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

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answer given by the Minister for Employment (Senator Abetz) to a question without notice asked by Senator Hanson-Young today relating to asylum seekers from Iraq.

I asked the minister just whose decision it was to forcibly deport last week an Iraqi asylum seeker back to Iraq. The reason I ask this is that we know that the situation in Iraq is becoming worse by the day. In the last week there have been half a million Iraqis displaced as a result of the conflict. Our own Prime Minister this week described the situation as so dangerous that it is impacting on the security of the region and on the rest of the world and that the brutal attacks, the violence, are being directed towards civilia

That is what our own Prime Minister has said. Yet, last weekend, the Australian authorities deported an asylum seeker who had arrived here in Australia in 2012. That man has been sent back to Iraq in the middle of what is now a very dangerous conflict zone.

The question to Senator Abetz representing the Prime Minister was: whose decision was it to deport that man, and who made the assessment that forcibly returning him to Iraq last week was safe? Who made the assessment that it was safe to send the Iraqi asylum seeker who had come to Australia seeking refuge and protection back to a war zone? That is what has happened—in the space of a week we have deported somebody back to a conflict zone that our own Prime Minister has said is unravelling so quickly that terror is being inflicted on the country's own civilians.

The other question I had was: just how many other people have we returned to Iraq in the last month? I want to be clear about this: the man I am referring to was forcibly removed. I have the documentation right here. I have his flight itinerary, and it says that the government is removing him. So he was forcibly removed. There are, of course, other asylum seekers who are being forced to choose between the horrific conditions inside detention on Manus Island and Nauru and Christmas Island, or facing the awful circumstances of danger back in their home country.

We also need to know how many of those people have been coerced into choosing between two hells. The question for this government is: just how voluntary is it for somebody to choose between living in the inhumane hell of Manus Island and having their human rights abused there, or opting to go home and having their human rights abused there?

As one asylum seeker put it to me recently, 'I either decide to die on Manus Island or to die at home,' and that is the choice that this government is putting to these men, women and, indeed, children. So how many Iraqi asylum seekers have we deported in the last month back to a conflict zone? On what basis has it been determined that it is safe to do so? And, for the man in question, what is the government doing to ensure his safety is protected, now that he has been dumped back in the middle of a brutal, violent war, as the Prime Minister himself has identified? It is unconscionable that we are sending Iraqi asylum seekers back to these war zones. This coming Monday in this place we will vote to suspend the deportation of those people— (Time expired)

Question agreed to.