Lisa Singh (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary to the Shadow Attorney General) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak today on this matter of public importance, a matter that is not only of national significance for Australia, and for our place in the region, but of importance to the world for how refugees and asylum seekers are treated. The actions taken by our government in signing a deal with Cambodia have the potential to set a disturbing new paradigm and change how the refugee convention is understood and implemented by all nations. Indeed, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Antonio Guterres, has warned that this is a 'worrying departure from international norms'.

We know that this arrangement represents world's worst practice in the treatment of refugees and the management of the movement of people. Rather than taking responsibility for the flow of asylum seekers across our borders and into our region, and working out a cooperative plan with our neighbours and partners in the Asia Pacific, the Abbott government has instead simply offloaded its duties and obligations onto smaller, poorer, and less-resourced nations with governments that are not equipped to deal with the major challenges involved in providing processing and settlement for large numbers of asylum seekers. We know that Cambodia falls directly into this category, and it is not surprising that Scott Morrison should have targeted it as a country that might be vulnerable to exploitation by this government. Transparency International, an NGO that monitors corruption worldwide, has ranked Cambodia 160th out of 177 nations on its global corruption index. Problems of governance and corrupt activity are endemic. We know that refugee children and families will be particularly vulnerable in Cambodia. Former Chief Justice of the Family Court, Alastair Nicholson, has spoken on this situation on behalf of an alliance of groups made up of UNICEF Australia, Save the Children, Plan International Australia, World Vision, Amnesty International, Refugee Council of Australia, International Detention Coalition and Children's Rights International, saying:

This planned deal is inappropriate, immoral and likely illegal. It is inappropriate because Cambodia has no capacity within its social sector to take an influx of refugees. Immoral because these vulnerable people are Australia’s responsibility, and while we await the detail, it appears illegal in contravening Australia’s humanitarian and refugee obligations to vulnerable children and families.

The alliance of children's and refugee agencies said Cambodia's education and health systems would not be able to support or sustain the arrival of refugees. Today, 70 per cent of Cambodia's children do not reach secondary school. Poor health also affects Cambodian children, with 40 per cent of children under the age of five being undernourished. Cambodia is itself a refugee-producing country, with many of its citizens seeking protection here in Australia from abuse by their government and by others. Even though Cambodia does not have the capacity to stop persecution of its own citizens, the Abbott government is entrusting the protection of some of the world's most vulnerable people to the government of Cambodia.

Some members of the government have started referring to this deal as a regional solution. But as experts in refugee law and migration management such as Professor Jane McAdam have argued, a regional, co-operative plan for dealing with asylum seekers and refugees must be based on burden-sharing between governments. Where developing and developed nations are collaborating in the processing and resettlement of asylum seekers, there needs to be an effort at capacity-building so that those countries with advanced systems for administering asylum seeker claims, and high legal standards for their determination, can help to educate and to develop those capacities in others where they do not exist. This is a long-term and intensive process and it cannot be done simply with the granting of one-off payments, like the $40 million dollars that has reportedly been offered by Scott Morrison. There is no investment in Cambodia's future, and there is little hope that its people will see the benefits of these large amounts paid out by the Abbott government. It bears a striking similarity to the Howard government's payments to the near-bankrupt government of Nauru as part of the Pacific Solution, which, rather than helping the country, have left it in a position where just last week it has again been placed in danger of bankruptcy and being forced to close down government services.

Rather than burden-sharing, the Cambodia deal represents burden-shifting: an aggressive, wealthy developed country unethically placing financial pressure on a developing country in its region to solve a political problem of the Abbott government's own making. According to the memorandum of understanding published on the website of the Department of Immigration and Border Protection, this is a deal relating to the 'settlement of refugees in Cambodia', but, as with all undertakings by this untrustworthy Abbott government, we cannot take what it says as being a true and accurate depiction. Indeed, hidden within the memorandum of understanding and its operational guidelines is a provision that 'Australia will help facilitate the voluntary repatriation of the refugees'.

So even after they have been offered a place of protection in Cambodia, however ill-equipped to provide that they may be and limited the protection might be, the Australian government will still be actively working to send them back to the country in which they were persecuted and from which they fled. We know of the mental health problems that asylum seekers and refugees routinely suffer from and how important it is that they are given certainty and stability in their circumstances so that they can heal and move on to lead full and productive lives. That is the only humanitarian way for them to be treated.

But these provisions effectively turn Cambodia into a holding pen so that refugees will be constantly moved on from one place to another—from Australia, to Nauru, to Cambodia and then potentially back to the country of persecution. It is a recipe for mental illness and suffering without end. In any evaluation of the Cambodia deal, we also need to bear in mind the recent history of the Australian government in managing detention centres outside Australian territory and its gross negligence in the operation of the Manus Island centre, involving armed attacks against asylum seekers and the death of Reza Barati. How can there be any faith in the government's ability to provide adequately for refugees in Cambodia given its record on Papua New Guinea?

The government has run its asylum seeker policy under what I have referred to as a circus of secrecy. In the Manus Island case, we only discovered the reality of what was happening through the brave actions of G4S staff members who had spoken about their situation through a Senate inquiry. They revealed that not only were asylum seekers incredibly traumatised by the rapidly developing tensions and violence that occurred under Scott Morrison's watch—after he had been warned about the need for greater security and to deal with deteriorating relations between the local population and those in detention—but staff themselves were also traumatised.

The negligence of the minister in failing to take adequate measures to protect the guards and staff resulted in a situation of such danger that security services were withdrawn and responsibilities were turned over to local authorities, leading to an increase in violence and the death of an asylum seeker. Rather than deal with these problems, the Abbott government has simply drawn down its veil of secrecy and refused to address these issues. This is the history of Minister for Immigration Scott Morrison's engagement with foreign governments and developing nations in offshore detention and refugee policy. Given the likelihood of its repetition in the future, for those of us who stand for human rights and for those of us who stand for the humane treatment of refugees and asylum seekers, we must take the strangest of stances against this Cambodian deal. That is because if we will not, then who will?