Christine Milne (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

As I indicated, Cambodia is one of the most corrupt countries on the planet. Ministers in the Hun Sen government are known to take bribes. The leader of the opposition in Cambodia, Sam Rainsy, has come out and said that any money Australia pays will go straight into the back pockets of government ministers. That is the way of it. What is being promised there and what refugees are being told is that they will not be able to live in Phnom Penh after they get a basic grasp of the Khmer language. They will be forced to relocate outside Phnom Penh. This is contrary to the refugee convention, for a start. You cannot force people as to where they can and cannot live. Then the refugees are to be given minimal assistance for 12 months, at Cambodian subsistence levels, which is poverty. And then, at the end of 12 months, the Australian government will assist them to go back to their country of origin—in other words, to facilitate refoulement. That is exactly what has been going on in Sri Lanka.

The Australian government is sending back refugees to Sri Lanka, where they are being raped and tortured. The Australian government does not want to know about it. It does not follow up. The ADF allegedly did not interview someone when they wanted to give evidence about the fact that they had been abused when they went back, yet they will be refouled from Sri Lanka. That is exactly what is going to happen with Cambodia. Australia has offered to assist Cambodia in returning refugees to their country of origin.

So we have a shocking level of abuse going on here. We are removing reference to the human rights convention, the refugee convention, in legislation. We are abusing people. I thought what Senator Back said was interesting. We do not know if it is a new announcement from the government; but, apparently, it seems to be. The government cut the humanitarian refugee intake from 20,000 to 13,750. So, far from increasing the refugee intake, the government has cut it, but Senator Back just said that it was to be increased to 20,000. I will be very interested to know if in fact it is a government announcement to increase the humanitarian intake to 20,000. However, the point here is that we have a government of a rich country like Australia that is absolutely shirking its responsibility to look after refugees. Instead, it is sending refugees into appalling circumstances on Nauru and Manus Island. It is now signing an extremely dubious deal with Cambodia. Not only was there rioting on Nauru when this announcement was made; there was an immediate protest outside the Australian Embassy in Phnom Penh, where Cambodians said it is a shocking thing that Australia is doing. How can a rich country shirk its responsibilities and send these people to one of the poorest and most corrupt countries on the planet and then say that their $35 million or $40 million, or whatever it is, will somehow be spent on those refugees when there is no detail? Where are they are going to be housed? How are they going to be supported? And after the 12 months, what will happen to them? Why won't they end up like the hundreds of others living on the rubbish tips outside the boundaries of the cities? And the reason we will not know is that the Australian government do not care and do not follow-up. They do not follow-up the people they send back to Sri Lanka, they do not follow-up what is going on in Nauru and they will not follow-up what is going on on Manus Island. And now we go to what will actually happen in Cambodia. That is why I put the issue of ministerial responsibility on the public record.

Senator Brandis interjecting—

I know that Senator Brandis and others find this a very amusing subject, but it is far from amusing. In time, there will be people who will look back on this and say: 'How is it that this actually happened in Australia? How is it that the Liberal, Labor and National parties thought sending refugees to offshore detention centres was in any way a reasonable thing to do?' We should be processing people when they come here. It is not illegal to seek asylum. The constant lie that is told about illegal arrivals is just that; it is a lie. It is not illegal to seek asylum. Now we have the situation where refugees will come from the Middle East in their hundreds of thousands, and Australia will be saying, 'It is such a shocking situation there that we have to go to war, but we will not accept the refugees who end up here'—as they have from Afghanistan, from Iraq previously and from Pakistan. 'We're sending them back.' Appalling! (Time expired)