Sarah Hanson-Young (SA, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I speak today to the Migration Amendment (Visa Maximum Numbers Determinations) Bill 2013, put forward by me on behalf of the Greens, which would ensure that any capped freezes on protection visas and in fact visas as a whole under the Migration Act would need to come to parliament for approval. The reason that we have put forward this bill, of course, is that the government and the Minister for Immigration and Border Protection last week, in retaliation, in the hissy fit thrown by the minister in response to the Senate's decision not to allow the reintroduction of temporary protection visas, decided to cap the number of protection visas to be given to people who genuinely deserve them. That decision has been made outside—currently—the realms of parliament's scrutiny and the ability of parliament to have a say.

There may indeed be an argument for capping a particular number of visas. Let that argument be had, and let it be had in the chambers of parliament, where we make laws, where we can debate the merits or not of a particular decision. This bill amends the Migration Act to ensure that a decision to cap the number of visas given would need to come to the parliament in the form of a disallowable instrument, meaning that the parliament could agree or disagree with the motivations and the actions of the government of the day.

This issue has two streams. We can argue the merits of what the government has done—and I will move on to those arguments in a short time—but there is also a very fundamental point about the ability of parliament to have a good discussion and oversee these types of decisions. We have here a minister and a government who are so arrogant that they want as much power for themselves as possible to cut out the parliamentary process. They do not like the fact that they do not control both chambers of parliament, so what they do instead is find ways to circumvent the parliament, therefore circumventing the wishes and the views of the Australian people. Regardless of who has the largest number of seats in House of Representatives, that does not give them a mandate to ram through or dictate to the Senate whatever they would like to do. The role of the Senate here, Mr Acting Deputy President Fawcett, as you well know, is to scrutinise legislation, to review government decisions and to ensure that we have a space for debate over decisions of the government of the day, the executive, and really play that important role of representing the people and the diversity of views within our Australian community.

It should not be very controversial that this amendment bill go ahead. All it is saying is that decisions to cap visas should be able to be approved or disapproved by the parliament. Any minister or any government who feel absolutely confident and just in the decision that they are making should not have a problem with having that debate on the floor of the chamber. It would only be a minister who is either too arrogant or indeed hiding from the parliament and therefore the scrutiny of the public who would not want to put something to debate and to have that discussion on the floor of the parliament.

Let me just go to the issue that directly relates to why this cap put in place by the minister last week is of great concern and why the parliament should be able to have a debate about this and have a look at whether this is a good decision. We know that there are over 30,000 refugees and asylum seekers, including children, currently waiting at some stage of the process in the Australian community or in detention for whom we need to process their claims in a timely manner and give a resolution. Keeping people—individuals who have fled war, torture, persecution and brutality but have finally reached Australia and safety—living in limbo is not an approach a fair-minded, well-resourced and forward-thinking country like Australia should take. The implication of a freeze on protection visas is that these 30,000 people will remain living in limbo.

Why is that a massive concern to many in this country? The types of conditions these people are living in are atrocious. A number of them, thousands of them, are remaining in indefinite detention at a huge cost to taxpayers. As we have heard from the Treasurer, MYEFO is going to be handed down next Tuesday. I will be looking very closely at just how much of a budget blow-out there has been. My quick calculations on the back of an envelope would say that we are now spending $11 billion over the forward estimates. Here we have a significant amount of that $11 billion being spent keeping thousands of people locked up in indefinite detention because the minister of the day has decided they will not have their applications processed until he gets his way through the parliament.

The other group within this 30,000 people includes families and individuals who are living in the community on bridging visas. These types of visas were only ever meant to be the bridge—thus the name, of course—between people being in detention and having their applications for protection processed. These bridging visas are keeping people in poverty. Individuals are not allowed to work. They are not even allowed to study. They have some access to medical services, but that is quite limited. There are individuals who are absolutely desperate to start contributing to Australia's economy and society and start putting their lives back together.

We cannot forget that the majority of these people—whether their applications are still at the beginning or whether their applications have been completed and they are still waiting on bridging visas now that the minister has capped the approving and granting of permanent protection—are genuine refugees. We know that because that is always what the statistics show. Ninety-six per cent of people who come here by boat are found to be people in genuine need of protection. Having to leave your homeland and engage in the dangerous journey to get out, hiding out until you can find someone to bring you to Australia or another country—no-one takes that decision lightly. Many of these people have had to leave behind family members, their entire lives and everything they own. No-one makes that decision lightly. It is reflected in the number of people who are found to be in genuine need of protection. If, indeed, people wanted to take the 'easy way', they would probably buy a ticket and fly in on Qantas. That would be the easy way to get here. When people are really desperate, when they have to smuggle themselves and their families out of their country and struggle for survival before they reach safety, the only option they see before them is to come here by a dangerous boat.

We need to be addressing that issue. We need to be finding people a safer pathway in order to reach protection. I do not believe the only option available for the world's most vulnerable refugees should be to engage a people smuggler and get on a leaky wooden boat to Australia. That should not be the option. But currently it is. It is not going to be solved by keeping people living in limbo, in poverty, without the ability to work and without the ability to get education or training and keep themselves engaged. It definitely will not be addressed by capping and freezing protection visa applications. All that does is create a bigger bottleneck in terms of the number of people who are desperate to start putting their lives back together.

This issue of dealing with the number of incoming refugees is of course not unique to Australia. In fact, we receive the smallest number of refugees when you compare Australia to comparable countries. Less than one per cent of the world's refugees end up coming to Australia. Yet if you listen to the political rhetoric in this place and the other place, listen to the radio or read the newspapers you would think that we were taking them all. The reality is we are not. That perception is wrong. Less than one per cent of the world's refugees end up in Australia.

But of course there has been an increase of late. I just bring the chamber's attention to the fact that the United Nations and its refugee agency, the UNHCR, have made it very clear that there are more refugees in the world today than there were in 1994. We have the highest level of refugees seeking protection today since 1994. No wonder there are people coming to Australia asking for our protection.

Since 1994, 15.4 million refugees, 937,000 asylum seekers and 28.8 million people have been forced to flee their homelands. But we are talking about how to manage the claims of a mere 30,000. It is out of proportion to believe that we have to cap, and stop processing, applications for refugee status because Australia is somehow being flooded by people who are fleeing war and persecution. We are not being flooded. Yes, we want as orderly a process as we can manage. Yes, people's claims need to be checked and we need to ensure that people who deserve protection are the ones getting protection. That is absolutely the case. But the idea that punishing people by freezing their applications in order to send a message to the wider public that the coalition government has our borders under control is just ludicrous.

I will tell you a short story about the impact on an individual's life of keeping refugees locked up in indefinite detention—that is, what will be a result of this decision to cap and freeze the processing of applications. There are over 1,000 children in immigration detention on Christmas Island. We know that the impact of detention on children is severe. We know it damages their mental health and development. We know it will scar them for life. How do we know that? Because we have seen it happen before. We cannot pretend anymore that we do not know the consequences of treating people like this. We do; we have seen them before. What will end up happening, as has previously happened, is that we will create the next damaged generation. These young people—these children—will grow up. They will end up being citizens in our country and we will have scarred them for life. Long-term detention and indefinite detention are dangerous, aside from how inhumane and immoral it is to treat a child like that. The cost to Australia of processing that child and their family's refugee claim in as timely a manner as possible and, if they are genuine refugees, allowing them to resettle is far less in money terms and, obviously, in human terms. It is far better than damaging these children for the rest of their lives, which is effectively what we are doing.

Those who are living in the community on bridging visas are not allowed to work, study or do training. These people are very capable. They are very courageous: they have fled repressive regimes and brutality, whether it is the Taliban in Afghanistan or the smashing of democracy supporters in Iran. These people have done everything they can to protect their families. There is a courageous element to that. These are brave people. They have stared death in the face and said, 'We're not having that. I'm going to fight for my family and get out of here.' They get to Australia and are put on a bridging visa. Many of them are well-skilled—there are top doctors, teachers, engineers, IT specialists, tradespeople. These people are desperate to work, and we are keeping them pushed down in our community as second-class citizens and not allowing them to contribute while they stay on a bridging visa. And how long will they be on a bridging visa? There is no indication from the immigration minister of how long that will be, but we assume that it is going to be for a very long time.

It seems ludicrous to me that there is an entire group of capable people who want to work, who want to contribute and who want to be self-sufficient, and we are saying to them: 'No.' They are living in the community. They could be paying taxes, engaged in the workforce, engaged in training and preparing themselves for when they are given permanent protection visas, except we are saying, 'No. You sit there. You do nothing. We will pretend that you don't exist until the time that the immigration minister decides to lift the freeze on protection visas and starts granting protection to people who deserve it.' We are having a huge debate about the fact that regional Australia needs workers, and we are flying in temporary workers from all over the world. Yet we have right here people who have risked their entire life for a chance to start putting their lives together and contributing to a community—a society—that will respect them and keep them safe. We need to think outside the square a little bit more and engage these people in our society, engage them in work, and stop punishing them simply because they dared to flee for their life and the lives of their family.

This bill is not about granting those people refugee visas; it is about saying that the debates on these decisions, which have a profound affect on people's lives, should be discussed in this chamber and should be able to be allowed or disallowed by the parliament. To do otherwise is pure arrogance on the part of the government of the day.

Michaelia Cash (WA, Liberal Party, Assistant Minister for Immigration and Border Protection) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I too rise to contribute to the debate on the Migration Amendment (Visa Maximum Numbers Determinations) Bill 2013. I note that the bill relates to a cohort of in excess of 30,000 people who came here under the former government's failed border protection policies and whom the former speaker and person who introduced the bill into this place states are 'in limbo, in poverty and without work rights'. When the mover of this piece of legislation refers to those people as being 'in limbo, in poverty and without work rights', it is important to ensure that the Senate understands and that Hansard records that Senator Hanson-Young was a member of the former government. The Greens and the Australian Labor Party were in a formal written alliance. The Greens were part of the government under which these people came to Australia. It was the former government, of which Senator Hanson-Young was a part, that ensured these people remained in limbo because, under the former government, these people were dumped into the community, and it was the former government which failed to commence the processing of these people. If there is any allegation that these people remain in poverty then that allegation should be directed squarely at the former government, which, again, Senator Hanson-Young was a part of.

