing their homelands and war—will actually be given appropriate medical, physical and mental health assistance. We know that the health assistance given to asylum seekers in Australian detention centres is not adequate. The government has admitted that itself. The service provider, International Health and Medical Services, IHMS, whom the government has just contracted to run the health services in Nauru, has said very clearly that it cannot offer adequate services to refugees who are detained for long periods of time in remote locations. The whole designation that has been put forward by the government today is designed to lock vulnerable people up, out of sight and out of mind, on a remote location for long periods of time. Yet the exact same health service delivery company, which has criticised the way that government has run detention centres here in Australia, has been contracted to run the medical facilities on Nauru. It clearly will not happen. We are, without doubt, going to see the horrors of John Howard's Pacific solution repeated all over again.

The list also includes the need for proper access to educational and vocational training programs. We will see how that goes, because there is nothing in the designation that says this has to happen. There needs to be application assistance during the preparation of asylum claims. The designation is absolutely silent on who will be running the claims for asylum. Will they be Australian officials, or will they not? What training will they have? Who is paying for them? And on what basis are they going to be given proper assistance? What access will refugees have to lawyers on Nauru? There needs to be an appeal mechanism against negative decisions on asylum applications that would enable a merits review by more senior officials and NGO representatives with specific expertise. None of that is in the detail put forward by the minister. There needs to be monitoring of care and protection arrangements by a representative group drawn on from government, civil society in Australia and Nauru. Again, none of that is in this designation. There needs to be provision of case management assistance to individual applicants being processed in Nauru. These are all the things that the Houston report said had to be included in this designation, yet none of them are.

The government have lied. The government have lied not just to the Australian people but also to the refugees currently being detained on Christmas Island and in Darwin who have been told that they are going to go to Nauru. The government have lied to the Australian people and they have lied to this chamber, because none of the recommendations in the Houston report that had to be put in place are here in this designation. The list of safeguards were there because we know that the last time we sent people to Nauru we sent them mad. The last time we sent refugees to Nauru was a black stain on Australia’s reputation for how we treat refugees—some of the world’s most vulnerable people. Rather than addressing the mistakes of the past, the Labor Party has lined up with Tony Abbott to reinstate the harshest, nastiest, cruellest aspects of John Howard's legislation and to take it on as their own. I can see members of the coalition nodding their heads in agreement. They have tricked the Labor Party; wound them in hook, line and sinker. This isn't Labor's policy; this is Tony Abbott's. And yet it is all being dressed up by Minister Bowen as somehow being able to stop the boats from coming. Well the boats have not stopped coming, have they? In fact, refugees themselves continue to say that until there is a safer option what else do they do? We need to make sure we resettle more people directly, implementing in a genuine sense the increase to the humanitarian intake.

I just want to go to the advice that the UNHCR gave to the government in relation to this designation. I think it is very important to note that when the minister gave his press conference yesterday he forgot to mention that the UNHCR did not support what the government was doing. The advice from the UNHCR clearly says that the key things that would need to be taken into consideration have not been appropriately dealt with for Australia to move ahead and start dumping people in Nauru. I will read from their advice:

… it is not clear from the information available to us that transfer of responsibilities of asylum-seekers to Nauru is fully appropriate. Whilst UNHCR welcomes steps taken by the Government of Nauru to accede to the 1951 Refugee Convention last year, at present, there is no domestic legal framework, nor is there any experience or expertise to undertake the tasks of processing and protecting refugees on the scale and complexity of the arrangements under consideration in Nauru.

It is clear that the UNHCR are not happy and have not given their blessing for Australia to start dumping refugees in Nauru. They are concerned that this myth of the no-advantage test endorsed by the government continues to be peddled and used as a justification for why we should be dumping men, women and children on Nauru. I will read again from the UNHCR's advice:

The issue of timely durable solutions for refugees needs careful consideration. In particular, the 'no-advantage' test endorsed by your Government contemplates a time-frame that is assessed against and consistent with the period a refugee might face had s/he been assessed—

and, quoting the government—

'by UNHCR within the regional processing arrangement'. The practical implications for this are not fully clear to us.

