Nick McKim (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the 9th report of 2016 from the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights, a committee that I have the honour to serve on. I particularly want to make reference to the Migration Legislation Amendment (Regional Processing Cohort) Bill 2016 and the comments and findings that the committee has made on that legislation.

Before I go to the details of the committee's comments on that legislation, I want to make it perfectly clear to the Senate that the Greens do not support this legislation. We believe the government has comprehensively failed to make the case for the legislation. We believe it is discriminatory because it engages and limits a number of human rights and it breaches a number of international conventions that Australia has signed up to over many years, including but not limited to the refugee convention. This legislation seeks to discriminate against a particular cohort who are described as transitory persons who were at least 18 years of age and who were taken to a regional processing country after 19 July 2013. It seeks to prevent those people from making a valid application for an Australian visa.

Before I go to further detail, I will respond to comments made by Senator Reynolds when she talked about the fact that the minister has the capacity to waive the ban on making an application for a visa. That is true. The bill does provide for that. But it is important to place on the record—which Senator Reynolds did not do—that this is a noncompellable function that is granted to the minister in the terms of this legislation. What that means is the minister can effectively refuse to make a decision on an application for the bar to be lifted. If the minister refuses to make a decision that is a noncompellable decision it then becomes nonappellable. In other words, there is no avenue for judicial or administrative review if the minister refuses to make a decision or refuses to engage with the application, to use the terms contained in this legislation. That is very important. It is very important that people understand that we are dealing at the moment—tragically—with Peter Dutton as the Minister for Immigration and Border Protection. I would say to the Australian people that, if you have confidence that Minister Dutton will, in fact, engage and make a decision on every application to lift the bar on making a valid visa application should this legislation become law, that is misplaced confidence because he has demonstrated time after time that he is not a fit person to be immigration minister in this country. Where it suits him or the government politically, he will behave in ways that make Australia less safe and will discriminate against people that he describes inaccurately as illegal arrivals in this country.

As the report of the human rights committee makes abundantly clear, the proposed lifetime visa ban engages the right to equality and nondiscrimination. I would argue very strongly that it limits those rights in a highly disproportionate way. As the committee found, the visa ban would appear to have a disproportionate negative effect on individuals from particular national origins or nationalities and, as the committee further comments, this human rights issue was not specifically addressed in the statement of compatibility. I want to say in relation to a piece of legislation that has a disproportionate negative effect on individuals from particular origins or nationalities that this is racist legislation. I am going to put it right out there that this is racist legislation in the view of the Australian Greens.

The committee has also noted that the proposed lifetime visa ban engages and limits the right to protection of the family and the rights of the child. One of the issues around the rights of children that are trampled by this particular piece of legislation is that there are children currently in Australia, some of whom were born in this country and some of whom are currently at school in this country, who are children of people in the cohort to which this legislation will apply.

It is not good enough for the government to claim that this legislation will not impact on children because of the definition of the cohort in this legislation, which is that people need to be at least 18 years of age. People who are over 18 years of age in the cohort that will be affected by this legislation and who have children who are currently in Australia will be caught by this lifetime visa ban. This means they will not be able to make a valid visa application and therefore they will not be able to come into this country and they will not be able to lawfully remain in this country. That means that when they go either the family is split up because the child remains here or the child goes with the family. So the effect of this legislation does catch children, even though technically it does not apply to children; there are children in Australia whose parents will be caught by this legislation, and that will inevitably impact on the children. This legislation will tear families apart. That is another reason why this legislation will not be supported by the Australian Greens.

I want to also raise the issue of the way that the minister has responded to requests from the Human Rights Committee. There is a malaise across government at the moment, where ministers are not adequately and acceptably delivering information to the Human Rights Committee in a timely way. This committee is a creature of the parliament. It deserves the respect of every government minister. I urge government ministers to do more to responsibly engage with the Human Rights Committee to provide acceptable qualities and quantities of information to the committee in a timely way so that the committee can do its job, which is to report to the parliament and provide information for members of both houses of this parliament. It is a really crucial committee, and it deserves to be treated with more respect by government ministers than it currently is.

Having made those remarks on the Migration Legislation Amendment (Regional Processing Cohort) Bill 2016, I think that it is clear, and should be clear, to the Senate that this legislation is discriminatory and that it engages and limits a range of human rights in a way that is clearly disproportionate to the intended effect of the legislation. Ultimately, this committee report lends yet more credibility and yet more weight to the argument that, in fact, this legislation should be rejected by the Senate when eventually the government brings it on for debate in this place. It should be rejected because it is in breach of human rights, because it is in breach of a number of the international obligations to which the Australian government has signed up, because it will result in trauma to families and children, and because ultimately it is racist legislation. I seek leave to continue my remarks later.

Leave granted; debate adjourned.