In relation to Senator Hanson-Young's statement that these people are without work rights, I would again remind the Senate—and for the benefit of Hansardthat it was the former government, of which Senator Hanson-Young was a part, which placed these people into the community without processing them, and it was the former government's decision to deny them work rights. Had Senator Hanson-Young and the now opposition not disallowed the government's temporary protection visas in the Senate last week, these people would now have work rights. So I think it is a little bit rich of Senator Hanson-Young, now that she is on the other side of the chamber, to come into this place and pretend that the last 5½ years did not happen. This bill is a direct result of the actions of Senator Hanson-Young when she was in government with the Australian Labor Party and was complicit in—

Sarah Hanson-Young (SA, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Mr Acting Deputy President, I rise on a point of order. I would prefer that the minister did not mislead the chamber or Hansard. I am a member of the Australian Greens, not a member of any government.

David Fawcett (SA, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

There is no point of order.

Michaelia Cash (WA, Liberal Party, Assistant Minister for Immigration and Border Protection) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

As I was saying, Senator Hanson-Young needs to remember when talking to this bill to ensure that history is recorded correctly. The Australian Greens were in a formal alliance with the Australian Labor Party and under that alliance they failed Australia and Australians in relation to border protection. The actual cohort to which this bill is directed is a cohort that came to this country under the former government, and in excess of 30,000 people were placed in limbo as a direct result of the actions of the former government. The former government did not commence the processing of these people. They were placed in poverty and without work rights as a direct result of a policy decision of the former government. Had this government's temporary protection visa initiative not been disallowed by the Senate recently, these people whom Senator Hanson-Young says do not have work rights would now be entitled to work rights if they had been granted temporary protection visas.

The reintroduction of temporary protection visas was one of the many measures taken by the coalition government to restore strength and integrity to Australia's immigration program and, as I have stated, to clear the backlog of Labor's legacy of in excess of 30,000 people who came to this country and who have quite literally been dumped into the community on bridging visas. Temporary Protection visas strike an appropriate and effective balance between a genuine need for safe haven from persecution and a disincentive for illegal arrivals, because, as a government, we are not honouring the promise of permanent protection that the people smugglers make to them when they encourage them to get on a boat and make the dangerous journey to Australia.

Of course, temporary protection visas directly respond to changing circumstances in a person’s home country. Temporary protection visas will allow those in need of protection to have access to work rights—unlike the current situation which Senator Hanson-Young supports, where people do not have access to work rights—and support services in the community. This is the case if they are allowed to be on temporary protection visas. These benefits—and again I remind the chamber that these are the benefits which Senator Hanson-Young has on a number of occasions advocated in this very chamber and, indeed, in the speech that she just gave in support of her own bill—have been denied to asylum seekers as a direct result of the Labor-Greens alliance in banding together recently to disallow Temporary Protection Visas.

Given the failure of the Labor-Greens alliance to support this important measure, the coalition government has chosen to regain control of the protection visa program by utilising the visa capping framework in the Migration Act 1958 to determine the maximum number of visa grants in the permanent protection visa class for this financial year. This was a necessary step as it underlines the coalition government's resolve to ensure that persons who arrive in Australia without visas are not granted permanent protection in Australia.

The cap on further protection visa grants is in place until 30 June 2014 and it will continue to deny people smugglers a product to sell. The message from the government has been consistent and clear: those who have travelled illegally to Australia will never be resettled in Australia permanently. At the same time, the government continues to implement measures to achieve a fair and orderly immigration program.

The cap on further protection visa grants also enables the government to ensure that we strike the right balance between the offshore and onshore components of the Humanitarian Program, providing the places to the most vulnerable who are patiently waiting to come to Australia through regular, orderly migration channels. These are people who do not have the means to pay the people smugglers and these are people who have been languishing in refugee camps for many years. Certainly, a number of them that I met from the Congo were in refugee camps for in excess of 20 years and, indeed, every single one of their children had been born in a refugee camp.

The visa capping framework in the Migration Act 1958 consists of sections 85, 86 and 91. These provisions commenced on 16 December 1992. Section 85 provides the minister with the power to set a cap on the number of visas that may be granted in a specified financial year, whilst section 86 prevents any more visas of that class being granted in that year once the number of visas granted reaches the number in the cap. Section 91 then enables the minister to consider those visa applications which are subject to the cap in the order in which he or she determines to be the most appropriate. The visa capping framework has been used on very many occasions by governments of both persuasions for many different visa classes—for example, parent and other family visa classes amongst others. It is a mechanism which allows for control when demand exceeds supply.

The cap does not stop visa processing, and I think that is a very important point to make, considering it is not what Senator Hanson-Young says is the effect of the decision that has been taken by this government. So, again, this cap and the ability of the minister under the act to make such a decision does not stop visa processing. It is not a freeze and it is not a suspension of processing. It is a mechanism to limit the number of grants which may be issued in a particular financial year. Illegal maritime arrivals will continue to have their protection claims assessed, and those who are refused a protection visa will still be able to seek a review by the Refugee Review Tribunal. Successive governments have found that the capping framework is useful to them when seeking to ensure that Australia's visa program is managed in the best interests of the nation. Nothing is changed by this government's decision: the provision continues to be used for its intended purpose.

This bill proposes to amend the Migration Act 1958 to allow instruments made under section 85 to be disallowed by the parliament. Removing the government's right to cap a visa class without risk of disallowance, as this bill proposes, has the potential to lead to disorder and to inappropriately fetter the government's legitimate role in setting the Australian migration program in the national interest. It would impact not only the Humanitarian Program but also all other visa classes within the migration program.

The financial impact on the migration program may be to the detriment of the Australian taxpayer if control of these programs does not fully rest with the government of the day. It enables the government to determine the optimum size and composition, as deemed by the government of the day in consideration of the annual budget. The cap is reviewed each year and takes into consideration any changes in the level of demand and allocation of overall migration program planning levels. The visa capping framework also allows for program management mechanisms, such as enabling the minister to consider applications in an order that the government deems most appropriate. These mechanisms are essential, particularly in the case of the parent visa case load. The visa capping framework has enabled successive governments to validly exercise control over a range of visa classes over many years, leading to the orderly management and flow of non-citizens to Australia.

Mr Acting Deputy President Furner, rest assured that, although the Labor-Greens alliance is not willing to allow illegal maritime arrivals who engage our protection obligations to receive the benefits of temporary protection visas, including access to work rights—which, under the former government, they were denied. Temporary protection visas remain a key component of this government's policies, and we will be taking any action deemed necessary in the weeks and the months ahead in order to implement this policy and deliver on our commitment to the Australian people. This bill should not be supported.

Ursula Stephens (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to make a contribution on the Migration Amendment (Visa Maximum Numbers Determinations) Bill 2013 and I indicate on behalf of the Labor members of this place that Labor is not supporting this bill, for very sound reasons—principally, those outlined by Minister Cash, actually.

The bill amends section 85 of the Migration Act 1958 to allow legislative instruments designed under section 85—that is, the limit on visas—to be disallowed. Senator Hanson-Young's second reading speech on the bill states that the bill seeks 'to ensure that decisions made by the minister on visa limits are accountable to the parliament, rather than at the discretion of the minister'. Section 85 of the act allows the minister to determine the maximum number of visas that can be granted in any particular subclass in any specified program year.

So these limit determinations—referred to under this part of the act as 'capping'—are not subject to disallowance, due to the operation of section 44(2) of the Legislative Instruments Act 2003 that states that legislative instruments made under part 1, 2 or 9 of the Migration Act cannot be disallowed. But we know—and Senator Hanson-Young said it this morning—that this bill responds to the government's decision to cap the number of onshore permanent protection visas at 1,650 for the 2013-14 year, which means that no further onshore permanent protection visas will be granted until the new financial year.

This decision is in place until 30 June 2014, for a very obvious reason. We all know what that reason is. It is because in the new Senate the government will attempt again to bring back temporary protection visas. We know that that is what the game is all about.

But there are 30,000 people waiting to be processed. I think the Refugee Council of Australia, in response to that decision, made a very significant point in their media release. They described that visa freeze as:

… a new low in Australia’s treatment of asylum seekers.

They suggested that the decision to suspend the granting of new permanent protection visas for asylum seekers, for the treatment of some of the world's most vulnerable people, was in direct response, as a petty political ploy, to the fact that the Senate disallowed the temporary protection visas. Petty politics at its worst is how the Refugee Council of Australia's President Phil Glendenning described that decision. He also makes the very important point that suspending the granting of new permanent refugee protection visas also exacerbates the deteriorating protection environment for the world's refugees and asylum seekers. He says in this media release:

All indications are that global asylum applications in 2013 are at their highest level in more than a decade. At a time when the number of people displaced by persecution and conflict is increasing, Australia is turning its back on those in urgent need.

Mr Glendenning makes the point about the government's position on special protection visas that the reality is that:

… many refugees found to be in need of protection from persecution and currently living in limbo in Australian communities, will become long-term residents one way or another.

And, he says:

Past experience from the Howard Government years clearly showed that the great majority of people granted TPVs were never able to return home safely and ultimately were given permanent protection in Australia.

As he says, Australian governments—of whatever persuasion—have to find a form of protection for those refugees who cannot safely return to their country of origin in the foreseeable future that will allow them to settle and make a long-term commitment to Australia.