Come on. You are not only dudding the Australian people; you are also dudding yourselves. This is an inhumane policy. We will see the mental health epidemics that we saw last time. The Labor Party's Pacific solution is going to be as harsh, as mean, as cruel, as dangerous as John Howard's was. And it will fail. It will fail because people need proper protection. People will continue to keep running until they feel they have a safer option.

The long-term indefinite detention that this government has so forcefully grabbed hold of is in stark contradiction to our obligations under the refugee convention. And that is why organisations around the country strongly oppose this designation put forward by the government today: Amnesty International, the Refugee Council, Asylum Seeker Resource Centre, the Australian Council of Trade Unions, the Australian Council of Social Services, the Federation of Ethnic Communities' Councils, the Australian Nursing Federation, the Australian Medical Association—the list goes on and on and on. Oh, and this one is very interesting: Labor for Refugees. You know what? There is no Greens for Refugees. We do not need a Greens for Refugees, because it is very clear what our policy is and what we stand for. And we do not stand for adopting John Howard's policy, Tony Abbott's policy, introducing it as our own and thinking that we can just dump refugees offshore, out of sight and out of mind.

The experts tell us that the best way of offering hope, protection and care for refugees is to increase the humanitarian intake and resettle people directly. I was interested to hear on the radio this morning that Paris Aristotle said that the boats will not stop until we properly increase our intake and take more people to Australia through a safer option, not waiting for them to board a dangerous boat only to lock them up and punish them. I was also interested to hear that the minister's excuse for why this designation should go ahead is because it will send a message to people smugglers that refugees will have their claims assessed in Nauru. Is he delusional? Do people smugglers really care where refugees are having their claims assessed? They have already collected their money! The Australian people are smarter than this. The Australian people know that punishing refugees—children, pregnant women—is not going to be the way that you punish the people smugglers. It is interesting to look back at some of the things that senators in this chamber have said in relation to detaining people and refugees on Nauru. Senator Doug Cameron only in September last year said: 'We should not go there. This is not a Labor policy. It doesn't equate to Labor values.' Senator Chris Evans said, 'The Pacific solution was a cynical, costly and ultimately unsuccessful exercise introduced on the eve of a federal election by the Howard government.' The Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, said, 'We will end the so-called Pacific solution because it is costly, unsustainable and wrong as a matter of principle.' On another date the Prime Minister said, 'The Pacific solution is an unsustainable and costly failure.' Who can trust the Labor Party to do the right thing by refugees? Who can trust the coalition to do the right thing by refugees? No-one believes that either the ALP or the coalition can be trusted to care for refugees, because they have proven over and over again unable to do it.

This designation has no protections for refugees. This designation will send children, unaccompanied minors and pregnant women to be locked up in a refugee camp for years and years and years on end with no legal responsibility, with no legal protection—not even the UNHCR or the International Organization for Migration want a bar of it. The IOM said they were asked to take on the contract for running the asylum seeker and refugee detention camp in Nauru. The government begged them to do it and the IOM said that they would not have a bar of it because it was too rushed and the arrangements and the agreements for how people would be protected are simply not there.

So the government has instead contracted Transfield Services. An engineering, mining and construction company is going to be running our refugee camps on Nauru. I would like to ask the minister what on earth Transfield Services understands, has experience in or knows about running a refugee camp full of hundreds of refugees who have fled war, torture and persecution? If it were not so serious, you would think this is a sick joke. What kind of training will these staff have? There is nothing in the designation about that, despite the Houston report clearly saying that these things need to be in place. What type of access will the media have to the detention centre in Nauru? There is nothing in the designation about that.

Several weeks ago in this place when we were debating legislation that stripped out all of the legal protections that used to be in the Migration Act, Senator Lundy, representing the minister, stood here until late in the night telling us that all of these things would be fixed in the designation. They are not there. They were never going to be there. The Labor Party has no intention of putting forward a proposal that looks after refugees, because this is about appeasing Tony Abbott and the coalition rather than standing for a humane policy that will protect people and will save lives. This policy is already a failure and it has not even been implemented properly yet. You are already hurting people, not saving them and not protecting them. Mr Acting Deputy President, I foreshadow that I will be moving an amendment. (Time expired)