Sue Lines (WA, Deputy-President) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I inform the Senate that at 8.30 am today 21 proposals were received in accordance with standing order 75. The question of which proposal would be submitted to the Senate was determined by lot. As a result, I inform the Senate that the following letter has been received from Senator Keneally:

Pursuant to standing order 75, I give notice that today I propose to move:

That, in the opinion of the Senate, the following is a matter of urgency:

The need for the Morrison Government to take responsibility for getting stranded Australians home, including acting on the Halton review recommendation to establish a national quarantine facility when the number of stranded Australians registered with the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and wanting to come home has now doubled from 18,800 on 20 August to nearly 37,000 and the number of vulnerable Australians has increased from 4,000 to 8,000 in just five weeks."

Is the proposal supported?

More than the number of senators required by the standing orders having risen in their places—

I understand that informal arrangements have been made to allocate specific times to each of the speakers in today's debate. With the concurrence of the Senate, I shall ask the clerks to set the clock accordingly.

Catryna Bilyk (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

[by video link]—One of the values that Australians hold dear is that they never leave a mate behind, yet this is what the Morrison government has done to thousands of Australian citizens and permanent residents—those who have become stranded overseas due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Many of these Australians have been trying to return home for over six months. Once the pandemic stopped the world in its tracks, they heeded the government's advice to stay put if they had employment and living arrangements. As economic conditions deteriorated across the globe, many lost their employment, had to give up their leases and are now stranded in a foreign country with no income and no support. When flights are available, there has been price gouging, with many airlines forcing Australians to purchase business or first-class tickets in order to reserve a seat.

Stranded Australians have turned to their government in their time of need. They would expect their government to move heaven and earth to help them, but instead the government has turned its back on them. We know of around 37,000 Australians stranded overseas. This figure has doubled since August, and it keeps on going up as Australians register with embassies, high commissions and consulates. The number continues to rise despite the Prime Minister's hollow promise that he would get these Australians home and out of quarantine by Christmas. As of today, Mr Morrison has only 10 days to deliver on that promise. Does the Prime Minister seriously expect us to believe, with his track record so far, that he will get 37,000 Australians home within the next 10 days? I think not.

About 8,000 Australians overseas are considered to be financially or medically vulnerable. This means they are facing the risk of or, in some cases, currently experiencing financial hardship, poverty and even homelessness. Even for those with the means to get by in their host country, many fear that, by the time they get home, they could have lost their homes, jobs or livelihoods in Australia. One of my Tasmanian constituents stranded overseas contacted my office after he had been discharged from hospital following a heart attack. He had been unable to secure accommodation and was about to head to a homeless shelter. Another one who has been stranded overseas for seven months now has told my office that due to poor internet access he is having great difficulty completing the online forms required by Australian government agencies, particularly uploading large documents. His phone provider recently cancelled his SIM card, which has prevented him from receiving the SMS codes required to withdraw money sent by a friend. Particularly concerning for him is that his insurance company recently cancelled his travel insurance because of Australia's ban on overseas travel.

It's pretty scary to imagine how many other Australians are stuck overseas through no fault of their own—those without insurance cover who will struggle to access health care if they have a serious injury or illness, including if they contract COVID-19. That's got to be a terrifying scenario for many Australians. Imagine how isolated and vulnerable they must feel. To get an idea of how some of them feel, you need only examine the Hansard transcript from the public hearings of the Senate's COVID-19 committee. Peta, a Melbourne resident who addressed the committee while stuck in Serbia with her family, including her 79-year-old brother-in-law, posed this question to the committee: 'How am I supposed to instil a sense of national pride in my children and friends and people we know about being Australians when you have so poorly let us down?' Peta also told the committee: 'The cap has abandoned my family and it has abandoned our citizens who are overseas. They are not stranded; they are abandoned by the government.' The 'cap' Peta was referring to is the limit placed on international arrivals, and it is one of the main reasons why stranded Australians feel abandoned by this government.

Adding to the sense of betrayal is the admission by the Department of Home Affairs that non-Australians with business, innovation, investment and student visas could be taking quarantine places from Australian citizens and permanent residents. Another stranded Australian, Deanne, who was stuck in the UK when she addressed the committee, spoke about the sense of betrayal of being abandoned by her government. She said: 'It just feels like a long-term boyfriend cheating on me. I've given my life to Australia and in my time of need they have dumped me.'