So what we saw in the decision by Minister Morrison—which was a very churlish knee-jerk reaction to the decision of the Senate to disallow temporary protection visas—was that he placed a bar on any further applications being made for permanent protection visas by people who arrive by boat—only by boat. Labor, of course, as we know, supported the Greens' motion in the Senate that disallowed the government's reintroduction of temporary protection visas because we believe that they are an anathema. It was actually the Hawke Labor government that introduced capping programs in 1988, and, as the minister said, the capping process is critical. It is the way in which we can balance and plan Australia's migration program each year, and it has been used in the past to manage the size and composition of the migration program rather than humanitarian programs. But—again, as the minister rightly pointed out—as the bill currently stands, this would apply to all instruments made under section 85, not just the humanitarian programs. And there is the rub. It actually becomes a very problematic proposition.

So Labor will not be supporting the bill. We believe that the Migration Act 1958 in its current form is appropriate to the circumstances because it does give ministerial discretion. It does give the minister the opportunity to make decisions about special circumstances. It does give the minister the opportunity to consider specific applications that warrant special consideration.

I know that you, Mr Acting Deputy President Furner, would have had the same experience as I have: that there are certain cases in our communities that come to light where we go in to bat on behalf of people in very difficult circumstances who might otherwise not have anyone to advocate for them. We have all been in the situation where we have been able to advocate on behalf of people seeking special consideration. The minister needs that discretion to be able to do it.

So our interest is in the Australian Greens' proposals for reform. If a broader proposition was going to be put to the opposition, we would certainly be interested in considering such a proposal on its merits. But the decision that the minister made, in that spiteful media conference after the decision by the Senate, about exercising his discretion, to keep those waiting to have their applications processed waiting, was, as I say, a very churlish response. If you read the transcript of his comments, you hear something quite specific—a very veiled threat in those comments that says: 'We'll do whatever it takes.' The minister said this morning: 'We'll continue to do whatever it takes, and we'll take whatever action we want, and there are other things under consideration.'

We all should be very mindful of the fact that this is another case of this government making policy on the run. Having lost control of Operation Sovereign Borders, they are now desperately scrambling to try to look like they are in control when in fact the whole border protection policy is in complete disarray, and the way in which they are trying to manage it is under this nonsensical veil of secrecy.

We hear from the good citizens of Christmas Island through Twitter and other social media how many boats have arrived there, because the government has decided that they are not going to tell us how many they have turned back. We have discovered, haven't we, how many boats they have bought in Indonesian fishing villages? Zero. So freezing refugee claims from being processed is actually just another distraction. It is a ploy that we have had to deal with in the disarray, the confusion and the shemozzle which is all that we can describe the government's failed border protection policy as.

I just want to go back to the very passionate plea that Senator Hanson-Young made about refugees. We are all stuck in this really hard place. Global refugee policy and Australia's response, and how we deal with people-smuggling and how we deal with the desperation is a policy conundrum—one of those wicked policy problems that governments around the world are trying to deal with. We are actually in the situation where our refugee flow is mostly by boat, so we have a particular challenge in our jurisdictional area that other countries, for example in Europe, do not. If they have porous borders, they are dealing with challenges in a very different way.

But even the Refugee Council of Australia says, and I quote their principal policy position from their website:

The Refugee component of the Australian Humanitarian Program is motivated by the recognition that a balanced response to the world's refugee problems requires that provision of resettlement places for Convention refugees be part of that response.

UNHCR estimates the number of refugees in need of resettlement in 2013 at more than 850,000 people, while the total number of resettlement places offered annually around the world is around 85,000. Australia has allocated 12,000 places—

of course, the Labor government was going to increase the humanitarian visas to 20,000 but the government has clawed those back—

in UNHCR's resettlement program for the 2012-13 financial year—

so we have 12,000 places now—

plus additional places through the SHP. Continuing to offer resettlement places – particularly through a multi-year planned program – represents Australia’s contribution to providing solutions to what is a global problem and contributes to Australia’s international standing as a country committed to upholding human rights and humanitarian values.

Furthermore, as one of the few countries of the world with an active immigration program, there is an expectation that Australia allocate places for refugees as well as migrants. In other words, the refugee program enables Australia to play its part as a responsible member of the international community and to derive recognition for this contribution from other states.

The SHP is driven not so much by an international imperative but by the desire of community groups and individuals in Australia to make a tangible contribution towards assisting members of their communities in difficult circumstances overseas, particularly those who may not have access to UNHCR's resettlement processes.

That is really the argument for an orderly way of dealing with the visa applications.

That is certainly the story that we heard yesterday in the first speeches by our new senators Dastyari and Tillem. Those stories were both of circumstances of desperation and seeking hope and opportunity in Australia, and they were very moving and compelling stories. Senator Dastyari made the point that it is not government policy that affects whether or not people seek opportunity and refuge here in Australia, or seek citizenship in Australia; it is actually the fact that we live in the best country in the world. It is so true: it is not government policy that attracts or detracts.

But I must take issue with Minister Cash's fierce determination to promote the temporary protection visa regime, knowing that it is a central part of the government's asylum seeker policy. The return of temporary protection visas no doubt will be one of the first things that the government seeks to introduce in the new Senate, post July, because it is determined to promote the so-called benefits of the TPV regime and at the same time completely ignore what everyone found to be the complete failings of the temporary protection visa regime. This is why Labor, when it came to government in 2007, decided to remove that regime. So, for very good reasons, we abolished the scheme introduced by the Howard government.

The coalition keeps arguing that the temporary protection visa will be the only visa which asylum seekers who have arrived by boat will be eligible for if they are found to be in need of refugee protection. The duration of the TPV will be determined on a case-by-case basis, depending on the circumstances in the country of origin, but no individual visa will exceed three years in duration. This is a revisionist policy; we are going back to the Howard government's regime about TPVs.

Refugees will be able to apply again for temporary protection when a TPV expires but, again, each case will be assessed, with a decision based on the merits of the case at the time. If it is deemed that the situation has improved and that continuing protection is not required, the applicant will be required to return to their country of origin. Where it is deemed that the risk of persecution continues, a new TPV would be issued, again for a period of up to three years. Permanent protection visas will not be provided to a TPV holder within the first five years of the first TPV being issued, and any decision to grant permanent protection could be done only through the non-compellable intervention power of the minister.

The minister argues the strengths of the TPV regime include work rights and access to Medicare and other benefits. But what she did not say is that the work rights might be restricted to specific geographic regions; therefore, we may see refugees seeking temporary protection visas being sent off to northern Australia or the outback to work and live. Benefits paid to TPV holders unable to find work will be set at the discretion of the government but will not exceed equivalent Centrelink payments and will be subject to mandatory mutual obligation schemes like Work for the Dole. We can imagine where this is going, Mr Acting Deputy President, can't we? TPV holders will not be entitled automatically to access settlement services or support, so what does this say about language, literacy and support services in the community? The minister is given discretion by exception to grant access to this support.

While on a TPV, refugees will be denied permanent residency, the right to apply for citizenship or access to family reunion under any program. And, if a temporary TPV holder chooses to leave Australia, he or she will be barred from returning. So there you go—that is the nub of what this government is trying to introduce, without any recognition or any acknowledgement of what we know was so bad about the last regime of TPVs. Not allowing access to services that are necessary for successful settlement creates a level of dependency and a lack of personal agency to do anything, and the idea of temporary status continuing on a rolling three-year cycle exacerbates the feelings of uncertainty and creates huge insecurities and tensions within communities. We know that is the case.

What do we say about denying people the opportunity of family reunion or travel rights? That is quite extraordinary and it leads to massive negative psychological effects that have been well documented, compounding psychological trauma. How do we deal with people who are going to be put on TPVs who have been through torture and trauma? How do they access the kinds of services that they are going to need to make the adjustment to living in Australia? And how do we deal with the fact that it is the ethnic communities of Australia that will be burdened with looking after those on TPVs? We know what happened last time: the big shift of costs was to charities, not-for-profit organisations and local governments, who stepped up to try to fill the gaps in supporting these people who need quite specific and extensive support. And, of course, what that does is just feed the narrative in Australia about asylum seekers and refugees being illegal or queue jumping. This is demonising refugees and asylum seekers. That is really not what this country is all about.

Scott Ludlam (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am pleased to be able to speak this morning to the Migration Amendment (Visa Maximum Numbers Determinations) Bill 2013 that Senator Hanson-Young has brought forward for consideration of the Senate. As Senator Hanson-Young outlined, the bill amends the Migration Act 1958 to allow the section 85 limit on visas to be disallowable. We have not said at any time that the minister should not be able to set these caps. Nonetheless, when ministers have discretionary powers within their portfolios to make these decisions without the need to put something to parliament, if it is a matter as grave as this—a decision to place an indeterminate freeze on a human being's livelihood—then we do not think that should simply be left to the discretion of the minister of the day at the stroke of a pen. So it is not the caps that we necessarily take issue with; it is the fact that those caps should be disallowable.

I commend Senator Hanson-Young not just for bringing this bill forward, because this is just a small piece of a much larger parcel, as other senators have identified, but for her determined opposition to inhuman policies that, as we have read over the last 24 hours, now amount to torture of human beings. And the government's highly politicised, very deliberate and systematic move to attempt to militarise the problem and to mischaracterise a humanitarian crisis as a military one is precisely the reason why you are failing, it is the reason the wheels have come off. It is a disgrace what is being done to the Australian Defence Force by hiding behind the uniforms of service men and women who signed up to defend their country, not to be dragged into the vile and politicised debate over some of the most vulnerable people on earth, who, when they take the risk they know may well lead to the deaths of themselves and their children in order to come to this country, are faced not with an orderly and legal and legitimate processing regime but with gunboats, with slogans, with ministers standing in front of banners and with vilification. This is killing people—you know that it is—and that is why it is such a disaster that you continue nonetheless.

An organisation with the gravitas and record of Amnesty International has described the detention centre at Manus Island as cruel, inhuman, degrading and violating prohibitions against torture, in its recent report. This is an organisation that exposes itself, by way of the resourcing of its members and volunteers and people around the world who care about issues like this, to some of the worst practices in the worst hellholes in the world. When it has accused an Australian government effectively of torturing people, it blows me away that coalition MPs can even show their faces in here and defend this practice this morning without some kind of apology. It is my strong view that what we are setting up here is an apology that will have to be made by a future Prime Minister, who will have to do what Prime Minister Rudd did in 2008, and, long overdue, stand and apologise on behalf of the entire country to a cohort of people who were abused with the consent of the executive and the government of the day. That is what we are setting up here—a situation where a future Prime Minister will need to apologise on behalf the country to the people who have been abused and damaged and lost through the government's misguided and quite violent asylum-seeker policies.

