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

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answers given by ministers to questions without notice asked today.

I want to take note of the answers given by Minister Watt and Minister Wong in particular today. I'll deal first of all with the remarkable response we got from the government about their failure to bring on the Migration Amendment (Removal and other Measures) Bill 2024. This is the Trump-like travel ban bill—together with the extraordinary God-like powers that they want to give to the immigration minister, this one or some future coalition immigration minister—to effectively put people in jail if they won't agree to their own deportation.

This is a bill that follows a pretty ugly Labor tradition of creating some of the worst precedents when it comes to being cruel to people who have come to this country seeking asylum—and deep attacks on multicultural Australia. Of course, it was the Labor Party, to their shame, who came up with the policy of mandatory detention. That is a policy invented by the Labor Party and weaponised by the coalition. It was the Labor Party that came up with offshore detention, another cruel policy created by the Labor Party and weaponised by the coalition. Now, the Labor Party has come up with yet another cruel innovation for dealing with people seeking asylum and dealing with migration—Trump-like travel bans and deportation powers that they want to give to an immigration minister.

You would have thought that the Labor Party would have learned from that history of cruel innovation in this, and not created yet another ugly precedent. It isn't just the coalition in Australia that has been weaponising these attacks that the Labor Party have created in their history. We now see the rhetoric that has been created by this race to the bottom between Labor and the coalition being picked up in the United Kingdom, in the United States and in parts of western Europe. The race to the bottom on migration, the race to the bottom on how we discuss people seeking asylum in this country, is spreading around the world like some kind of toxic political discussion points and it is dehumanising people seeking asylum.

We have seen it in the last two to three months, this debate between the Labor Party and the coalition, to see who can make the strongest connection between people seeking asylum and criminality. We know that when you look at the data on people seeking asylum, they are no more likely to commit any kind of criminal offence than the balance of the population. We know that the history of people seeking asylum is that they have come to this country and made incredible contributions to our society.

But all we have heard from both the Labor Party and the coalition in the last three to four months is this demonisation of people seeking asylum. And now they want to legislate to deport people or to jail people at the whim of the immigration minister. Is it any wonder that Labor hasn't brought on this bill? The reason they haven't brought it on is not because they're not willing to do this new cruel innovation. It is that they are hurting at the moment in multicultural Australia. They are hurting because multicultural Australia has looked at how Labor has utterly failed multicultural Australia in their appalling stance on the genocide in Gaza, and Labor doesn't want to take another hit. Well, maybe they should learn and kill the bill, pull the bill, and try to build back one small part of their very damaged reputation with multicultural Australia.

The response we got from Minister Wong on the question of why Labor won't support a duty of care for the environment, a duty of care that would protect future Australians, was derisory of the question. The fact that Minister Wong gave that answer—dodging the question, refusing to accept responsibility for her government's recent approval of Gina Rinehart's proposal for 151 coal seam gas wells by Minister Plibersek—the reason that we saw that dodging and weaving and failure to answer the question is because Labor knows that it is betraying the future.

Those answers happened while we had Anjali Sharma and Daisy Jeffrey—two young people in the chamber who had been fighting for this bill, fighting for their future. The minister showed disrespect to them by refusing even to address the questions that came from Senator David Pocock, It was a shameful lack of leadership, and it is shameful lack of leadership which reflects Labor's history and its record on the climate.

Question agreed to.