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

I rise to—

Glenn Sterle (WA, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Road Safety) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

This is on page five?

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

This is on page five, and it's document No. 3, which relates to contracts with Paladin, which is the company that the Department of Home Affairs has engaged to provide certain services on Manus Island—services worth over half a billion dollars of taxpayers' money. I have to say, there are serious questions here around the kind of compliance monitoring that the Department of Home Affairs has carried out, such as it has, in relation to these comments.

For context, it's worth pointing out significant and serious criticisms of the Department of Home Affairs that the Australian National Audit Office has revealed in more than one report over the last few years. But what's really interesting about documents that are now in the public domain is that we have discovered that Home Affairs inspectors have not been to Manus Island for 15 months due to safety concerns. It leads me to pose the starkly obvious question to this Senate, which is: if Manus Island is not safe for Department of Home Affairs officials, how was it ever found to be safe for those desperate and vulnerable people who travelled to Australia by boat to seek asylum here and who were then exiled to Manus Island, in many cases for six long years?

The answer is, of course: it was never safe for those people on Manus Island. In exiling most of them over there in 2013—as I said, over six long years ago—we were not only abrogating our responsibilities under international covenants that we had signed, but we were deliberately and knowingly sending them into danger. We shouldn't be surprised that people have been murdered over there, and the murderers are yet to be held to account; we shouldn't be surprised that people have been attacked over there and assaulted on multiple occasions; and we shouldn't be surprised that there has been and continues to be an epidemic of self-harm amongst that community of innocent people, who have not even committed an offence under Australian law, let alone a crime.

As we found out in the last couple of weeks during inquiries being conducted by the Senate Standing Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs into various pieces of legislation that are currently underway, there are over 50 people—53, in fact, according to the Department of Home Affairs—who've been imprisoned in the Bomana immigration detention facility in Port Moresby in Papua New Guinea, a facility, I might add, that was at least substantially and potentially totally funded by Australian taxpayers. That's 53 people, some of whom had been approved for transfer to Australia under the medevac legislation that was passed by this parliament against the wishes of the government prior to the last election.

The Senate, through the legal and constitutional affairs committee, has heard evidence that some of the legal representatives of these people actually cannot even get in touch with them anymore. I'm hearing very disturbing reports coming out of Papua New Guinea that people who are in the Bomana immigration detention facility have had their phones removed from them, have had their contact with the outside world completely severed and are currently suffering extreme deprivation and humanitarian and human rights abuses. In at least some of those cases, the people concerned were so ill that they were approved for transfer to Australia under the medevac laws because they could not get the medical treatment they required in Papua New Guinea.

These people have been exiled to Papua New Guinea for six years. They'd been locked up on Manus Island for multiple years, until the Papua New Guinea Supreme Court determined that that was illegal. And now they find themselves locked up again in immigration detention in Papua New Guinea, desperately ill, cut off from contact with doctors and cut off from contact with their lawyers. It's a disgrace.

Glenn Sterle (WA, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Road Safety) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Senator McKim, your time has expired.

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

Mr Acting Deputy President, I seek leave to continue my remarks at a later time.

Leave granted; debate adjourned.