Early in the pandemic the government belatedly helped organise some flights for Australians in Wuhan and passengers of the Diamond Princess in Japan, but they haven't done nearly enough to repatriate stranded Australians. In fact, they have spent substantially more taxpayer money chartering flights out of Australia and on lobsters, prawns and abalone than they have spent chartering flights into Australia for Aussies stuck overseas. It has shocked and appalled many Australians that this government has spent over $4,300 an hour on an RAAF plan to help former senator Mathias Cormann lobby for his OECD job—yet they can't task RAAF planes to help get Australians home. Most of the Australians who have been able to return to Australia have done so on their own initiative. Some have come together with other stranded Australians to book and share the cost of charter flights. In doing so, they have undertaken a task that the government should have been doing months ago.

There are three simple actions that Labor is calling on the Morrison government to take to help Australians stranded overseas to get back home: (1) increase the caps on international arrivals so that more Australians can return to Australia; (2) stop the price gouging by airlines flying into Australia—it's outrageous that, simply to get home, some Australians are being forced to pay as much as $15,000 in airfares; (3) use all possible flight options to bring stranded Australians home, including working with airlines to increase the number of commercial flights and charter flights and using the fleet of the Royal Australian Air Force. There are thousands of Qantas and Virgin workers currently on JobKeeper and hundreds of plane sitting idle. We acknowledge that Qantas has provided some repatriation flights, but why isn't the government asking the airlines so they can use more of their spare capacity to bring more Australians home?

Mr Morrison could also deploy the RAAF fleet of VIP aircraft around the globe. As I said earlier, the government seems to have no trouble tasking an RAAF aircraft to fly a former Liberal minister around Europe—and providing him with eight staff—so he can apply for a job. Mr Morrison has spent months dismissing our calls to use the RAAF fleet to bring stranded Australians home, yet he thinks the extravagance heaped on Mr Cormann is okay. And what was the Prime Minister's glib explanation for this? 'He might get COVID.' Does Mr Morrison not think that the 37,000 Australian stuck overseas might also be at risk of contracting COVID-19 too? A lot of those at risk would be in countries where they've got no health insurance cover. It's unconscionable that the government are putting one of their mates ahead of vulnerable Australians.

Mr Morrison keeps blaming hotel quarantine arrangements for his government's lack of progress. He keeps pointing the finger at the states and the territories, because we know he's never to blame for anything. But he is trying to pull the wool over Australians' eyes. He knows that his government could expand quarantine arrangements. He has clear and thorough advice from the hotel quarantine review about how the federal government could do this, including advice to run quarantine under federal legislation and to open up further quarantine facilities such as the RAAF Learmonth base. The Morrison government's failure to take the necessary actions to get stranded Australians home is a dereliction of its duty to its citizens and it's a breach of the citizens' human rights. It's an indelible stain on the record of this government that it has abandoned thousands of Australian for months when they were at their most vulnerable and looking to the government for help. This absolute lack of care and concern for thousands of vulnerable Australians is outrageous.

Australia should have a reputation for looking after its citizens abroad, but when turning to Mr Morrison's government, you're on your own. For anyone listening to these proceedings right now who wants to add their voice to the thousands calling on the Morrison government to rescue stranded Australians, I encourage you to sign Labor's petition. You can find this petition online at www.alp.org.au/strandedaussies. (Time expired)

Amanda Stoker (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I acknowledge that the motion we're dealing with now, which was signed by Senator Keneally, reflects a drum she's been banging for some time. I've got to say that with this motion, the pattern that I, and I'm sure many people in this chamber, have observed of Senator Keneally overreaching on matters in the Home Affairs portfolio has reached a new high. If you're a person of my vintage, and you may well be, Mr Acting Deputy President Griff, you might remember Inspector Gadget. When I was a kid I liked Inspector Gadget because he had extending arms and legs that were very handy for his adventures. But not even Inspector Gadget, with his superextending arms, could reach as far as Senator Keneally tries to do so often with her efforts in the Home Affairs portfolio. Overreach is the order of the day when it comes to Senator Keneally. In this motion her overreach is so spectacular that even with his extending 'Go, go gadget arms,' Inspector Gadget would topple over.