The centre at Manus has obviously been very difficult for journalists to access, but I congratulate Amnesty International and everybody around the world, and certainly in this country, who work in support of asylum seekers. Groups like the Refugee Rights Action Network in Western Australia, for example, do a mix of very determined advocacy but also take themselves into detention centres to see what they can do. They get toys and books into the detention centres, form friendships with people who are inside and then do the best they can to look after them when they are out.

Groups like the ASRC in Victoria also perform really basic tasks like counselling people who have fallen through our detention centres and have come out traumatised with post-traumatic stress disorder. Their experiences in the detention centres have been laid on top of whatever it was that they were fleeing from in the first place, and it makes me feel ashamed to be Australian when I read that our worst fears have been confirmed, that the horror we are inflicting on people amounts to torture. It is something that obviously we have suspected for a long period of time. But all those who have opposed the policies of this government—and, when the wheels fell off the ALP, the former government's policy when they followed now Prime Minister Tony Abbott into the gutter on asylum seekers policies—have remained defiant and stayed with the campaign all the way through.

This morning we are acknowledging that the implications of a freeze on protection visas are devastating. After the disallowance of TPVs went through last week, it looked like nothing more than a tit-for-tat tactic, a five-year-old child throwing his toys out of the cot, and there was a minister, looking around for some kind of political tactic to retaliate. But he did not choose a political tactic to retaliate; he chose to make the lives of human beings even more miserable. Well played!

These are refugees including women and children who are being detained in immigration detention, some for years—some for more than four years. Some are currently living on bridging visas with the right to work, and others subject to community detention will never now be granted permanent protection in Australia. The freeze condemns these refugees to a life of fear and uncertainty.

I have spent, as I suspect many of us here have—and I know that Senator Hanson-Young certainly has—a measure of time in some of these detention centres. We have seen the situation gradually become more and more degraded and worse and worse until we are forced to confront the realisation that conditions inside detention centres offshore and onshore are not degraded and vile by accident. They are like that deliberately. We are trying to persuade people who have fled war zones and risk of torture and killings and disappearances—as are still occurring in Sri Lanka—that they are better off staying in those circumstances than they are fleeing to the protection of Australia. One of the people interviewed in this Amnesty International report, a 43-year-old gentleman from Iraq—he is my age—said:

I have lived in war zones with bombs and explosions. I have never experienced what I am experiencing here with the uncertainty that we face. If we had died in the ocean that would have been better.

This means, Senator Cash, that you are getting close to your policy objective of being more terrifying and worse than a war. Is that really what you are setting out to do? If it is, you should just jump up and say so. I suspect people like me would probably breathe a sigh of relief that you are no longer pretending that it is in the best interests of the people you are looking after, who have fled and exercised their international legal rights to seek asylum, to have you then say that it is for the best, that we are trying to prevent drownings at sea.

I do not think you are, and it pains me to say that. If you go back over the last few years, I figure that there was a genuine will within this parliament, at least for a period of time, to try to do everything that could be done to prevent deaths at sea. The Australian Greens believe, obviously, that the best way of doing that is to provide a safe pathway for people. But I do not think that is what the coalition has ever been about. It has been about turning a humanitarian emergency into a national security one, because that is where you think you are on safe ground. Parade the gunboats, parade men and women in uniform to provoke fear in the community, and then rescue people from that fear. It is disgraceful. It is a very old political tactic. It is not something that I think should be pursued any further. What I hope for the most is that you will see just how badly that tactic is failing when you try to convert a humanitarian crisis into a national security one. There is no doubt at all that your tactics will fail. But this is not merely a political question, because lives are at risk and people's futures are at risk.

As at May 2013, there were 1,731 children still locked up in Australian detention centres, children who have arrived as asylum seekers, who have already experienced severe traumas. So you might want to think about your apology, about the future apology that a Prime Minister will need to make to those children who committed no crime either in Australia or in the countries they fled from. The only thing that they appear to have done wrong, whether they came here with their parents or not, is to arrive at a time when the politics of people fleeing and seeking refuge is as degraded as it has ever been, certainly in my political memory.

The reason I think that Minister Morrison has chosen this tactic, as I said earlier, is that he wanted some way of maybe mitigating the humiliation that he might have felt about the TPV disallowance last week. But temporary protection visas do not work as a deterrent. I would have thought that those of you who were in government during the Howard years at the time of the SIEV X disaster would know very, very well—viscerally in fact—just how poorly TPVs fail as a deterrent and as a policy instrument. In 1999 when they were introduced, they did nothing whatsoever to stop the flow of asylum seekers by boat. In fact, they probably had the reverse effect. In the two years prior to the introduction of TPVs, 1,078 people arrived by boat. In the first two years following the introduction of TPVs, 8,312 people arrived by boat. And you know this well: by denying family reunion, more women and children were then forced to take the perilous boat journey to Australia.

But it is as though we are operating in fact-free environment where, as long as you front up and are a little more hairy-chested today than you were yesterday or the day before that, you will be able to get the headline that you are strong on border protection and stronger national security. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, people are traumatised and now camped in situations that amount to torture in the detention centres, where it is actually very, very difficult to get an independent and objective view of what is going on there.

On behalf of the Australian Greens and those of us who are fleeing the building to spend time with loved ones over the holiday season and take a break: we will not forget the plight of those who came to Australia seeking a better life, for whatever reason, fleeing some of the worst regimes and situations anywhere on earth, who are locked up behind razor wire with or without their children, not knowing whether their family are safe or whether or not they will be protected, for whom the idea of Australia as a beacon of democracy, human rights and wellbeing in the region has been exposed as a cruel joke.

I wish everyone in this chamber well. Take time over the break to reflect on the impact that the policies, bills and measures that we pass in here have on the lives of real human beings. I am proud to stand with those in the community who utterly reject the policies of this government as they have tripped from failure to disaster, from one scandal to another, while hiding behind the uniforms of the ADF. We will not rest until these policies have been reversed and we have a policy that respects international law, that respects human rights and that respects the individual aspirations of the people who seek refuge here when there is nowhere else to go.

Zed Seselja (ACT, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The coalition will not be supporting the Migration Amendment (Visa Maximum Numbers Determinations) Bill 2013, as has been laid out by the minister quite eloquently. I want to address some of the arguments that we have been hearing from the other side, particularly the Greens, in relation to this space but also the complicity of the Labor Party and the Greens in relation to the issue of temporary protection visas. I want to go through a number of the points that have been made by Senator Hanson-Young and Senator Ludlam in defence of their argument and in defence of their view of how immigration should occur in this country. This Greens view of the world is a view that we utterly reject. It has been proven to fail time and time again.

Sarah Hanson-Young (SA, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It is not a Greens view; it is international law.

Zed Seselja (ACT, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Senator Hanson-Young says it is not a Greens view of the world. It is. It is a Greens-Left view of the world. I was not going to quote Bob Carr yet, but I will. Bob Carr, a former senator in this place, said: If you want to embrace the Greens-Left-Fairfax-ABC position, you are going to go backwards at the next election.

He said that there should be no daylight between the Labor Party and the Abbott government on asylum seekers. He made it very clear, and Bob Carr was right on that point. Bob Carr was wrong on a lot of things, but he was right on that point. Unfortunately the Labor Party in opposition has not taken his advice, and that is part of the reason we are having this debate and part of the reason that Scott Morrison has had to respond—because of the way the Labor Party combined with the Greens to abolish temporary protection visas, which I will come to in a moment.

Let us be absolutely clear. When we hear the Greens talking about the number of people in detention, let us remember that when the Howard government left office there were no children in detention. After six years of a Labor-Greens government, that has radically changed, and that is the fundamental problem that the coalition now has to address. It is not because we take some relish in this—we have to do this. This is an issue of significant national importance.

It did not have to be like this, because the policies of the former Howard government worked. The Labor Party, in conjunction with the Greens, egged on by the Greens and supported by the Greens at every turn, sought to dismantle that effective refugee program. When you dismantle it, you get negative, adverse consequences—as we have seen—that involve thousands of people taking the dangerous journey. Unfortunately, we know more than 1,000 people have not made it to Australia and have perished at sea trying to come to this country because the policy settings changed and the former government opened up a situation where the sugar was back on the table. Bob Carr and others in the Labor Party have recognised this—at the very end Kevin Rudd tried to recognise this—but Labor in opposition is taking a different approach, and they took it when they disallowed temporary protection visas.

I will go the point of temporary protection visas. The government acted swiftly to ensure that none of the 33,000 people who arrived in Australia illegally by boat under Labor's watch and were yet to be processed will be granted a permanent visa, despite the Greens and Labor disallowing temporary protection visas. Unlike Labor and the Greens, the coalition will never act to honour the promise of a people smuggler by providing their customers with permanent visas in Australia. We got to this point after Labor and the Greens voted to disallow temporary protection visas, in defiance of the mandate for this measure from the Australian people. Minister Morrison used his powers under section 85 of the Migration Act to immediately cap the number of onshore permanent protection visas available to be granted in 2013-14 at the 1,650 issued prior to the swearing in of the Abbott government. The government's actions mean that no further permanent protection visas can be granted to any onshore applicants this financial year, thereby denying permanent residence to any of the 33,000 people onshore in Australia who arrived illegally by boat on Labor's watch and honouring our promise to the Australian people.

