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

It is the great Liberal dream, isn't it—a user-pays justice system? Don't worry yourself one iota about access to justice. Seriously, you have a go to get a go in this country, according to the Prime Minister, but you only get access to justice if you have a fat wallet or deep pockets. That's what you just got up and told this Senate. I make the point again: this is the same cohort of people that you are happy to spend billions—with a 'b'—of the taxpayer dollars on every year, establishing offshore detention centres on Manus Island and on Nauru. You are still spending north of $1 billion a year, even though the numbers in those centres, thankfully and belatedly, have come down significantly. You are prepared to spend that money. You are prepared to spend money running an intensely punitive onshore detention regime in this country, where innocent people who have done nothing wrong are imprisoned arbitrarily and indefinitely at a massive cost to the taxpayer. You are then saying that you have to come in and hit the same cohort of people who are trying to appeal politicised decisions made by government agencies to deny them refugee status, to deny them the migration status that they want. They want to file an appeal against that in the Federal Circuit Court, and you want to put their fees up by nearly 500 per cent in order to fund these new judges.

I've got an idea for you, Minister: just fund them out of the consolidated fund. That's the way you should be funding new judges. You don't need to increase fees by nearly 500 per cent in migration matters, pricing a whole cohort of people out of the justice system—some of whom, I might add, are denied work rights by your government, and many of whom have been recently or over the last two or three years cut off income support by your government. They've got no money, they are begging for food, and the charity and refugee sector have had to step up to feed and house these people because you treat them like they are criminals, like they are dogs. But they are actually people, human beings, with children and families, and your government's actions have resulted in them getting kicked out on the street. Many of them can't work because you won't give them work rights. Many of them don't have income because you cut them off our social security system. And now you want to increase their filing fees by 500 per cent. I've got an idea: fund the new judges straight out of the consolidated fund.