Let's start with the first example of her overreaching, her reference to the Halton review recommending a national quarantine facility. That's overstatement No. 1. I've got the report and the relevant pages right here and, among a range of matters canvassed in that report, there's a suggestion for the government to 'consider' a national quarantine facility 'in reserve'. The report doesn't say we must establish one now, as Senator Keneally puts it, nor does it say that the current status of demand requires it, but rather it says we should establish one if or when required, should there be a need to scale up services significantly and at short notice. That's a far, far cry from the land of overreach that Senator Keneally inhabits.

As we would perhaps expect, her overreach doesn't end there, because Labor, who protest perpetually that immigration detention is cruel, barbaric and wrong now want to reopen immigration detention facilities and put Australian citizens in these facilities. They treat the government as though the government is doing the wrong thing by refusing to reopen immigration detention centres immediately and filling them full of Australians who've been overseas. It is not wrong for the Australian government to canvass and pursue every option to avoid putting Australians in immigration detention, if at all possible. Perhaps Senator Keneally might also like to mix some Australian citizens who've been overseas in with some of the convicted criminals that we have in immigration detention waiting for deportation? Perhaps she'd like to send them in with the other people who are not criminal, but who, nevertheless, are in immigration detention because they are not entitled to be here in Australia? I mean, this is the most harebrained scheme I think Labor has ever come up with. Yet they come in here and argue it as though putting Australians in immigration detention would be some kind of supremely moral position. It truly is a bizarre thing.

Then we go to the next one of her spectacular overreaches: pretending that it's the Commonwealth government that is forcing the imposition of caps on the numbers of people who can return to Australia each week. Perhaps that's the biggest dishonesty of the lot—another overreach, with those go-go-gadget arms extending again to the point where every sensible person can see the inspector topple.

But of course the smart Australians won't be fooled. They know that the caps are driven by state governments requiring hotel quarantine. They know that that limit means that the number of people who can return has a natural ceiling associated with the number of hotel rooms available, and they know that the vast majority of the heavy lifting on bringing people back has actually been delivered by the New South Wales government, through Sydney airport.

Are there other options that could be considered for bringing more Australians home? Well, yes. And is home quarantine perhaps one of them? Perhaps. Maybe more testing and shorter quarantine periods at either end of an international flight might also be worth exploring. But those are matters that lie in the hands of state governments, and the confected outrage that we hear from those opposite is a smokescreen for the reality that the states, overwhelmingly Labor governments, hold the reins on this issue. Maybe Senator Keneally should pick up the phone to one of her Labor mates—maybe Premier Palaszczuk; maybe Premier Andrews or Premier McGowan—and start to negotiate with them a more reasonable attitude. But I'm pretty sure they don't want to throw Australian citizens into immigration detention either—not least because, under the proposition that's being put by those opposite, it would have a whole lot of Australians return to immigration detention for Christmas.

To point out the madness of what's being argued by those opposite is not to dismiss the seriousness of the situation. There are Australians overseas who want to return, and we need to do all that we sensibly can to get them back as soon as is possible. We're keenly aware that many Australians face hardship overseas because of global travel restrictions that have arisen because of the COVID-19 pandemic. So DFAT is helping vulnerable Australians. They're doing that by facilitating access to flights back to Australia. Importantly, they're providing financial assistance, where that's required, through what is called the hardship program, because we know that, at a time when the global market for aviation has taken such a big hit, it's just not as economically viable for flights to be as cheap as they were some months ago. So we're providing help for people to meet that higher cost that many are facing. And we're continuing to provide professional and responsive consular assistance to those people who are in need.

Many Australians have been able to return. Not 5,000 or 10,000 or 20,000 or 30,000—we have facilitated the return of more than 432,000 people since the government advised Australians that they needed to reconsider their plans to leave Australia for overseas travel. DFAT has helped over 31,000 Australians to return on over 370 flights, including almost 11,000 people on 74 government-facilitated flights. Ten commercial flights have been facilitated by government just since 23 October, and they've returned over 1,500 passengers—1,583, to be precise. That includes one that arrived in Darwin today from London and a Qantas flight that landed in Darwin on Saturday from Delhi. There is a steady stream of Australians being brought home, and that's happening as soon as it's practical to do so, within the limits that have been set by National Cabinet at the insistence of state governments, because they're the ones that impose this hotel quarantine requirement and they're the ones that face the management associated with imposing that rule.

