Matt Thistlethwaite (NSW, Australian Labor Party, Parliamentary Secretary for Multicultural Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

I must say that this is probably the most difficult policy issue that the parliament and the people of Australia have had to deal with certainly in my time in this place. Having just heard Senator Cash's contribution to this debate, I think this is also the saddest policy debate that we have had over the last three years in this parliament. It is sad because today is World Refugee Day. Today is the day when the world should be celebrating the fact that, after World War II—with the atrocities of the Holocaust and the mass persecution and genocide of people from other nations for reasons of their colour or their race and through no fault of their own—the world came together and said, 'We must stop this. It can never happen again.' The world spawned the refugee convention in 1954 and the protocol in the early 1970s. On a day when we are meant to be celebrating the fact that the world can open its arms to people who flee persecution and to parents who decide to put the interests of their kids and their safety before anything else, we have to listen to that. Those opposite could say on World Refugee Day that they are committed to supporting the United Nations refugee convention and the principle that Australia is a place where people can seek refuge; but they come in here and again try to score political points on this issue because they see an opportunity to win an election around it. I think it is downright sad.

We are a wealthy nation. Our living standards are some of the best in the world. Our real incomes are some of the highest in the world. We have the third highest minimum wage in the world. For generations in this country we have recognised that we as a collective and as a people have a duty, a moral responsibility, to care for others who are fleeing persecution. We have opened our doors to them—and look at the nation that it has built. Arthur Calwell, the immigration minister in the 1940s and 1950s, said we must populate or perish. Since then, seven million Australians have come to this country as migrants and refugees. They have settled in peace, harmony and mutual respect. They have made a better life and, importantly, contributed to our nation. They built the nation that we are today. They built the economy that we have today.

It is something that I feel strongly about because my wife's grandparents came here as postwar migrants from Italy, seeking to flee the devastation of World War II in their country. They are two of the seven million who have come to this country and made a contribution. They had children. Their children became doctors and lawyers and factory workers. They had grandchildren. They became nurses and other people who contribute to this country.

Of those seven million Australians, 800,000 have been refugees who have come here seeking to flee persecution and find a better life. They have done so legally because the world said in 1954 that people have a right to safety, to protection and to live with their families without the threat of war and without the threat of persecution and genocide because of the colour of their skin or their background.

We have welcomed migrants from all corners of the globe. Traditionally, they came from the UK; then they began to come from the Americas, from postwar Europe, from Asia and, more recently, from the Middle East. We have welcomed them—and we have welcomed them because there has been bipartisan leadership. There has been a collective understanding by the leaders of our nation since we got rid of the White Australia policy that it was not only the right thing to do but was also beneficial for our economy, that if we were going to grow as a nation this would be the right thing to do.

And look what it has spawned. Our nation's greatest asset now is not our natural resources, not our institutions; it is our people, our diversity. If you go into any Australian home now, you will generally find an ancestry different from the traditional one. We boast about 260 different ancestries in this country now. We speak 400 different languages at home. We practise many different religions and theologies. We do it in peace, in mutual respect for each other, in harmony and, importantly, in a way that grows our economy, makes us all better off and gives us all greater living standards. And we only ask one thing of those people who come here: that they respect Australian values and laws, and that they make their contribution—and 99 per cent of them do.

This government is committed to immigration. We are committed to multiculturalism and we are committed to the United Nations refugee convention. That commitment is symbolised by the fact that over the last 12 months we have implemented a policy of increasing our humanitarian intake of refugees. We have increased the humanitarian intake from 13,000 refugees per year to 20,000. We have worked with neighbours in our region to deal with this issue. We have worked, through the UNHCR, to ensure that we are doing our bit as a nation to settle those who are seeking asylum throughout the world. And we have done so to the tune of 800,000 people over the course of our history.

The issues that have dominated the political debate in recent times have been asylum seekers and boat people—people getting on boats, paying people smugglers and coming to this country. In the context of us welcoming refugees and in the context of our history and of the contribution that refugees make to this country, Australia has been a welcoming place for refugees and has been generous in the spirit of the United Nations refugee convention. But in these times you simply cannot have vulnerable people, particularly children, getting on a boat and coming here in unsafe conditions. You cannot have policies that encourage that, unfortunately. I did have a sympathetic approach to this issue, until I saw those shocking, horrifying images of people drowning on the rocks at Christmas Island a couple of years ago—particularly children, flailing in the water, in the rough surf. Bystanders watching, yet unable to do anything, saw kids drown. You just cannot have a policy that encourages that. We cannot allow helpless, vulnerable people, particularly children, to get on unsafe boats anymore. We just cannot do it.

But we still want to be sympathetic to refugees. We still want to meet our commitments through our humanitarian intake. I do not think you can persecute anyone who is trying to do the best thing by their kids, really, and ensure that their kids remain safe. But, as a surf lifesaver for 28 years, it saddens me that we have to see those images of people in the water, with children, having to be rescued or, in certain tragic circumstances, drowning.

So the issue becomes: how do we maintain that generous history, that generous disposition to refugees, that tradition of resettlement—resettling those who are seeking asylum, as they are legally entitled to do in accordance with international law—and do that safely? How do we do that without encouraging people to get on boats?

It is not a policy failing. It is not an unwillingness to deal with this issue. It is not, as Senator Cash says, a willingness to waste taxpayers' money by those on the Labor side of politics. It is not that at all. We want to solve this issue. And we would like to be able to do it in consultation—in partnership, really—with those opposite.

