David Shoebridge (NSW, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

How could you allow your party, the Labor Party, to be driven by, literally, the politics of Suella Braverman here—that's what you're doing—and not have one of you stand up and say no? Not one single member of the federal Labor Party has said no to this. Why are you here? Why don't you just join the big 'cruelty party' and make it just a single party? What's the purpose of Labor if all they do is implement Mr Peter Dutton's ugly policies? What's the purpose? You changed the government and changed nothing else. The coalition can sit there grinning like Cheshire cats because you are just implementing their policy and you've done it within 48 hours of the High Court delivering its decision. They thought they were in opposition, but it turns out, when it comes to this, they're in bloody government. Millions of people voted to move them out, and you've just reinstalled them. Why are you here if it's just to deliver what they would have delivered anyhow before the election, only with maybe a slightly calmer social media spin on it—maybe slightly less celebratory but the same core policy. Why are you here?

When it comes to the mandatory sentencing provisions that you're going to tack onto this—handed to you by Mr Peter Dutton, drafted by Mr Peter Dutton, but delivered by Labor—what does Labor's own national policy platform say about that? The publicly available 2021 national policy for Labor says this:

Labor opposes mandatory sentencing. In substituting the decisions of politicians for those of judges, mandatory sentencing undermines the independence of the judiciary. It leads to unjust outcomes and is often discriminatory in practice. Mandatory sentencing does not reduce crime, and leads to perverse consequences that undermine community safety, such as by making it more difficult to successfully prosecute criminals.

That's your own platform. That's Labor's 2021 national policy platform. What is Labor doing now? You're about to put in place Mr Peter Dutton's mandatory sentencing provisions for refugees—because you think refugees are powerless, because you think it's okay to attack them and because you're even willing to sell your own national policy platform to just have a go at a powerless group in society because it works for you politically. It works for you politically to have an answer to a shock jock on 2GB. You just junk your own national platform.

It's not as though we have to go back to 2021. We recently saw the so-called festival of democracy and the media show which was the 2023 Labor National Convention. You all came together and had a draft new national policy platform this year. You had a pretend little debate about AUKUS as though you cared, and then you adopted this on mandatory sentencing in 2023, the same year that you're about to legislate Mr Peter Dutton's ugly little mandatory sentencing provisions on your bill here against refugees. This is what Labor said in their 2023 draft national platform:

Labor opposes mandatory sentencing. This practice does not reduce crime but does undermine the independence of the judiciary, lead to unjust outcomes and is often discriminatory in practice.

That's true. What Labor said on their national platform is true in 2023 and 2021. What's not true is everything that's come out of the mouth of the Prime Minister about that in the last 48 hours. What's not true is the offensively false, discriminatory, unjust language that's come out of Labor in the last 24 hours, backing in the coalition's mandatory sentencing provisions for refugees. What you've said in the last 48 hours is what's not true. You know it's not true. You know it's wrong. You know it's discriminatory. You know it undermines the judiciary. And you're still going to do it.

Why are you here? Why don't you just join the coalition? Why don't you just make your big cruelty party and be done with the pretence on this? Why are you here? You say one thing before the election. You get elected on a platform. You say mandatory sentencing's wrong. You say it's unjust. You say it undermines the judiciary. Then, when you get elected and you finally sit on the government benches, you legislate for mandatory sentencing against refugees. Why are you here? Why do you keep lying to the electorate in election campaigns and then govern just like the coalition? Why are you here? Where is the single member of the Labor Party that's going to stand up for your own national platform? Not one of you. Why are you here? You're doing all of this—this festival of cruelty with your mates from the coalition—before you've even read the judgement of the High Court. You don't even have the judgement of the High Court. You're probably just going to create yet another unconstitutional holy mess, and grind refugees and their families through another unconstitutional holy mess, just because you want to deliver in a time frame that suits Mr Peter Dutton. Why are you here?

The idea that you could craft legislation to address what the High Court has found about two decades of systemic cruelty—that you could provide and craft a legislative response to it—before the High Court has even delivered its reasons is so obviously wrong. You know it won't work. You're no doubt being advised about this legislation by the same lawyers that were telling you that you were going to win the High Court case and saying: 'Don't worry about it. You don't need a plan B.' The same lawyers who've lost the High Court case, who obviously didn't understand the constitutional constraints around executive punishment and cruelty, are no doubt drafting this piece of legislation before the High Court has even delivered its reasons showing why they were wrong. Do you seriously expect this next little cooked-up piece of executive cruelty to survive a High Court challenge? It's not actually even about being lawful. It's not even about pretending to be lawful. It's about delivering a political hit job on refugees because it's convenient to you to keep the shock jocks and Mr Peter Dutton off your back. Why are you here?

So of course we're going to vote against this bill. But, of course, the combined parties of cruelty are going to come together and ram it through without any committee process, without the benefit of the reasons for the decision of the High Court, because that's what you do.