Since 18 September, over 39,600 people have returned from overseas, including more than 15,300 Australians who had registered with DFAT. Of those, more than 3,400 were vulnerable people. We are taking the necessary interest in making sure that people who are in hard situations, whether that's because of their health, whether it's because of their ability to meet living costs in the place they're located or whether it's because of the cost of flights back, get the hand they need. We're doing what we need to do for vulnerable people. And while the global pandemic is far from over, and we don't know when we will return to the normal state of international travel, Australians can be assured that we do very much care about getting them home safely and that at the federal level we are doing everything within our power to make sure that the road home for them is facilitated as swiftly and as safely as possible.

Janet Rice (Victoria, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

This pandemic has been challenging in so many ways. There's been so much hardship, so much hurt, so much suffering. Not least amongst that hardship, hurt and suffering has been the plight of the tens of thousands of Australians who are stranded overseas. And that number is increasing. It's not surprising, as you see the pandemic having such huge impacts all around the world, that people want to come home.

At the COVID committee hearing just on Friday, we heard that the numbers have increased from 18,800, as they were on 20 August, to, just a few month later—despite the number of people who have come home—37,000 Australians who are saying, 'Please, let us come home.' At that hearing we heard DFAT acknowledge what the Prime Minister has been unwilling to acknowledge, and that's that they are not all going to get home by Christmas. On 18 September the Prime Minister said:

I would hope that those who are looking to come home, that we'd be able to do that within months. And I would hope that we can get as many people home, if not all of them, by Christmas.

It's very clear that that's not going to be the case. In fact, we are going to fall well short of that.

I did some quick sums during the hearing last Friday, when we were told that over September, October and November 7,000 people had returned home each month—so, 14,000 throughout September and October. We were told that there's going to be some increase in the number of quarantine spaces over the coming months because there are going to be some flights coming into Melbourne and there are going to be more quarantine facilities in Tasmania and the ACT. But when I asked, 'Well, just how many more does that mean?'—from 7,000 a month, what are we going to get up to, 10,000 or, at a max, 15,000 a month?—I wasn't contradicted. In fact, I would say that the likelihood is that over the coming months—and it's less than a month to Christmas—we're going to be lucky if we get another 10,000 Australians coming home. And of course only half of that 10,000—only about 5,000 of those 37,000 Australians stranded overseas—are actually going to make it home to be with their loved ones by Christmas, because of the two weeks quarantine that's required.

So, of those 37,000 people who, in September, the Prime Minister said we'd be trying to get home by Christmas, we're looking at actually only 5,000 being able to get home. In fact, at the rate of quarantine availability, we're going to be lucky if those 37,000 people all make it home by Easter time. They're going to be stuck there for many months longer. This is tragic, because each one of those people is suffering in their own way. People are running out of money; people whose leases have run out have nowhere to stay; families caring for their children are desperately worried that, if both parents catch COVID, they won't have the family or support network to have somebody else look after their children. This is a real risk. If you look at the tragic statistics in the United States at the moment, in North Dakota, one in a thousand people have died of COVID, meaning about one in 10 people have caught it. These are really scary statistics. If you're an Australian living somewhere in the world with that sort of prevalence of this virus, you would be desperate to come home.

What also makes this such a tragedy is that there is something that we can be doing. There is a solution to this. We heard on Friday—and it was confirmed—that the limitation is not the number of flights or the number of places on flights; it's the quarantine facilities. It's having spaces available in Australia for people to quarantine. It means that, if you put the resources in, there are facilities all around the country that could be used for quarantine. By putting those resources in, we could lift the number of quarantine spaces tomorrow. This is a federal government responsibility because it's the federal government's responsibility to look after Australians and our borders. As the motion says, the review that Jane Halton undertook recommended establishing a national quarantine facility. There is a role that the federal government could be playing that this government is not playing.

I want to acknowledge in this debate the important work of Amnesty International in bringing attention to the plight of those stranded overseas, including through their report, Stories of the stranded Aussies. As that report notes, there is a clear breach of human rights in the Liberal Party's actions to leave people stranded overseas. The report states:

The Australian government has an obligation under international law—including Article 12(2) of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and Article 12(4) of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights—to bring these people home. They are not meeting this obligation.

