Andrew Bartlett (Queensland, Australian Democrats) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

This report was tabled towards the end of last year. This was the committee’s report into, in particular, Mr Chen Yonglin’s request for political asylum in Australia. I think it is important to ensure, once again, that we do not just look at the political controversy surrounding that incident but learn from the incident as well and look at ways to handle similar situations much better in the future.

One of the key aspects of this report was that it highlighted the problems with culture, not just within the immigration department but in some ways even more so in the foreign affairs department. I think that is very worrying. There is an understandable desire at government level in Australia to have a good relationship with China. That is obviously in our nation’s interests, and I support that. But it should not be at the expense of human rights. That is the concern that I have and it clearly came through in examining how this case was treated by the foreign affairs department—basically, very dismissively, without even an attempt to examine the facts behind the situation.

I think that is unacceptable, and it reinforces some of the problems with the wider government and Foreign Affairs attitude towards Chinese democracy activists in Australia—groups like Falun Gong, whom many senators would have seen out the back of Parliament House, on the road in, a number of mornings this week, not doing their usual silent demonstration but doing a performance art demonstration of some of the torture and serious mistreatment that Falun Gong practitioners are subjected to in China. It is worth noting that because, although it might not be as high profile as the case of Chen Yonglin, it is an issue that is going to continue to come up. The Chen Yonglin case is relatively unusual, but there is no reason to suggest that people in his sort of position might not do something similar in the future. If so, we should certainly react better to them, as well as to other Chinese asylum seekers and dissidents, than we did this time.

It is worth noting that the statistics show that the largest nationality group of asylum seekers—people seeking protection visas and lodging refugee claims—in Australia, is Chinese people. Most of them come here on other visas—student visas, business visas or whatever—and then seek protection after they arrive, sometimes a while after they arrive. A proportion of those, not all, are people who claim to be Falun Gong practitioners, and some of those have been granted visas to date.

We cannot allow those sorts of decisions to be influenced by sensitivities about how the Chinese government might react to those sorts of claims. I have a real concern that those sensitivities do creep into some decisions, more so in the ones that are somewhat borderline. The problem can come through, with other political factors, when things are borderline. When you are wondering whether to give somebody the benefit of the doubt on an issue, factors such as those sensitivities can weigh in.

That is where the political culture coming down from government level can have an influence. Some of these cases are difficult; I accept that. I am not saying that everyone who lodges a claim should get a visa. They do need to be examined. Falun Gong practitioners themselves are concerned that some people might falsely claim to be practitioners as an easy route to a visa. Due to the way those practitioners structure themselves, it is not always easy to verify these sorts of things categorically. I recognise that they are not always black-and-white, clear-cut decisions, but we do need to make sure that wider political sensitivities do not enter into them. Given that Chinese people are now the largest group of refugee claimants in Australia, that is an issue we are going to have to continue to wrestle with.

I draw attention to a book, Refuge Australia: Australia’s Humanitarian Record, by Australian historian Klaus Neumann, who gave evidence to this inquiry. He has done a lot of work looking at the history of how Australia has handled refugee claimants since the lead-up to the Second World War, when it became an issue that Australia had to address. We had not seriously had to before. That history clearly shows, with regard to government officials defecting—the Petrov case being the most obvious example of that, but there are others as well—that politics has heavily influenced outcomes in a lot of cases. That is why we have had so few people accepted as defectors in Australia. We have probably had more claimants than people realise, although not for quite some time. Many of them were accepted but not specifically on the grounds of being a defector. We found other ways around the situation to give them other visas so that it was not seen as accepting defectors. In some cases, that was because of political sensitivities.

Frankly, I do not particularly mind, if somebody is seeking protection from persecution, what the name of the visa is, as long as we give them protection, as long as the visa gives them security, safety and access to the same entitlements as everybody else. In that sense, I am not being purist about it. But there are also cases, as that book demonstrated, where politics influenced asylum claims and had a role in people being rejected, including, to use another contemporary parallel, people fleeing from West Papua into Australian territory in the 1960s.

Governments of all persuasions have done it before, and it is partly understandable, because relationships with foreign governments are part of what is important to Australia and our national interest. I am not suggesting they should not be, but we must make sure that basic human rights standards are not sacrificed. That is the risk, and I think this inquiry showed that it is a risk that is still very much current in the present day. Even with some of the changes that have happened in the immigration department, there are still significant problems. That is because the act itself and a lot of government policy approaches have not been changed. Until we change those, I do not think we will ever fully overhaul the culture in the way that is needed.

Question agreed to.