Matt O'Sullivan (WA, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answer given by the Minister for Foreign Affairs (Senator Wong) and the Minister for Finance (Senator Gallagher) to questions without notice asked by Senators O'Sullivan and McGrath today relating to a recent High Court decision concerning migration matters and to inflation.

I had the pleasure of asking the first question today. It's a matter of serious concern for Australians. The issue that I raised was in relation to the High Court ruling on immigration detention. I cited three cases that have been reported recently, over the last day or so, in various Australian publications: the Australian newspaper, the Guardian and also again in the Australian. I want to repeat the particular individuals and the situations where people have been released as a result of the High Court's ruling last week. I quote the first one:

… a violent sex predator with a record of attacking elderly women in their own homes so chilling a judge branded him "a danger to the Australian community".

The second one was in relation to an individual that was attacked in their workplace: it says the victim was 'held up against a shelf in a blind spot without cameras in a retail store about 4 pm on a Thursday afternoon'. The final one was, in relation to a 28-year-old woman, 'fatally shooting her in a forest on the outskirts of Kuala Lumpur and blowing up her body with military-grade explosives'. These individuals are now out on our streets. That is just chilling.

I realise that these are cases that go back some time and that this particular case that was before the High Court has been dealt with over the last year—I think it was sometime last year that it was first brought forward; someone might correct me if I've got that time wrong. The point that I want to make is that the government has had time to prepare. The questions that I asked Senator Wong went to what the government is now doing about it. There was nothing that went to what the government is doing.

This is of grave concern to Australians. About 50 people in Western Australia at Yongah Hill, which is in Northam, about an hour and a half out of Perth, have been released. I asked a question about other examples of cases where people were held in indefinite detention, and I didn't get an answer to that either. Do we now have people wandering the streets of Perth in my home state who are similar to the people in the cases that we've heard here? Sadly, we didn't get an answer to that either.

I'm concerned because Minister Giles, the Minister for Immigration, Citizenship and Multicultural Affairs, in question time in the House yesterday said that the government rightly argued against this particular case to overturn the two-decade-old precedent. He said, 'We were prepared for this outcome.' Sadly, I didn't hear anything in Senator Wong's response to my question that demonstrates that the government is now actually doing something about it. If they were prepared, why can't they be upfront with us and tell us about what they're doing? The minister went on to say in question time yesterday—sorry, the Attorney-General, Mr Dreyfus, went on to say that he'd confirmed that there were legislative options that were being considered. Obviously the government couldn't have known what the outcome of the High Court case would be, but if it knew that it needed to be prepared, why is there not legislation in parliament right now that we could be dealing with as a matter of urgency? This is of grave concern.

So far, in the response of this government, we're not seeing the steps that they are taking. We're left in the dark. We don't know who all these people are. We're not being upfront with the Australian people about the types and situations of the people who have been let out of detention. We also don't know what steps the government is taking to take this seriously. The government is distracted and is not focused on the things that matter to the Australian people.