We've got a breach of international law and we've got a government that could be taking action but is not taking action and is not meeting this obligation. That takes us to a really important point about this pandemic: it shows where your values lie. It's when the world's turned upside down that hard decisions have to be made. And we've now seen what the Morrison government have decided. They have decided to leave Australians stranded overseas.

The Australian Greens believe that universal human rights are fundamental and must be protected and respected in all countries and all places for all people. When you apply a human rights framework to the actions of countries, you can't pick and choose and say that it's okay for some countries to protect human rights and that it's okay for other countries to abuse them. That means that we as a country have to keep challenging ourselves to make sure that we are living up to our human rights obligations. It is our responsibility to call out human rights abuses in other countries, and it is our responsibility to respect the human rights of our citizens. We need to be getting people back to Australia. We need to be acting on black deaths in custody. We need to be not locking up asylum seekers in indefinite detention. We need to be bringing our citizens home.

But, while this Liberal-National government claims it values Australians, it has refused to take any ownership of this issue. We just heard Senator Stoker basically saying, once again, 'No, no, it's all a matter for the states.' The Prime Minister has a nose for a photo op; he can sniff out a shiny announcement a mile away if he wants to be part of it. But when it comes to the real issues that people want help with, then, no, it's a question for the state premiers. Meanwhile, of course, they have shown where their real priorities are. Mathias Cormann hardly had time to exit the building before he had a RAAF jet at $4,000 an hour flying him—whisking him—around at great expense, trying to get a cushy job. It really goes to show that it's one rule for everyday people and another rule for the Liberal mates network.

I want to be very clear: while the government has let Australia down during this crisis, there is a better way. Quite early in the crisis, we understood that there is a massive need for governments to intervene, to be looking after people and protecting our people. That's why we released our 'Invest to recover' plan. That report recognised that we faced, and continue to face, a pivotal moment. We said that for many people things haven't been easy for a long time, and that the inequality crisis, fuelled by the neoliberal politics of the Liberal and Labor parties, has been supercharged by the current health crisis and its disastrous economic consequences. And, while we rightly focused on responding to COVID-19, the climate crisis that drove the devastating bushfires earlier this year has not gone away.

By recognising that this is a pivotal moment, we can take real steps—tremendous steps—which will make a real difference for people, for communities and for the environment. We can intervene. We could invest and bring Australians home by Christmas, if we wanted to. It's not a matter of money; the government are spending $99 billion in giving handouts to their big corporate mates. They could spend the money if they wanted to. This is a moment in time, and the Liberal Party is betraying future generations by not seeing it. They have let down thousands of Australians overseas and left them stranded. It's not good enough. (Time expired)

Alex Gallacher (SA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I too would like to make a contribution to this urgency debate. To start with, I just want to put on the record clearly, as I think Senator Keneally and others have done, that the constitutional requirement for the federal government to oversee quarantine is clear. It's a Commonwealth government responsibility to oversee human quarantine. I think that anyone writing the history of this pandemic with perfect 2020 hindsight is going to see that this was one of the clear failures of this government: not immediately taking action and putting in place across-the-board rules in each state and territory to safeguard quarantine in the nation.

If we look at the Halton report, perhaps quite contrary to popular opinion, the incidence of travellers returning and having a positive rate was 0.66 per cent in the two weeks to 30 August 2020. And the rate was as low as 0.3, based on 22 diagnoses of COVID-19 for in excess of 6½ thousand international travellers. We know that one case is capable of effecting community transmission and beginning an exponential growth in the rate of contracting the virus. But I think that when the history is written it's going to be very clear that the Commonwealth had an opportunity—it saw the Ruby Princess and the Victorian experience, and a similar, but smaller, experience in South Australia—where, if there had been one set of rules in the states and territories across the nation in respect of how we were going to treat this quarantine issue then there would have been less failure in repatriating people quickly and effectively.

