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

Thank you for your wise ruling. My first request is to ask Minister Watt if he's able to take the questions I asked on notice. He has responded to some of them at a general level, and accepted the general proposition that I made, which is that the minister has use existing powers under the Migration Act to cancel visas that were reissued post the Pearson case and therefore put people back into detention. If the minister could commit to providing the numbers that I asked for in my original question on notice, I'd appreciate that.

The second point is that if the courts agreed about the seriousness of these offences then the people would have been sentenced to more than 12 months imprisonment and the minister would have had the right to cancel their visas under existing powers. I genuinely don't think that Minister Watt's argument stacks up in any way.

Thirdly, I make the point that about 100 people who were released post the Pearson case—that is, they had visas reissued to them—and who are now liable, should this bill pass, to be re-detained include refugees and stateless people. Senator Watt wants to say that the Greens arguments around human rights that I made in my second reading speech are spurious. They are not spurious arguments.

I'm not going to be hectored by Senator Hanson, who has no idea what she's talking about on this issue and is yet again demonstrating how she wants to punch down on migrants in this country, which she has built a career by doing. I'm not going to be hectored on this by a racist senator like Senator Hanson.

The TEMPORARY CHAIR: Senator McKim, that was a personal reflection which was uncalled for. You will withdraw that remark about Senator Hanson.

I withdraw. The point I'm making is that the people who were released post the Pearson decision and are liable to be re-detained include refugees and stateless people. Many of these people have been in indefinite immigration detention for long periods—many years, in some cases. They are often people with severe trauma backgrounds who are extremely vulnerable. The minister has just admitted that the immigration minister has already cancelled a number of visas that were revived by the Pearson decision, under section 501(3)(b). The process to target the so-called worst offenders is already underway using existing powers of the Migration Act. There is no need for this bill.

I want to raise a couple of specific circumstances of people that are going to be impacted by this bill. I'm not going to talk about people's names or, in any way, identify them. There is one person—a refugee—who has trauma induced psychosis and has been described as one of the most mentally ill people his social workers have ever engaged with. That person should be treated for health conditions, not placed punitively into immigration detention. They're a refugee. They can't go back to their home country, because they have a genuine well-founded fear of persecution. They've been found to be a refugee.

Another case is a refugee who's currently working full time. He was released over Christmas. He's finally reconnected with his daughter and is now going to face being retraumatised and re-detained. Another case is a young refugee whose sentence was reduced to 10 months on appeal. He never should have been caught by the mandatory cancellation provisions, in the Migration Act, in the first place. He finally returned to his mother, over Christmas, and now faces being ripped apart from his mother and sent to an immigration detention facility on the other side of the country—because of this bill.

Seriously, there is no need for this legislation. It's going to rip families apart. It's going to retraumatise incredibly vulnerable people. Yet Senator Watt wants to get up and crack into the Greens on the basis of some spurious longbow argument that he's making. I'd urge Senator Watt to have a bit of a look in the mirror here at what the government is doing and the way the government is destroying lives in this country. As I said in my second reading contribution to this bill, this could have been stumped up by Mr Morrison or Mr Dutton—just like the instrument to designate Nauru as an offshore detention country that Senator Watt had to limply defend yesterday.

This is the same 'rubbish in a different bin' stuff that we're getting from this government. Sadly, in politics in this country, when the Coles and Woolworths of Australian politics change sides in this chamber, it seems that the more things change the more they stay the same.

The TEMPORARY CHAIR: Minister?