Kristina Keneally (NSW, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Leader of the Opposition in the Senate) Share this | Hansard source

For years there have been calls to help the locally engaged interpreters and support staff who fought with our troops in Afghanistan. These brave men and women stood alongside Australians in our hour of need, yet we've left it too late to help too many of them in theirs. For believing in our mission and supporting our values of liberty and democracy, they and their families now face grave danger and death at the hands of the Taliban. For months and years, Labor has joined with veterans, retired senior officers of our defence forces and former prime ministers in their call for urgent action to help the locals who helped us.

Australian veterans like Jason Scanes, Glenn Kolomeitz and Stuart McCarthy have been trying to save the lives of their mates in Afghanistan—and I acknowledge as well my colleague in the other chamber Luke Gosling—knowing full well that the window to get them out has been narrowing. Now, with the country in tatters, we are forced to witness the horrific scenes in Kabul as people flee for their lives. The reality is that we simply have not done enough to help our friends. In July other allied nations were evacuating their Afghan supporters as the Taliban advanced. The Morrison government did not do enough. When Kabul fell, the government were left scrambling to send in evacuation aircraft on 16 August. The Prime Minister now says he wishes it could have been different. The reality is that it could have been. Veterans, lawyers and even former prime minister John Howard warned Mr Morrison that he wasn't doing enough to get our allies out.

I've spoken to dozens of people from the Afghan Australian community over the past week. They have shared their stories with me. These are harrowing, tormenting and deeply moving. These are Australian citizens and permanent residents telling me of their relatives who are in hiding, moving every few hours with their children and nothing more than the clothes on their backs, unable to get food, unable to get their documents, unable to fill out the forms and unable to get to the airport. These Australians tell me of the desperate texts, the WhatsApp messages and the fear: the very real threat of death hanging over their wives, their children, their parents, their brothers, their sisters and their cousins. They have more questions than answers, because the humanitarian visa rules are unclear and the process is confounding, particularly in the middle of a humanitarian crisis. MPs and senators, particularly in seats with high concentrations of Afghan Australians, have been overrun—inundated—with requests for help. My office alone assisted in supporting more than a thousand applications in the last week.

Temporary protection and safe haven visa holders are also receiving conflicting advice from the Morrison government about whether they can apply for family reunification visas. The minister, Alex Hawke, said on ABC radio that they can, but the Department of Home Affairs publications say they can't. Legal services and refugee support groups are not able to get clarity either. I've been talking to many of these over the past few days. This confusion adds to the distress and the misery that Australian citizens, Australian veterans, visa holders here in Australia and those who work every day to support them are feeling.

It's not too late to fix this. The Morrison-Joyce government's offer of 3,000 visas is insufficient. Australia has 13,750 humanitarian intake places available for refugees this year, and we didn't exhaust our quota from last year. We should do more. I welcome that the Prime Minister says that this is a floor, not a ceiling. But, again, confusion reigns. The minister for immigration told ABC radio that these places were new. It is clear that they are not. None of this will matter, though—the number of places—if we can't secure safe passage to the airport, a task made exceedingly difficult now due to the government doing too little, too late. I acknowledge the bravery and the hard work of ADF personnel, Home Affairs officials and other Australians who are on the ground, seeking to secure safe passage, but I can share with this chamber that, just today, a woman who my office assisted to get a visa turned up at the airport and was turned away by Australian officials because they didn't accept that the email documentation she had was real. This is the type of bureaucratic process that is simply not working for people who are in a humanitarian crisis. Mr Morrison must ensure, as well, that Afghans in Australia on temporary visas are not deported and that they have pathways to remain here. This has been done for people from Hong Kong. This has been done for people from Myanmar. It can be done for people from Afghanistan who are here in Australia on a temporary visa. We should do this, and all these things, not just because they're right but because we owe respect to our Australian citizens and permanent residents who are desperate and fearful for their family members in Afghanistan. We should do it because we owe a great debt to our military men and women who served in Afghanistan. We honour those who went, those who never came home and those who never came home quite the same.

The reality is that our mission in Afghanistan would have been far more dangerous without the selfless sacrifice of the locals who helped us, and that's why so many of our veterans are fighting to save their mates. How can we let their pleas fall on deaf ears after all they've done for us? Soldiers know better than anyone that mateship is a verb. Mateship means showing up in hard times, and no-one left behind. It's a value woven into our national fabric by the Anzacs. So what do we owe to our mates in Afghanistan? We owe them more than we can ever say, but at the very least we owe them the chance to live in the peace they fought so bravely to bring to their own land.

We will dissect this war for decades to come—why we went there, what we did and why it ended like this. But I beg of the Morrison government, do not let this ending be an enduring shame. That would be the ultimate betrayal of our veterans, of those who helped our soldiers and of our values. The Morrison government must do more for our Afghan-Australian community and for our Afghan mates, and it must happen now.