That is where we have been forced by the reckless actions of the Labor Party, combining with the Greens in this chamber, to prevent the coalition from taking the necessary steps to get our migration program back under control. That is what the Australian people expect, and that is what the Australian people deserve. We have seen what happens when you lose control. We have seen the unprecedented cost, the chaos and the tragedy. Under Labor, more than 50,000 people arrived illegally on over 800 boats and more than 1,100 people tragically perished at sea after people smugglers' boats sank. More than 6,000 children have had their lives put at risk by making the dangerous journey to Australia. More than 14,800 desperate people have been denied precious resettlement places under our Offshore Humanitarian Program because those places were taken by people who arrived illegally by boat. This is an important point to make when we hear the arguments from those on the Left, particularly in this case from the Greens, who now lament that there are children in detention, when they contributed to the policy mix that dismantled the program which left no children in detention. No children were in detention at the end of the Howard government under the policies that they opposed. They opposed them and then they sought to dismantle them. We now have the tragic consequences of that and now, as the coalition does its best to try and fix that, at every turn we are frustrated by those opposite—and that is fundamental here.

But, when we talk about the 14,800 desperate people who have been denied a resettlement place, that is absolutely at the heart of this argument and that is one point that the Greens cannot ever answer, because the first question you have to ask yourself is: do you put a cap on the number of refugees that Australia takes? Ninety-nine per cent of the population would say, yes, you have to have a cap. We can have legitimate arguments about what that cap should be at any given time, but I would make the case that Australia has always been generous in the number of refugees that it takes. We can argue at the margins about how many that should be, but we have always been generous by international standards in how many we take.

If you agree that you have to cap it and if you agree that it is not unlimited and that there has to be a cap and that it has to be managed, then you must manage it. That is the fundamental difference between the coalition's approach and that of those opposite. That means having a suite of measures which says to people: 'If you get on a boat, if you take that dangerous journey, there won't be a permanent settlement in Australia at the end of it. That is not the way to come to Australia.' There are many more refugees in the world than we can take and therefore we have to make choices, and when we see the Greens' view of the world prevailing it is the people smugglers who get to choose. It is they who are choosing who comes to this country; it is not the Australian people and it is not the Australian government. It is not done on the basis of need; it is done on the basis of who can get to this country.

That should not be the basis of your immigration program or your humanitarian program. It should not be on the basis of who is able to make it by boat to this country. So the coalition has made it very, very clear that if you come illegally you will not get permanent settlement in this country. That is the only way we can properly manage this issue, because as soon as you change that equation—as soon as you say, 'If you get here you might get an advantage over those who are waiting in refugee camps'—then people will take that journey and they will do it in their thousands. We were told by the Labor Party, when they started dismantling the process, that the reason the additional arrivals were coming was push factors. They were arguing that it had nothing to do with the policy settings of the Australian government, that it was all about external factors—as if there were not push factors during the Howard government, as if there was not significant unrest in other parts of the world that was pushing people.

Unfortunately, there are always push factors. There are many parts of the world which are not peaceful. There are many parts of the world where people are persecuted for all sorts of reasons. So there are always push factors, unfortunately, and that is one of the reasons why we have to have a generous refugee program. But the Labor Party argued that it was just the push factors and it had nothing to do with the policies. Well, we know that they were wrong not just because of the experience and not just because we can point to the statistics of how many people arrived by boat after they changed the policies. We know they were wrong because they acknowledged it by changing their policies. They acknowledged that policies in Australia actually do matter, that there are pull factors, that there are incentives. People smugglers do respond to the policies of the Australian government, and when we get it wrong, as the Labor Party did with their Greens coalition partners, the consequences are tragic: the people smugglers respond, and more people get on boats. That is the legacy that Scott Morrison and Michaelia Cash and the Australian government are now seeking to deal with.

I think there is a particular aspect too of the Greens' position on this which does need to be highlighted, and I know the minister did highlight it. It is this issue in relation to the disallowance of temporary protection visas and the consequences of that. The consequences now are that the work rights that would have flowed under temporary protection visas do not exist. They do not exist, so the Greens, along with Labor, have voted for a situation where these thousands of people who are in this country are now in a situation where they cannot work. Anyone who gives that a moment's thought will see the kind of social consequences that can go with that. That is another legacy of getting it wrong. That is not compassionate.

Senator Hanson-Young interjecting—

You have made the decision. The Greens have made the decision that temporary protection visas, which would have allowed work rights, are not going to be allowed. We see the false compassion.

Senator Hanson-Young interjecting—

It is not compassion. Your policy is not compassionate. The Greens' policies lead to people getting on boats. They lead to people getting on boats, and they have voted for a situation where these thousands of people have been drawn here by that dismantling of those policies and they are now confining them to a situation where they will not have work rights. That is the policy that they have now put in place through their votes in this Senate chamber, and the squawking we hear across the Senate is reflective of the shame that they should feel for the policies that they have advocated. The Greens have advocated them; the Labor Party have implemented them when they were in government; and our job now is not to follow that view of the world. As Bob Carr rightly said—Bob Carr got it spot-on with this issue; he got it spot-on—the Greens' left view of the world is not the way to go; it is not the way that a responsible government goes. We do expect that from the Greens. They will always advocate for those irresponsible policies. The Labor Party have chopped and changed on this issue. They chopped and changed in government, and they appear to be chopping and changing in opposition.

In conclusion, I simply restate that we now need to be able to get on with the job. The coalition have a mandate to stop the boats and to regain control of our migration program and of our humanitarian program. That is the task that all Australians of goodwill want to see. We do not want to see people getting on boats. We do not want to see people perishing at sea. We do not want to see people languishing in this country without work rights. We want to have a controlled migration program. That is what we need to do, that is what we should be allowed to do, and the kinds of stunts we see with bills like this from the Greens do not assist that. That is why this bill should not be supported.

Kate Lundy (ACT, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the Senate for this opportunity today to speak on the Migration Amendment (Visa Maximum Numbers Determinations) Bill 2013, and I acknowledge the work of Senator Hanson-Young to bring this bill before the parliament.

The bill before this place proposes to amend the Migration Act 1958 so that instruments made under section 85 would be subject to disallowance. As it has already been expressed, section 85 of the act allows the minister to determine the maximum number of visas that can be granted in a particular subclass in a specified program year. Visa limit determinations made under this part of the act are not subject to disallowance. This is because 44(2) of the Legislative Instruments Act 2003 specifically states that legislative instruments made under the part of the Migration Act 1958 cannot be disallowed.

As Senator Hanson-Young has explained, the purpose of this bill is to override the determination made by the government on 2 December via legislative instrument which caps the number of protection visas that can be granted for the 2014 financial year and to ensure that changes to visa limits are subject to parliamentary scrutiny.

In outlining our position on the bill, the Hawke Labor government introduced capping the visa program numbers back in 1988 as part of a suite of significant reforms in response to a major report from the committee to advise on Australia's immigration policies titled Immigration: a commitment to Australia. The reforms also included the division of the immigration program into three main streams—families, skilled and humanitarian—and the establishment of the Bureau of Immigration Research. Since its introduction, capping has been critical in the balancing and planning of Australia's migration program. It works by limiting the number of visas issued in some categories while increasing the proportion of visas issued in others. The point is the government has control.

As explained clearly by the Department of Immigration and Citizenship back in 2010, the Migration Act 1958 allows the minister to cap or limit the number of visas which can be granted each year in a particular visa subclass. This limit or cap applies only for the migration program year in the year in which it is introduced. When a cap is reached, applicants then wait in a queue for visa grant consideration in a following year, subject to places becoming available. This means that when the number of visas set by the minister for a visa class before the migration program year has been reached no further visas can be granted in that program year.

The capping power comes under section 85 of the Migration Act, and instruments made under section 85 of this act are not subject to disallowance, as I said. As mentioned, the bill before this place proposes to amend the act so that instruments are subject to disallowance, with the effect of this bill being that any decision by the minister to cap a certain visa class could be disallowed by the parliament. This would apply to all instruments made under section 85, including those relating to family and skill streams, not just the capping of protection and humanitarian visas.

Labor has been supportive of the mechanisms available to manage the migration intake, in particular visa subclasses, and it is for this reason that Labor will not be supporting the bill as it currently stands. As my colleague Senator Stephens expressed, if the Greens wish to put forward a proposal on reform, the opposition would consider such a proposal on its merits—if and when such a proposal were to be put forward.

I do acknowledge that this bill comes in response to the coalition government's decision to cap the number of onshore permanent protection visas for this financial year. This means that no further onshore permanent protection visas will be granted until the new financial year, leaving some 30,000 waiting to be processed. Let me be clear about this: Labor not supporting the bill we have before us today by no means condones the irrational decisions or misuse of the intent of the discretionary powers under section 85 of the Migration Act by the relevant minister. The decision of the government minister on 2 December means that there are going to be nearly 30,000 people being supported by the government without their status being resolved. This is policy on the run from a government that has lost control, and it is possible now to observe a government that can only be described as faking it when it comes to having a managed immigration process.

The government's border security policy is in disarray, and the government circus of secrecy on border protection and asylum seekers continues. The government will not tell us how many boats it has turned back, it will not tell us how many boats it has bought in Indonesian fishing villages, and the government continues to refuse to answer questions regarding the status of tow-backs, turnarounds and the use of community wardens. Freezing refugee claims from being processed is yet another distraction from this disarray of the Abbott government's failed attempts to manage the humanitarian and asylum seeker issue. I believe the Australian public deserves better, and the Labor opposition has continually tried to hold the government to account for its appalling attempt at secrecy around these issues. I will give you an example: the government's figures demonstrating the so-called success of Operation Sovereign Borders failed to take into account the impact of the PNG arrangement implemented under the former Labor government. Having been in office for more than 12 weeks now and having just visited Papua New Guinea, Minister Morrison has confirmed that he has not changed a single clause of the agreement put in place under the Labor government. There is no denying it is a very tough policy designed to break the people smugglers' model, but in the fortnight prior to the election, on 7 September 2013, there was an average of two boat arrivals per week. This is precisely the same average rate of boat arrivals, according to Minister Morrison.

