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

Tonight I want to give voice to the many hundreds of innocent men, women and children who are detained in Australia's offshore detention regimes on Manus Island and Nauru and also many of those who are detained in Australia in our onshore detention regime.

I will start with Manus and Nauru. Let us be clear about this: Australia is deliberately exposing people to harm. As a result, we have seen people murdered. We have seen people set themselves on fire. We have seen people stitch their lips together. We have seen children sexually abused. Indefinite detention of the kind that is still going on, on Manus Island and Nauru, has caused—and, tragically, continues to cause—massive psychological and physical harm to people who have done no wrong, people who have broken no law, people who have done nothing other than reach out a hand to Australia, asking for its help and seeking its protection.

The Australian government continues to flout international law. It continues to turn boats around at sea, to send desperate people to meet an unknown fate at sea or straight back into the hands of regimes they are fleeing, to arbitrary imprisonment, to torture or even to death. It is now 11 months since the PNG Supreme Court declared Australia's Manus Island detention centre illegal, and that centre remains open. Last month, the forced deportation of asylum seekers on Manus Island began. This is despite the well-known legal flaws in Papua New Guinea's refugee status determination process. As Professor Jane McAdam, the Director of the Andrew and Renata Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law, has written:

PNG's refugee status determination process falls far short of the standards required by international law. PNG law itself does not contain any protection against refoulement …

She has also written:

… PNG's refugee status determination process is inconsistent with international law in a number of significant respects …

But it is not just Professor McAdam and other Australian legal experts. The UNHCR has noted that Papua New Guinea's migration regulation:

… incorrectly applies the limited exclusion provisions of the Refugee Convention to ordinary criminal matters more properly dealt with under PNG criminal law, which could lead to wrongful denial of refugee status.

And yet the Australian government is complicit in forcibly deporting people from Papua New Guinea on the basis that they have failed a fundamentally flawed refugee determination assessment. It is an utter disgrace. It is a stain on every man, woman and child in this country that Australia continues to enable the forced deportation of people from Manus Island. At any time—maybe even as I stand here speaking—there could be a person or people being handcuffed on Manus Island, frogmarched out of the detention centre there and sent back to the very countries they have fled, to goodness knows what fate. And yet this government, with the support of the Labor Party, is silent. In fact, this government is enabling that shocking treatment. How many people have been deported? We do not know, because the government will not tell us. Where have they been sent? We do not know, because the government will not tell us. Does the government plan to forcibly deport more people back to the regimes they were fleeing in fear of their lives? We do not know, because the government will not tell us. And what of the fate of the people who have been forcibly deported over the last few weeks? We do not know, because the government will not tell us.

Amnesty International, an impeccably regarded international human rights organisation, says that, on Nauru, Australia's detention system was 'explicitly designed to inflict incalculable damage on hundreds of women, men and children'. Amnesty International has also found that conditions on Nauru are 'a deliberate and systematic regime of neglect and cruelty' and amount to torture under international law. And the government have not ever rebutted that claim. They have simply denied it and they have offered nothing in terms of a substantive rebuttal of a claim that Australia is torturing people on Manus Island. We have also had Mr Juan Mendez, a former UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, concluding that conditions on Manus Island 'violated the right of the asylum seekers, including children, to be free from torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment'. It is an utter disgrace the way Australia is treating people on Manus Island and Nauru. We have a duty of care to these people. They sought our help, and we have abandoned them and, worse, we are overseeing their torture.

Let us remember Reza Barati, who was murdered on Manus Island in 2014. Let us remember Hamid Kehazaei, who died of septicaemia which developed when he did not receive proper treatment for a cut to his foot. Let us remember Fazal Chegani, who died in suspicious circumstances on Christmas Island. Let us remember Omid Masoumali, who set himself on fire in Nauru last year. Let us remember Faysal Ishak Ahmed, who died on Christmas Eve after a seizure and a fall and who had been ill for months beforehand. Let us remember Saeed—not his real name—someone who right now we believe to be in the Villawood Immigration Detention Centre facing imminent deportation back to Iraq, despite being in ill health; someone who fears for his life should he be forcibly deported back to Iraq; a stateless person seeking asylum. I want to congratulate Mums 4 Refugees, Love Makes a Way, the Close the Camps action collective and the New South Wales Young Greens, who right now are holding a vigil outside Villawood and who have campaigned so strongly and so passionately for the person we know as Saeed.

One day there will come a reckoning in this country for what Australia is doing—for the torture, for the indefinite detention, for the refoulement, for the turn-backs, for the harm that we are causing to men, women and children indefinitely detained, people who sought our help and people on whom we turned our collective backs. There will be a reckoning, there will be a royal commission, there will be apologies and there will be reparations, but the tragedy is that they will come far too late for far too many people.

Senate adjourned at 19:51