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

I want to take this opportunity to place a few matters clearly on the record. Firstly, obviously, as I've previously said, the Australian Greens oppose this legislation, and we'll give expression to that position by voting against the bill on the third reading. Secondly, it's important that folks listening to this debate understand that both Senator Cash and Senator Watt are spinning like yo-yos in relation to the claims that they are making. Let's be very clear about who is culpable for the laws that were struck down by the High Court. Both of them are culpable because both of them voted for those laws. And they voted for those laws in the face of warnings from the Australian Greens that they were unconstitutional. That is what happened.

This blame game that is now playing out across the chamber, where Senator Cash is attempting to blame the Australian Labor Party, and Senator Watt is attempting to blame the LNP, is simply pure spin. The only people in this chamber who are not responsible for the mess that we find ourselves in are the Australian Greens, because we are the only people who voted against the laws that the High Court found were unconstitutional. As part of our rationale for voting against those laws, we stated that it was likely that they would be found to be unconstitutional. Those are the actual facts, as opposed to what is claimed to be fact by Senator Cash and Senator Watt.

I am rarely on a unity ticket with Senator Cash, it has to be said, but she is right when she speaks about the bipartisanship that has existed on this issue. That, in our submission to the Australian people, is a large part of the problem. We see, time after time, a bipartisan race to the bottom on immigration policy in Australia, on refugee policy in Australia, on policy that relates to people who seek asylum in Australia. Unfortunately and tragically for thousands of people, we know where this race to the bottom ends. It ends in a dark place for our country.

It ends in refugees and people seeking asylum and migrants being demonised in Australia. It leads to them being brutalised either here in Australia or in places like Manus Island and Nauru. It leads to the creation of two separate classes of people in Australia based on people's citizenship status or visa status.

We hear Senator Cash urging the Senate to consider facts, when in fact what we have been facing over this broad debate over the last few weeks on a range of issues, including but not limited to the citizenship legislation we are currently debating and also including but not limited to the government's response to the recent High Court case which effectively rendered indefinite immigration detention illegal in this country, is a confected emergency created by the Leader of the Opposition, Mr Dutton, and the barefaced lie promulgated by the opposition that all of the people within the scope of the recent High Court decision are somehow hardened criminals, when in fact that is simply untrue. They have been so successful in repeating that propaganda over and over again, despite its baselessness and its fundamental untruth, that now we have Labor members repeating it as if it were true and we have people in the media repeating it as if it were true. Talk about a post-truth world that we are living in at the moment!

The facts of the matter are that many of the people caught within the scope of the High Court's decision have never been convicted of a crime in their lives and yet they are still being bound up in this race to the bottom, engaged in on a bipartisan basis, as has happened in this country since the MV Tampa appeared nearly a quarter of a century ago. It's this bipartisan competition to demonise and brutalise migrants, refugees and people seeking asylum in Australia. The truth has gone out the window, as it has gone out the window before. Do we remember children overboard? Do we remember that? Remember how Australians believed that people who were seeking asylum in Australia threw their children overboard, and it turned out to be a big fat lie. Do you remember that? The truth goes out the window. Mr Dutton's thrown it out the window in this debate and the Labor Party have capitulated in the most craven way, as they always do. We have walked down this path many times before and, tragically, we're going to walk down it many times again in the future. I confidently predict that. It is a dark and dangerous path that this country and this parliament walks down all too frequently.

I want to place very clearly on the record that there are a range of concerns the Greens have with this legislation. Fundamentally, what this does is create two classes of people before the law in Australia based on people's citizenship status. It creates one body of law for people who are sole nationals and it creates a completely separate body of law for those who hold citizenship in more than one country. It basically says, 'If you hold citizenship in more than one country, we're going to snatch your Australian citizenship away or at least provide the power for the courts to do so in certain circumstances.'

Citizenship is one of the most fundamental rights that a person can hold. It effectively gives you right of entry to a country and right of residence in a country and it entitles you to the rights of all other citizens in that country. Taking it away, if it is to be done, ought to be done in the most careful and considered way.

But here we find ourselves again taking away rights or severely curtailing rights—as we found ourselves doing yesterday on another fundamental human right, the right to liberty—with a bill being gagged in this place with that bipartisan lockstep from the major parties. We get 90 minutes today. How astoundingly generous! We got less than that yesterday to consider 70 pages of amendments and an explanatory memorandum of somewhere around 150 pages that was so weighty it literally had to be bound into a book to be put before senators. We were expected to debate those amendments in less time than we're getting for this bill today. On this bill, we are getting 90 minutes. This will be, I have no doubt, my only opportunity to make a contribution in the committee stage of this bill.

The Greens will, as we have in the past, proudly stand up against this erosion of fundamental rights in this country. In this case, it is the right to citizenship; yesterday, it was the right to liberty. We will stand up for a fair, decent and humane immigration system that treats refugees, people seeking asylum and migrants with the respect that they deserve, and we will hold out against this dark path that is being trodden by the major parties in this place.