In my home state of South Australia it's a very popular political decision to cease taking any more international travellers until we get our situation firmly under control once again. I know from speaking to many people in my street and in my neighbourhood that it's very popular. They say: 'Oh, we shouldn't bring them back. We should be very hard on them. Why are they over there anyway?' They're over there because that's what Australians do. I gave my daughter a 21st birthday present which was an around-the-world ticket. It took her four years to come home! Fortunately, there was no pandemic in that time but, had there been a pandemic, I would have been moving heaven, earth and everything else to get her home as quickly as possible. I really feel for the people who are stranded overseas in dire circumstances. The other day I read the story of a woman who'd lost her job because of the infection rate in London. She's now couch surfing and desperately trying to get home. It's true: we could bring them home. As Senator Rice said, it's not the lack of planes and seats but the lack of a coordinated approach to quarantine. The ad hoc nature of it and the implications of devolving the responsibility to the states have set us back a hundred years, in my view. Human quarantine is, simply, a Commonwealth responsibility. This government should have done better.

At 13 July 2015 we had 637 asylum seekers detained in Nauru RPC. I don't think many Australians would realise the cost of running that RPC in 2015. The figure—from the department—to 30 April 2015 was $350,419,000. To look after 500 people this government was prepared to spend—when you add in the operational costs, the staff costs and the capital costs—nearly half a billion dollars. We have what appears to be a fairly successful operation at Howard Springs in the Northern Territory, where people come in. Early Sunday morning as I drove over to Canberra I heard a woman ring that ABC program, whatever it is—Macca's Australia All Overand say: 'I'm so relieved to be here, and all my cohort are so relieved to be here. And we're so thankful to be in the Northern Territory in a fairly open environment, rather than in a closed, air-conditioned inner-city hotel.' Most of us in this chamber spend far too much time in hotel rooms. I could not imagine being put in an air-conditioned room with no window and no balcony for 14 days, not allowed out for anything, basically. It would be extremely tough on your mental health—tough on all sorts of things.

The government had an opportunity to take control and a constitutional obligation to take control. The Ruby Princess was one area where it failed. As I've said, when the history of this is written it's going to be classified as at least an abrogation of the constitutional position of the federal government. I know that politics are being played around each state and territory. COVID incumbency is a very powerful thing; we've seen that over a couple of elections now. I know that the Premier of Western Australia has been the hardest of all in instituting strong border protection. In WA they faced a High Court challenge and won. Basically, it's not going to change in a hurry. But we've got to think of these 37,000 Australians who probably are becoming increasingly desperate.

Australia is a travelling nation. When we get back to having a million Australians overseas at any one point in a year, perhaps we'll need to have a bit of foresight and say, 'If there is a problem, what are we going to do?' Is it just going to be ad hoc? Are we going to allow it just to stumble and bumble along? Clearly, the Constitution written by our founding fathers gave the Commonwealth human quarantine as an obligation, and I think it's very clear that this Scott Morrison government—the Hon. Scott Morrison—has failed Australians in that respect. Contrast this with natural disasters like Cyclone Tracy in Darwin. The place was evacuated in three or four days. They threw everything at it, set a record for passengers on planes. I was working at Darwin airport in those days and saw it firsthand. The government saw Australians in need and did something immediately. If they'd spent one-tenth of what they spent on 500 or 600 IMAs—irregular maritime arrivals—then this problem would have gone away. But that's not the case. We're now looking at people not getting back to their families for Christmas. I think it's a crying shame that the federal government, which has done a lot of good work in this area—I can't be critical of the government on JobKeeper and that sort of thing—has, on the matter of human quarantine, abrogated or failed in its responsibility. That is to Scott Morrison's enduring shame. The history will be written that it was an abrogation of their responsibility, if not a downright failure to meet their responsibility.

Perin Davey (NSW, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

If you were to listen to Labor, this government is heartless, uncaring and unfeeling towards the plight of our citizens who are overseas, but nothing can be further from the truth. Labor are very, very loose with their rhetoric and very loose with their facts when they grab at the heartstrings of Australians to paint the Morrison government as a heartless, unfeeling government that is quite happy to see our citizens languish overseas at the expense of all others. As I said, nothing can be further from the truth.

From the very get-go, at the beginning of this pandemic, as early as January we were talking about what this may mean for international travel. We closed our borders to people coming in from China very early in the piece. In March our government made people overseas aware that they should seriously consider returning home if there was no requirement for them to stay overseas, and certainly many people did so. Yes, we acknowledge that those who chose not to at the time had their reasons. They may have been in stable employment at the time, their family circumstances may not have allowed it, and we totally accept that. No-one should be derided for having made the choice to remain where there were. Some of those people now want to return home, again for a variety of reasons, and we are working very hard to facilitate that to ensure they can come home.