Labor's PNG solution appears to be having an impact, and yet we still have a coalition government so intent on using this as a divisive issue within the Australian community that it cannot acknowledge a positive impact. As we said when we were in government, the Labor Party were focussed on the need for a durable regional solution—a partnership with our South-East Asian neighbours to destroy the people smugglers' model and support the UNHCR in managing a strong and compassionate offshore humanitarian program.

We sought to do this acting on the advice of an independent expert working group in an effort to extract this issue from the torturous grip of the pejorative politics the coalition were so intent on playing. Alas, this was to no avail. The Abbott government, then in opposition, ramped up their divisive approach with the evidence of this manifesting itself in their opposition to the proposed Malaysia arrangement. With a great deal of gall the then opposition spokespeople, Mr Morrison and Senator Cash, mounted their case on the fact that Malaysia was not a signatory to the UN Convention relating to the Status of Refugees. It is important to remember this, in the current debates and as we see the scenario unfold, in the context of the Abbott government's actions and their language and decisions in relation to asylum seekers.

I would like to take Senator Seselja to task on his claims, amongst many, that the coalition are intent on optimising pathways for refugees coming through a managed offshore program. This can be completely unpicked when you look at the coalition's policy of reducing the refugee intake from 20,000 to 13,750. The coalition had the opportunity to demonstrate goodwill in this regard by maintaining the higher number of refugees through our humanitarian program, but in a contradictory way they reduced it. Claims of supporting so-called legitimate pathways to Australia—those through managed offshore processing centres with the support of the UNHCR and other NGOs—are completely undermined by the government's actions.

It is worthwhile taking the time, as we are presented with opportunities such as Senator Hanson-Young's bill, to hold the government to account for their hypocrisy and their counterclaim that somehow Labor's efforts in government were ill-motivated. Nothing could be further from the truth. Having been involved in the portfolio, as Minister for Multicultural Affairs at the time, I know the effort we put in and the lengths we went to, in the first instance, to extract the divisive politics from a vexing issue. This is an emotional issue for many Australians—be they refugees, supporters of refugees or at the other end of the spectrum. It is this emotion and fear that the coalition choose to exploit in their continuing approach to asylum seekers. In contrast, Labor's approach was to manage soundly and effectively by looking at the long-term durable and sustainable arrangements needed in our region.

Our approach involved working with near neighbours, including Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, Nauru, Malaysia, Thailand and many others, where we know there is an increasing flow of asylum seekers and people seeking a better home to give their kids a better chance. We also know that the coalition made blatantly untrue claims that when the Howard government left office there were no children in detention and therefore the increasing numbers during Labor's period of government are evidence of monumental failure. We know circumstances changed during that time and that Labor, in working with our regional partners and taking advice from an independent working group, did its utmost to extract the divisive party politics that have come to characterise this issue.

This is probably most evident in the discussion around temporary protection visas. Labor's stance on temporary protection visas is longstanding and very well known. When we were elected to government in 2007, we abolished the TPV scheme introduced by the Howard government. We knew that the issuing of temporary protection visas would remove what was seen as a very unfair system when people's status was unresolved. We know from looking at the numbers that temporary protection visas did not provide the disincentive the then Howard government and the now Abbott government claim. When we put the PNG arrangement in place no-one was to be resettled in Australia. The use of temporary protection visas would undermine that disincentive through the PNG Regional Resettlement Arrangement put in place under the Labor government. As I said, these are extremely tough policies, but they show that the use of TPVs undermines this approach—an approach which, on the evidence, appears to be working, without acknowledgement from the Abbott government of course. The PNG arrangement took Australia as an option off the table. That is what has made a difference. We need to smash the people-smuggling model, and Labor's policies were intent on doing that. We need to put in place a very real disincentive for people to get on dangerous vessels.

I would like to conclude, as my colleague Senator Stephens did, by reflecting on the great virtues of having a strong migration system. We heard last night the personal migration stories of two new Labor senators and their parents. As a former Minister for Multicultural Affairs, I have heard so many moving stories of first, second and third generation migrants who were able to tell the story of their parents' journeys in very moving and substantive terms. These stories are part of Australia's story. Our history will continue to be informed and enriched by the life experiences of people who find their way to our country by whatever means. Our attitude towards migrants, be they humanitarian entrants, skilled migrants or entrepreneurs who find their way here because they think that Australia offers the best platform for them to contribute to civil society one way or another, is something we can be extremely proud of. We know now as an opposition, as we did when we were in government, that it is our utmost responsibility to have an orderly migration system, certainly; but it must be a migration system that serves the needs of Australia first and foremost.

When you look at all of the evidence of the civic and economic contributions of humanitarian entrants to our country, that contribution is immense. One of the things we were able to do in government was to conduct a series of research exercises to quantify the kinds of contributions that have come from our different cohorts of migrants over the more recent generations. One of the most heartening pieces of research that I read was the documentation of the contribution of humanitarian entrants to civil and economic life in this country. It is profound. They have a higher propensity to invest in their own education and their children's education and to volunteer in the community.

The other issue, of course, is the importance of finding work. As Senator Dastyari and Senator Tillem both reflected in their respective stories of their parents coming to Australia—fleeing very difficult circumstances elsewhere—the right to employment was first and foremost a key determinant in their ability to settle their families successfully and to raise their children with such astounding results.

I would like to close on a very positive note. All of us in this parliament, and certainly in this place, have a responsibility to make sure that, when we do reflect on our humanitarian program and the vexing issue of stopping people smuggling and supporting a strong and sustainable humanitarian program, we do so in the best possible spirit that underscores who we are as Australians. Humanitarian entrants, asylum seekers and refugees all have a story to tell. They are all very human stories and they should sit at the forefront of our minds when we consider such matters.

Penny Wright (SA, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise in support of the Migration Amendment (Visa Maximum Numbers Determinations) Bill 2013. This Australian Greens bill amends the Migration Act 1958 so that legislative instruments designated under section 85, which relates to a limit on visas, can be disallowed. In other words, this bill seeks to ensure that the decisions made by the minister about visa limits are ultimately accountable to this parliament. This bill will give the parliament a final say on visa caps and freezes and not leave it in the hands of a minister who has a track record of capricious and punitive decision making.

Why are the Australian Greens introducing this important bill? Last week, the Minister for Immigration and Border Protection, Scott Morrison, made a decision which placed a cap, a limit, on the number of protection visas for the 2013-14 financial year. His decision will affect many, many people—the 30,000 asylum seekers who are currently waiting to be resettled in Australia. The freeze is retrospective. That means that, as the cap of 1,650 protection visas to be issued for this financial year has already been reached, it leaves those who have already been determined to be refugees in a state of limbo and prolonged uncertainty. Of those 30,000 asylum seekers, 21,000 have been legally determined to be refugees and are living in the community on bridging visas.

Let us go back to basics and pause and remind ourselves what it means to be a legally-determined refugee. What does it require? A refugee is a person who has been found to have fled their country of origin. It is a person who has fled because they have a well-grounded fear of persecution because of their race, their religion, their nationality, their membership of a particular social group or their political opinion. It is also a person who has been found to be unable to rely on the protection of the authorities in their country of origin, and so they have fled—seeking refuge, seeking a sanctuary.

The Greens do not support bridging visas, because they condemn applicants to a state of limbo. These vulnerable people are not allowed to work and may only receive temporary or reduced government financial support—financial support which is not adequate to keep body and soul together.

I would like to tell you something about what it is like to live in a state of uncertainty or limbo. This is based on a meeting I had with a young constituent of mine, a young man of 20. I will call him J, because his name starts with the letter 'J'. He approached me recently. He came to Australia in 2010 when he was 17, and he was one of the lucky asylum seekers, in a sense, because he was granted a permanent visa to remain here indefinitely. J was a Hazara refugee from Afghanistan. While living in Afghanistan with his family—his parents and his four siblings—his father disappeared and it is strongly believed that he was murdered by the Taliban because he was transporting government wheat in his truck.

Prior to that and thereafter, J and his family were constantly threatened because they wanted to vote and because they were going to school. Finally, he tells me, his mother beseeched him to leave. She was so fearful that he would die like his father that she beseeched him to leave, and yet he also told me that, when it came to the point of him leaving, she was in tears and strongly wanting him to stay. She was what every mother would be in that situation: she was trying to save his life and yet so sad to see her son heading off wherever, not knowing whether she would ever see him again.

Now J lives in Adelaide. He works two jobs, and his mother and his four siblings were able to escape Afghanistan and are living in Quetta in Pakistan. It is a place of extreme risk, and they are living on a very low income such that they can barely feed themselves and keep body and soul together. I saw J because one of his employers at his two jobs brought him to me because he was absolutely despairing of J's future and also his welfare. He noticed that J was not concentrating very well at work—he had always been a very hard worker at the manual job—and discovered that J had not eaten for 48 hours because he was so desperately trying to save money to send to his family and also to try to bring them to Australia. He was actually extremely malnourished. So he brought him to me and wanted J's story to be told.

J's anxiety and despondency is totally compounded by his fear for his family in Pakistan and the constant knowledge that the money that he is able to send to them from two jobs while also contributing to a household of other asylum seekers who are not employed and not able to work means he has not only no money for himself but also insufficient money to send to his family. When I met him in September J was despairing because he was fully aware of the new government's posturing on immigration and that it boded very ill for his ability to reunite with his family here and for the asylum seekers with whom he shared his home who did not have permanent visas.

I want to say that these punitive policies do not work as a deterrent. No matter how well people like J understand the punitive measures our government is imposing, they are always going to weigh those up with the conditions in their country of origin. When someone is facing death, rape, persecution or torture, they ultimately will have no choice but to vote with their feet. All these punitive policies do is compound the suffering they have already experienced when they come to our country seeking refuge.

For J, his fear for his mother and his siblings' safety is the reason he wants to bring them here. It is that simple. He is an extremely impressive young man. He is an intelligent young man. He would love to study, particularly maths and science. Whether he will ever have a chance to do that in Australia I do not know. He is a loving son and brother. He feels incredibly responsible and loyal to his family and he feels intense distress not only at the dangers they are in but also at the uncertainty in the area of asylum seeking and refugees in Australia.

