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

This government has got a lot wrong in its pandemic response, and one of its most egregious failures is how it has ignored and marginalised people in immigration detention in the middle of a pandemic.

Heartbreakingly, tragically and eminently foreseeably, we now learn that there's been a COVID outbreak in the Park Hotel in Melbourne, one of this government's hotel prisons. Remember, this hotel prison is full of innocent people who asked our country for help over eight long years ago. They've been locked up every day since and they continue to suffer as a result of this government's cruel indifference to their fate and horrific persecution of them. The government has chosen to cram these people, who have pre-existing medical conditions and illnesses, into hotel prisons and other immigration detention facilities without putting effective COVID prevention measures in place. We now know, confirmed by the government, that at least three of these people have caught COVID, and there could be many more, because many more are feeling sick and are symptomatic, as we debate this issue today. This is a massive failure in the government's duty of care. This was predictable and it was entirely avoidable.

The Greens, along with many other people—including, most importantly and most critically, the refugees and people who sought asylum who were locked up and remain locked up in these hotel prisons—warned the government at the start of the pandemic that exactly this would happen, that this tragedy would come to pass, unless people were released from hotel detention into the communit We warned about the overcrowding of people and the impossibility of proper hygiene in these facilities, and we and they were ignored.

These innocent people have been detained now for over eight years. They've been exiled. They've been brutalised. They've been deliberately dehumanised. They've been illegally imprisoned. They've witnessed violent assaults, rapes, the sexual assault of children and murder. They are now being infected with a potentially life-threatening disease. We call again on the government to release all low-risk detainees being held in detention into community detention, with appropriate medical care and precautions to ensure that they and the broader community are safe from COVID. (Time expired)