Stirling Griff (SA, Nick Xenophon Team) Share this | Hansard source

For two weeks now, over 600 asylum seekers and refugees have been holed up in the Manus Regional Processing Centre and have rightly refused to move to the new transit accommodation at Lorengau, which they fear very much is not secure. While these men endure squalid conditions, it is business as usual for this government. Drinking water, food, medical treatment, electricity and sewerage services have been cut off. The government has now made this PNG's problem, when it really very much should be ours.

This is an international embarrassment. Worse, how can Australia diplomatically counsel other countries about their human rights obligations when we are clearly—very clearly—failing ours? Need we be reminded that in June the government settled a $70 million class action brought about by more than 1,900 men who were detained in hostile and damaging conditions? It seems that, once asylum seekers arrive by boat, this government forgets that they are human beings with needs and emotions, no different from any of us here. Many have suffered terrible events in their home country and continue to suffer in detention.

The new transit accommodation has been hastily erected, and, according to the UNHCR, the West Lorengau transit facility was still incomplete by the time the men were due to move in on 31 October. This still appears to be the case.

Given the fact that the local community doesn't want them there and these detainees are really Australia's responsibility, the government should consider New Zealand's genuine offer to resettle 150 asylum seekers. That is 150 men and women who finally get a chance to live a full and peaceful life. As for the government's argument that it will encourage asylum seekers to use New Zealand as a back door to Australia, well, that argument is very flimsy. Besides the fact that it insults New Zealand by implying that people our neighbour accepts would immediately seek to leave rather than stay there, I fail to see how this argument can be sustained. Firstly, New Zealand is only proposing to take 150 people. It's not an open-ended offer. Secondly, a similar argument can be made against the US deal, which the government was so happy to jump on.

Too many asylum seekers spend too many years wallowing in immigration detention. The irony and the horror are that we are simply doing more damage to already traumatised people, and we offer them no hope. I add my voice to that of the UNHCR and many others urging the government to accept New Zealand's offer and, over and above that, to remember its humanity and expedite resettlement of all our offshore detainees.