This decision by the immigration minister will affect 30,000 asylum seekers. As I said, 21,000 of them are refugees and the remaining 9,000 are being held in detention centres or community detention. As we know, the United Nations has recently slammed the conditions of Australia's offshore detention camps. Its High Commissioner for Human Rights visited the Nauru and Manus Island detention centres in October last year, and the findings were alarming. They said the centres did not comply with international law standards. What a shameful thing for Australia to have a UN representative saying we do not comply with international law standards. In particular they found that they do not provide a fair, efficient and expeditious system for assessing refugee claims and are uncertain and capricious rather than operating under a fair and reliable rule of law that we in Australia would demand for ourselves. They do not provide safe and humane conditions of treatment in detention and they do not provide adequate and timely solutions for refugees.

The implications of this government's freeze on protection visas are devastating. Asylum seekers, including women and children who are being detained in immigration or community detention—some for more than four years—and those on bridging visas will never be granted permanent protection in Australia. I have to ask how deeply these Australian governments—and there is a poor track record on the part of the previous government too; let's be really honest about that—are willing to sink in our name before they realise that cruelty does not work and that it is not the way that we want to behave on the international stage in Australia.

By keeping the world's most vulnerable people, who have come seeking our help, in a state of permanent limbo, the government is compounding refugees' suffering, including increased risk of mental and physical health problems. We are already seeing those effects amongst asylum seekers, of course. I think we are all now aware of the 7.30 report about Manus Island in relation to the findings of Amnesty International. Last night the 7.30 program aired a report with information from AI's researchers and translators who accessed Manus Island last month. These professional people who have seen the best and worst of human rights being upheld or abused around the world called the conditions in our detention centres 'cruel, inhumane, degrading and violating prohibitions against torture'. That is Australia. That is our responsibility in 2013.

One asylum seeker said: 'I get about four to five hours sleep a night due to tension and I have nothing to keep me busy. I'm just thinking and thinking through the night. I'm mostly thinking about how I can't do anything for my family.' Amnesty's team has described appalling living conditions on Manus Island, with overcrowding, a lack of medical services and little to no access to communication with the outside world—telephones or the internet. There is a lack of basic things: a lack of soap for the toilets and water in spite of requests of the medical staff.

As the Australian Greens spokesperson for mental health, I am particularly concerned about the entirely foreseeable impacts on these people's mental health. It is a matter of grave concern to me. We are already seeing a wide range of mental health problems, with depression, anxiety and lack of sleep compounding the impacts of the trauma that these people have already experienced and that has led to them fleeing their countries of origin in the first place, particularly where they have been subject to war, conflict and torture. Amnesty reports found that the mental health facilities on Manus Island are not adequate, and that is entirely consistent with the lack of support for people's health generally, with water rations amongst the people living on Manus Island reported to be as little as 500 millilitres per person per day.

The UN have particularly slammed the Nauru detention centre, saying it is rat infested, cramped and very hot. This is a place where people will be living indefinitely. They called for an end to sending children, particularly unaccompanied children, to these detention centres. The UNHCR's Richard Towle has said:

The toughness of the physical conditions is superimposed on a mandatory detention environment and that compounds people's uncertainty.

It plays with their minds. He said:

If not addressed very carefully, we could see a fairly rapid degradation of psycho-social and physical health if people don't have a fairly early determination of their fate and future.

Australia, I am saying it is reprehensible to treat our most vulnerable fellow human beings in this way. What are we doing?

The Senate's decision last week to scrap temporary protection visas was an important step in the right direction. To me it was a way of drawing a line in the sand and saying, 'We have sunk low but we will sink no further.' I was very proud to vote with the Australian Greens against the reintroduction of temporary protection visas, because we know that they do not work as a deterrent. They may be punitive, but they do not work if the proposed objective is to deter people. In 1999, when temporary protection visas were introduced, they did nothing to stop the flow of asylum seekers to Australia by boat. In fact, they had the reverse effect. In the two years prior to the introduction of TPVs, 1,078 people arrived by boat. In the first two years following the introduction of TPVs, 8,312 people arrived by boat. Not only did they not deter the new arrivals but the devastating impact of denying family reunion was that more women and children were forced to take that perilous boat journey to Australia, which often ends in tragedy as we know.

So, denied the ability to issue temporary protection visas, what was the response of our statesman-like immigration minister and Prime Minister? We are currently seeing the very unedifying spectacle of punishment for punishment's sake. It is tit for tat. It is a vindictive move by Scott Morrison and Tony Abbott. They have made a cruel decision to freeze the number of protection visas, deliberately targeting the vulnerable human beings who are most affected by this whole sorry situation. The freeze will condemn these refugees to a life of fear and uncertainty, and it leaves open the possibility of returning vulnerable refugees to the very dangers that they originally fled from.

The long-term separation from a person's family and homeland and the impacts of arbitrary indefinite detention in cruel conditions, particularly for the children who are in offshore detention, will only add to the disastrous mental health impacts we are already seeing. This is a far cry from the kind of Australia that I grew up in and that I believed I would be seeing. This is a far cry from the compassion and the decency that I think are at the heart of most Australians, particularly when they know the human faces and the human stories of the people that we are treating in this way.

I would just like to share with you another story about the effects of these policies on human beings so that we cannot turn away and pretend that we do not know what this does. Each of these 30,000 people that we are talking about is an individual with a human story and a human context. Recently I visited a small primary school in South Australia. It is one of the primary schools that would benefit from an injection of funds if the Gonski formula is properly applied, because it is an area of disadvantage, but it is a joyous place to visit because it is inclusive, respectful and incredibly diverse. It is a wonderful place with wonderful staff and wonderful families, and they have a new arrivals program there where they welcome children who are living with families on bridging visas who are living with this uncertainty now. I was able to visit one of the classes, with little children who had come from all corners of the world with their families, fleeing persecution and looking for a new future in Australia. These children were being given intensive English language classes in a year-long program before being able to move into mainstream schooling. The joy, excitement, endeavour and enthusiasm of those little kids in that class—this was a class of children between about five and seven—were wonderful.

One of their teachers was relaying to me how the uncertainty of what the families live with is so adverse in its effects on those children. They come, they create and they have a family and a community at that school among the other children. There is a real culture of acceptance, inclusivity, respect and joy in that school. So they make their connections and they make their friends and then, at the flick of a pen after a capricious decision, they can be moved at any time and taken out of that school. She has seen that happen from time to time, and it means that the children—little kids like any little kids who have been born in Australia—have those basic needs of community, connection and friendship and then, having come already from a traumatised background, are potentially just ripped out of that school. They are living with that uncertainty in their families, and their mental health, their wellbeing and their ability to grow up and reach their potential are severely curtailed by that. She was passionate in talking to me about the issues that they see every day. Those teachers are working so hard to try to create an environment of nurturing and care for these vulnerable little kids.

I feel so ashamed sometimes when I think that this is the country over which we are presiding at the moment and that this is apparently the sort of future that this government and those who would see a punitive regime in place would be happy to see. So it is imperative that we as Australian people—members of the community—make sure that the government knows that it must change its way of thinking about asylum seekers and refugees, because we are a caring nation and we should care about those who wish to build a new and secure life in Australia and are putting their trust in this nation.

The immigration minister's powers under section 85 are significant. He may determine the maximum number of visas that people can be granted in a particular subclass in any specified program. While all ministers have discretionary powers within their portfolios to make decisions without the need to put everything before parliament, these particular decisions are so far-reaching and of such consequence to so many powerless people's lives that they require scrutiny. This government has demonstrated an unprecedented capacity for cruelty and retaliation, and for that reason I think it has lost its right to be trusted with this degree of unqualified power. By making the immigration minister accountable to the parliament through this Australian Greens bill, we may ultimately be able to make him accountable to what I consider to be truly Australian virtues—those of basic decency and simple compassion.

Anne Ruston (SA, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I too rise to speak on the Migration Amendment (Visa Maximum Numbers Determinations) Bill 2013. Before I go into explaining why I am not able to support this bill put forward by the Greens, I would like to comment on some of the comments made by previous speakers. Senator Lundy has accused the coalition of playing politics with a very serious issue of migration. She also took Senator Seselja to task for saying that we are seeking to optimise the pathways for migration to this country. It is a really tough thing for them to be making those sorts of comments when you look at why we are even debating this bill today. One thing that is absolutely sure is that no member of this chamber—whether from the Labor Party, the National Party, the Liberal Party or the Greens or either of the two independent crossbenchers—would not say that we want to stop the boats and we want to stop people dying at sea. I do not think anybody in this House or in the green House down below would be able say that those are not goals we are all trying to achieve. I think we all agree to a large extent on what the actual problem is. Nobody, but nobody, wants to see a fellow human being persecuted or suffering in their country. Nobody likes to see women or children being discriminated against and nobody likes to think that they cannot be safe in their home. I do not think there is any question at all that we all agree that there is a problem that requires solving. To suggest that we have playing politics with something as serious as this quite demeans the whole debate.

Just because we have some differing views about how we should address this problem does not mean that we are playing politics. If we all agree that we need to find a solution, it is about time that we put some facts on the table about what has occurred in the past and about the things that have proved to work in the past. I know Senator Hanson-Young has long stood in this place advocating that we should open our borders and let everybody come in. She is entirely entitled to her opinion in that regard, but my view is that the one thing we must do is to stop encouraging people who are making money out of the poor and vulnerable by making them pay money to put them on boats. We have to target our actions and policies towards ensuring people smugglers are the ones who are prevented from continuing this hideous trade of trafficking in people. We went to the election with the very clear intention of reintroducing a multifaceted policy package to prevent more people putting themselves on rickety boats and sailing off into the wide blue ocean only to risk their lives and the lives of their wives and their children. All that really achieved was putting money into smugglers pockets. On the basis of an overwhelming mandate to introduce our package of measures, it seems a little odd that we are debating once again another action from the other side—from the teams that lost the election, that did not win the election. Every time we try to introduce something that we have gone to the Australian people with and they have given us the mandate to implement, it seems a little odd that the other parties will attempt to undertake some action in this chamber to prevent us from implementing the policies that we have been asked by the Australian people to implement.

