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

You can determine the health of a democracy by how it treats some of its most vulnerable people. Some of those vulnerable people were asylum seekers who travelled to Australia on leaky boats some many years ago and sought asylum. It is now some five years on and those asylum seekers, men, women, and children, on Manus Island and Nauru have been languishing and have been treated appallingly by this government. They have simply been left and forgotten. As a country, we cannot abdicate our responsibility for what occurs on Manus Island. But the other thing we should not be doing is creating politics out of this—and that is exactly what the government have been doing for so many years now. They have been creating fear politics with the Australian people. This, of course, has led to these asylum seekers not being able to be settled in Australia; in fact, not being able to be settled anywhere.

These asylum seekers have indeed been forgotten by this government—so much so that the government has received incredible and ongoing criticism not just from civil society here in Australia, not just from the opposition and other parties, but also from the international community, and only as recently as a week or so ago, when the United Nations Human Rights Committee released its recommendations from its review of Australia's compliance with a key human rights treaty, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights—another breach of a treaty that we have signed up to, but there are so many more. One thing I learnt last year when I spent some time at the United Nations was that the one issue that we were absolutely pulled over the coals for as a nation, and rightly so, was how we were treating vulnerable people who sought asylum—how we were treating refugees.

It's obviously a very opportune week for Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull because he's at the East Asia Summit. He has that opportunity again to engage with President Trump and also with Prime Minister Ardern. Both the US and the New Zealand governments have offered and agreed to settle these refugees who are desperately seeking settlement so that they can rebuild their lives and get over the trauma that they have suffered. We are still waiting, of course, for the some 1,250 that the US agreed to settle to actually be settled. There have only been about 50. But I understand from the briefings I've received that that processing is going as it should be and, hopefully, will happen sooner than later. The other offer on the table came over a year ago—probably 18 months ago now—from the former New Zealand government, but it has continued under the new New Zealand Labour government, to settle some 150 refugees a year who are on Manus.

I've written to Minister Dutton and I've written to Mr Turnbull. Labor has been constantly asking this government to act on these settlement options. But it's refusing to do so. What does that say about this government? It says that it is quite willing to leave 600 men on Manus Island, potentially in a situation where their lives are at stake and where they're fearing for their ongoing safety. It is absolutely abhorrent to me and to everyone in the Labor Party that a government would treat another human being in this way. We do have a sense of humanity and that is why we have been constantly asking this government to act, whether it's on the medical care that those on these offshore islands have required in Australia or whether it's on the New Zealand settlement arrangement. We have constantly been calling on this government to act.

I say to the Greens: I'm sure that you have well-intentioned ideals in wanting this situation to be resolved. But attacking the Labor Party time and time again is not going to get you there. We know what the facts are.