Unfortunately, we could not get that outcome because of the nature of this parliament. Because of the nature of the hung parliament we could not get a resolution on the floor of the parliament to this issue. We tried: we put a resolution to the parliament that would have got around the problem of the High Court decision regarding the Malaysia people-swap agreement. It did not work. I am not going to go into the reasons why it did not work, but it did not work. In the wake of that, the government said: 'Let us try to take the politics out of this issue; let us ask some people who do not come with any political baggage to this debate but have some experience with it. Let us ask them to advise this parliament—not the government, importantly, but the parliament: the elected representatives of the people of Australia. Let us ask them to come up with a workable solution to this issue.'

That is what the expert panel on this issue was entrusted to do. The panel was headed by Angus Houston, a very well respected military leader in this country. It also had Paris Aristotle, a very well respected refugee advocate, and Michael L'Estrange, who has also worked in this area for many years. They came up with a series of recommendations. They tried to take the politics out of this issue. The panel came up with 22 recommendations advising the parliament on what they thought was the best course to deal with this issue, to ensure that we met and continued to meet the commitments that we had made through international treaties and agreements to the United Nations High Commission for Refugees—the commitments that we, like many other nations, made to the rest of the world in the wake of World War II. How do we continue to meet those commitments but ensure that people do not get on boats and risk their lives?

The panel came up with 22 recommendations. The key point that they outlined and underlined in that set of recommendations was that, if it was going to work, you needed to adopt all 22 of them; you could not pick one, pick the other and say, 'We're not going to do a few of the others.' They needed to be adopted as a whole package. That is the key point. One of those recommendations was the Malaysia people-swap agreement. Unfortunately, again because of politics, we have not been able to implement all 22 of those recommendations. Of course, the expert panel said: 'Well, if you cannot implement all of those 22 recommendations then this will fail.' And, unfortunately, we have been unable to get that agreement. I think we have been unable to get leadership from some members of parliament on this issue.

The saddest thing on this is that, unfortunately—I have got to say this—I think that those opposite see this as an opportunity: a political winner. They see this as something that can win them the election. The truth is that, regardless of who wins the election, this problem will go on into the future.

The reason that this problem will remain is that there is a human catastrophe of catastrophic proportions occurring in Syria at the moment. Our nation's foreign minister, Bob Carr, has outlined the magnitude of the devastation that is occurring in Syria at the moment. Close to one million people are now in refugee camps bordering Syria, in Jordan and Lebanon. They are not going to go away. They are not going to disappear into thin air. That problem is going to remain beyond the election. People are still fleeing persecution in Afghanistan. They are still running away from the Taliban. There are still problems in Iraq that people are fleeing. There are still problems in Burma. We cannot stop that. Those refugees who exist because of that persecution are going to do what any human being would do, and that is: try to protect their kids. So that is the fact about this. You cannot ignore that. Just as those opposite seek to ignore the effect of the global financial crisis on the world economy over the last five years and the reasons why our budget is still in deficit, you cannot ignore the fact that there are people who are fleeing persecution.

There has been a level of debate in this country about how we deal with the issue, and the coalition have said that they will stop the boats—they will turn back boats on the high seas. That is their prerogative; they can come up with that policy as an attempt at a solution. But when you analyse this issue—when Australian people have a look at the issue in detail—the argument is wafer thin. The reason the argument is wafer thin is that people who have experience in this area of trying to implement a policy like this—the likes of former Admiral Chris Barrie, the former head of the Navy—have said that it will not work, because it has not worked in the past. Unfortunately, some of these people smugglers are ruthless. When they are confronted with a turn-back on the high seas, they disable the boat, and we have all seen what the terrible consequences of that are.

The second point to make is that the Indonesian ambassador himself—the Indonesian government's representative in this country—has said publicly to the Australian public that the Indonesian government will not cooperate and will not cop the Australian government turning boats around on the high seas. Why would they? Those on these boats are generally not Indonesian nationals. The Indonesian government have made it very clear that they will not cop boats being turned around on the high seas.

So the question that remains to be answered and that those opposite, unfortunately, have not been able to answer—not one of them: not Mr Abbott, not the opposition spokesperson, Scott Morrison, and not Senator Cash—is: if you turn around on the high seas a boat that contains refugees, where do they go? Perhaps someone on the other side of this chamber, throughout this debate, can answer this question: if you turn refugees around on the high seas, where do they go? Where do they go if Indonesia is saying, 'You can't come here and we won't cop that, because you're not Indonesian nationals'? Where do they go? More importantly, what does the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees think about turning around boats that are unsafe—they generally do not have enough life jackets or enough food or water, and they generally have children on them—on the high seas? That is the political reality of this issue. That is why the rhetoric might be fine but, when you dig down and analyse the policy, it will not work. That is why the great tragedy and the great shame of this whole thing is that there has not been political leadership on it.

In 2001, when the Tampa turned up on our shores, there was in some respects a political crisis. It stopped the nation. It was the issue that everyone was talking about. John Howard developed a policy to deal with that, and he got bipartisan support for many of the elements of that policy. He got political leadership from the Leader of the Opposition at the time, Kim Beazley—much to Kim Beazley's detriment, I must say. Kim Beazley received numerous motions from Labor Party branches and letters from members of the public saying, 'Don't do this; it's the wrong thing to do.' But he put the nation's interests first. He showed political leadership on this issue, and he worked in a bipartisan manner with the government of the day to solve the crisis. The great shame about this whole debate is that in this 43rd Parliament we have not had that political leadership from the Leader of the Opposition.