I wonder where this whole exercise is going to end. Every time the Greens do not like something that a coalition government or minister does, are they going to introduce an instrument into this chamber to prevent us from actually governing this country? There has to come a point where they stop doing it and accept the fact that they lost the election, that the coalition overwhelmingly won the election, that we have the right to govern and that we must be given the opportunity to govern.

This particular bill we are debating today is quite clear about what we were trying to do in last week's temporary protection visas policy that we tried to implement and that was kiboshed in this place. We all have to realise the implications of that when it comes to our ability to do what we said we were going to do and that is stop people getting on rickety boats and coming to Australia. By preventing us reintroducing temporary protection visas last week—which, I might say, would have enabled the visa holders to access 100 per cent of any relevant benefits they could have in Australia—those opposite have denied them that possibility as well as the capacity to be able to work. They are now trying to prevent the 33,000 people, I believe, who arrived in Australia as irregular maritime arrivals under the Labor government staying in Australia indefinitely.

What we are talking about here is migration—immigration into Australia. There are so many positive stories that we could be telling in this place about migration in Australia over the years. It was only yesterday that we had the pleasure of sitting here and listening to our two new senators, Senator Dastyari and Senator Tillem, telling of their experiences when they came to Australia as migrants a number of years ago. They were fantastic stories, but they still came by sensible and proper channels and means. If you look at the millions of people around the world who are seeking to flee from the countries they were born in, I think you have to realise that, unless Australia has the intention of doubling its population overnight, we have to have a sensible, properly managed, consistent and fair migration policy in place.

I look at the community that I live in and the marvellous migrants who have come to Australia by all sorts of different means and for all sorts of different reasons. They have made a wonderful culture in my community. We have a huge component of Italians, a huge component of Greeks, many Turks, Vietnamese and Indians, and that has turned my local community into a really rich tapestry of all the sorts of things that these cultures are able to bring. So I do not think that anybody can say that we, as a government and as a country over the years, have not been a very proactive and welcoming country for migrants from all over the world.

If we want to have an ongoing and sensible migration platform and program, we have to put some fairness and some equity back into it. Looking over the last six years, 50,000 or so people have arrived in this country by irregular means. Those 50,000 people obviously end up ahead of the people who, having put in their applications, are sitting somewhere else in the world and waiting for them to be processed. They are sitting there waiting while these irregular maritime arrivals are jumping the queue.

I would like to quickly tell a story. Like Senator Wright, we all have stories of people around the world who we have had some involvement with or knowledge of and who have had a pretty tough time, but I can tell an alternative story. There are two young boys whose auntie and cousin live in Adelaide. I have had the pleasure of spending some time with Marbor Tut and his family in Australia. They are wonderful people and they came here by a proper migration channel as refugees from the Sudan. Marbor's mother had a sister, and her sister and her husband both unfortunately contracted AIDS in the Sudan. They had two very young boys. The mother and father have subsequently died and left these two young boys as orphans. Keny and Awakeer Majur are currently in a Sudanese refugee camp waiting for the opportunity to have their applications to come to Australia under a family reunion program processed. Over the last six years, I have tried to help the Tuts get these two young boys to Australia. Every time we went to the immigration department, they were so overwhelmed and so swamped with dealing with the massive number of irregular maritime arrivals they were required to process that there was no time for these two young boys.

Sadly, even today, these two young boys are still stuck in a Sudanese refugee camp. We are working very hard with the minister to see if we can get them to Australia, basically, before they die. The life expectancy of a child in a Sudanese refugee camp is very short. Very few of them ever leave the refugee camp or survive to a time where they would reach adulthood. I think we can all be terribly sympathetic—I am too; I have heard some terrible stories and the stories that Senator Wright informed this house of a moment ago about the people that she had had the privilege of being involved with. There are some terrible stories; there is no question that there are some terrible stories, but we have to remember that there are terrible stories all over the world, not just of those people arriving by boat.

In the hearings of the expert panel on asylum seekers that the previous government put together, Mr Aristotle, Mr Houston and Mr L'Estrange all made the very clear point that we needed to have a migration policy of no advantage. What we see with this bill is that it really seeks to create advantage. It is really saying that, if you can somehow—no matter how desperate you are to undertake the process—manage to get yourself from Indonesia, Malaysia or wherever you might be coming from, onto a rickety boat somewhere in international waters and rescued by an Australian Navy vessel, then you are going to have a better chance and be given an advantage over and above my two little boys who are sitting in a Sudanese refugee camp.

I think we need to recognise that it is not just the people in this place but also the expert panel that was put together by the previous government who came out and said that we need to be very careful that we do not apply an advantage rule for one lot of people that discriminates against another lot of people. I put that on the record because I think that nobody around here would question the strength and the experience of the three eminent gentlemen who made up that panel or the fact that they come up with that particular decision.

Senator Wright also made the comment that punitive measures cannot work. I suppose the question that Senator Wright probably needs to answer is about punitive measures not working. I do not necessarily agree that they do not. I think the fact that we saw such an extraordinary decrease in the number of boats arriving in Australia immediately following the election of this coalition government probably does suggest that punitive measures do have some meaning—but the punitive measures need to have real actions on the other end of them. We all know that if you think you are going to get away with something you are more inclined to try and do it—that is just human nature. So I think to say that punitive measures do not work is probably something of an oversimplification. I think that they do work.

But in the sense of saying that these punitive measures do not work the only thing that we can really refer back to in arguing this case are the facts of the matter, that the day after the coalition government was elected to this place the boats started to stop coming. By introducing measures like this particular bill to which we are referring today we seek to prevent the minister from having an instrument in his cabinet of things that he is able to use to govern this country. What we would be doing is simply encouraging the problem to continue by taking away another of the measures by which the minister has the capacity to be able to control the problem that he is trying to deal with on behalf of the Australian people. I agree with some of the stuff that Senator Wright said—the tragedy that is occurring out there in the wider world—but I certainly cannot agree that punitive measures do not work, because in the past obviously it has been proven that they do.

Just for the record, it is really worth pointing out that since the abolition of temporary protection visas in August 2008 more than 50,000 people arrived in Australia—some would say by illegal means, but certainly by irregular means and not by the normal migration channels that we have discussed already. That was more than 800 boats, and the cost to the budget in migration was $11 billion. That is the blow-out to the budget—$11 billion. Imagine what good we could have done in Australia over that period of time if that $11 billion had been able to go into other programs instead of just rescuing people from the sea? I imagine that a large component of that $11 billion was the diversion of our Navy, which should have been out there doing other things rather than running around the oceans and plucking people out of the sea. Basically, the previous government just said to the people smugglers over there, 'Well, come on guys, come on down; we're happy for you to come,' and in the process of doing that wasted $11 billion of Australian taxpayers' hard-earned money.

But definitely more tragic than the $11 billion are the 1,100 who lost their lives during that period. There is no price that you can put on a human life, although some overseas seek to do so. So we have a situation where in a very short period of time we had 50,000 arrivals, $11 billion and 800 boats, and 1,100 people have died in the process. That is a record that no government wants to have, and I can assure you that when this coalition government went to the people of Australia it was for the very reason that we did not want to have a record that said that. We said that we were going to put an integrated package of measures together to allow the minister the ability to do what he needed to do to stop those boats coming and to prevent our coalition government from having the terrible record of excessive cost, chaos and absolute tragedy that the previous government will always have to wear as its legacy for its time in government.

When we came into government we had a problem. Obviously, we had a very big problem. We had a legacy caseload of 32,000 people who had arrived irregularly by boat, and more than 20,000 of those people were out in the community. I might say that of those 50,000 people who arrived in Australia by this irregular means during the term of the previous government, 8,300 of them are children. You really do have to question how we could be doing anything to encourage people who would be prepared to put the lives of 8,300 children at risk by putting them in boats that are totally unseaworthy.

I think that whilst the debate will continue, I think we need to be very clear that this is not a political debate. This is a humanitarian debate, and I think it is time that we all accepted that we have a problem and that we worked together to solve it. These kinds of kneejerk, 'I-know-better-than-you-do' types of things that we are getting from the Greens by changing legislation every time they do not like something I think are an abuse of what the Australian people sought for this place to do. I think it is about time those opposite realised the Australian people elected the coalition to govern this country and it is about time you let us govern the country.

Sam Dastyari (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I will just begin by acknowledging the work that Senator Hanson-Young has done this space, certainly advocating on behalf of those who take such tremendous risks to come to Australia. Senator, while I have not always agreed with your position, I think your passion on the issue is certainly inspiring.

I note the speech that was just delivered by Senator Ruston, and I note that it referred to some of the policies of the coalition government. I cannot help but accept that the coalition, as far as I see it, long ago dispensed with any decency on this subject. They have treated us all with contempt on this issue—contempt for public scrutiny, contempt for journalists and contempt for members of the public, and I believe contempt for those people from afar who have sought refuge, empathy and support among the people of this great country. And while I do affirm my respect and appreciation for Senator Hanson-Young and her work in this area, the Labor Party and I will not be supporting this Migration Amendment (Visa Maximum Numbers Determinations) Bill 2013 for a few reasons that I will try to summarise quickly.

As colleagues on both sides of the chamber have reminded us this morning, it was the Labor Party that introduced caps to visa programs in 1988. As my colleagues in this chamber have stated, discretionary caps allow the government of the day to determine both the quality and quantity of our migration. I think that is absolutely critical. As I said in a speech to this place yesterday, I am a very big advocate of the broad idea of increasing our overall migration levels. I think we should be looking at increasing the number of migrants we bring into this country. I am also quite supportive of the idea of increasing the number of refugees that we accept as a nation, but I believe that it has to be done as part of a coherent, whole-of-government approach and that the federal government—

John Hogg (President) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Order! Time has expired for this debate.