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

I move:

That the Senate take note of the annual reports of the committee.

Over the period covered by these annual reports we've seen a massive expansion in the powers of the Minister for Immigration and Border Protection, Mr Dutton, as he continues to oversee the oppressive regimes of offshore detention on Manus Island and Nauru—and these are unconscionable regimes. We can see the banality of these regimes in some of the disgraceful leaking of so-called information against Mr Abdul Aziz Adam. Aziz is a genuine refugee who has been detained for 4½ years on Manus Island. He is a man who has suffered immeasurably, as have many, many hundreds of other detainees on Manus Island and Nauru, because of the actions of Mr Dutton and his Liberal and Labor predecessors.

Aziz had the audacity to ask a question on the ABC's Q&A earlier this week, and, for having had the audacity to publicly ask why he has not been given the protection that Australia legally owes him, in revenge, the office of the immigration minister leaked so-called information about Aziz to the Australian. Unfortunately, the article was based on false premises and false information leaked by the minister's office. Firstly, the article described Aziz as an asylum seeker. That is not correct. He's actually a refugee and has been found to be a refugee by the PNG government. Secondly, and more seriously, it claimed that Aziz has not applied for US resettlement. This is false. He has applied for resettlement to the US. The article also claimed, on the basis of information provided from Mr Dutton's office, that Aziz has been involved in a specific number of protests in the Manus Island detention centre. I have no doubt that's true. In fact, I've been involved, sitting next to Aziz, in a protest myself inside the Manus Island detention centre.

What this shows is that Mr Dutton's spooks are watching every move that these men make, because they still have absolute control over what is going on on Manus Island and Nauru. They are counting how many protests refugees go to, they are counting what actions refugees take at those protests and they are documenting every action that the refugees take. I say to Mr Dutton: instead of spying on these innocent people and maliciously leaking against them to your favourite pamphlet—the unofficial sponsor of the Cronulla riots in this country, The Australian newspaper—how about treating these people like the human beings that they are; respecting the legal rights that they have, which we have signed up under international law to abide by; and resettling them and bringing them to freedom and safety, which we should have done years ago?

As we stand here today, the cruelty of this government has reached ever higher levels because Mr Dutton is, as we stand here, forcibly separating a man from his family and putting this man—and I spoke about this in the adjournment debate last night; Arash is a refugee on Nauru—in a position that none of us in this chamber would ever want to be in. I hope that none of us are ever in this position where we're forced to choose between a shot at freedom and the chance to hold our baby daughter in our arms for the very first time. That is the situation that this government is placing Arash in. There are plenty of Liberal and National senators in this place who pontificate and lecture the rest of the country about how much they care about family values—what rot. If they cared about family values, they wouldn't be trying to smash up this family and deny this man a chance to hold his beautiful baby daughter in his arms for the very first time.

I say to those opposite: you don't care about his family, you don't care about his wife and you don't care about his daughter. You only care about your political game. That's all you care about. So don't come in here and start giving us lectures about how much you care about families. I do not believe you; I do not believe any one of you. If you cared about families, you wouldn't be doing this. You've covered up and you've played down reports of abuse, including the sexual abuse of children and the neglect of children. You've covered them up time after time after time.