Since March we've returned over 420,000 Australians to our shores. They have returned home. They're back with their families. Indeed, my office has had many phone calls from people thanking our government for helping them to return home safely, without the risk of getting COVID when they get home. Let's not forget, back in March National Cabinet agreed on hotel quarantine for all arrivals. National Cabinet—all of the state governments and the federal government—agreed that hotel quarantine would be the method that we would apply to ensure that people returning to our shores can do so safely, monitored securely to protect our Australians here onshore as well as themselves. Since that time we have been doing just that.

The state governments let us know how many that they could deal with safely and effectively. Using whatever processes they chose to use the state governments identified the caps. On that note, I commend the New South Wales government for having a cap nearly three times higher than the other states. We know—and as Senator Keneally knows, because we heard it in the Senate Select Committee on COVID-19—that hotel quarantine is the reason why Australia has been so successful at controlling the spread of the virus and the virus coming into our shores. We also know, unfortunately, what happens if we push our hotel quarantining system too hard and if we don't have effective control mechanisms in place, because we've seen what happened with Victoria and their tragic second wave. Thankfully, that is over, but we don't want to see that again. So we are committed to ensuring that our hotel quarantine system—working with our state governments—is effective and managed appropriately.

We also heard, last Thursday at the Senate committee, that the result of Victoria's second wave meant that Victoria shut down their borders completely. They didn't accept any returning Australians, and that had a significant impact on our capacity to re-shore our citizens from overseas. But, fortunately, Victoria are set to handle foreign arrivals again, and hopefully this time with much-needed improvements to their hotel quarantining. This is all to ensure the safety of Australians—the safety of Australians both returning home and onshore.

The other thing that Labor says is that we should just open a national facility. Where? Where can we open this national facility? Senator Keneally, last Thursday, suggested we reopen our closed detention centres, such as Port Hedland and Baxter. I never thought I'd see the day when Labor said that we should reopen our detention centres. Believe me, our government has looked at all options, and we have looked at those closed detention centres—detention centres we're very proud to have closed because we addressed other border issues. But Port Hedland and Baxter, in particular, are not currently fit to put people into. You cannot wave a magic wand—this is my message to Senator Keneally and to Australians out there, because this is about managing expectations. You can't present emotion to this chamber and miraculously be able to manage 35,000 people pouring onto our shores with nowhere to go, nowhere to be effectively quarantined, and not risk our population. Of the arrivals that we're currently dealing with, over one per cent of them have COVID. But we are containing that because we have got effective quarantine.

The other option that Senator Keneally put forward was Christmas Island—the currently closed areas of Christmas Island. The parts of Christmas Island detention centre that are fit for use at this point in time are being used. There is no extra capacity there. We have worked with the Northern Territory government. We've reopened the Howard Springs facility, which is currently taking 500 people a week, and negotiations are ongoing to expand that. We've also now negotiated with Tasmania and the ACT, who have now, graciously, allowed incoming passengers from overseas within what they believe they can effectively manage. This government is doing all it can. We have facilitated 72 repatriation flights to date. They are flights wholly and solely committed to people who've registered with DFAT.

The other point that Labor make is that the list of Australians wanting to return home is growing, and that is true, because there are Australians overseas at this moment and their situations change, so that list will fluctuate. It will grow as people want to come home and it might decline again as things settle down overseas. But to hold to the claim that our government has failed on a key promise—even Senator Keneally's quote from the Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, wasn't a promise. He said, 'We hope to have all Australians home by Christmas.' That was those who were on the list on that day. And, yes, the list has grown. But, since that day, we have had more than 35,000 Australians return home, which was a far greater number than that was originally on the list on the day that the Prime Minister said that he hoped to have them return home.

So we are very committed to doing all we can to return Australians home in a way that is safe and in a way that ensures we maintain our very good and very strong record on containing COVID on our shores. But my message to everyone listening today is: we haven't forgotten our Australians overseas. We are doing all we can, effectively.

Louise Pratt (WA, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Manufacturing) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to support this urgency motion this afternoon because the Prime Minister of our country issued a statement of false hope to the thousands of stranded Australians when he said he would get them home before Christmas. This promise was made to the 26,800 Australians who at the time were registered with DFAT as stranded. That was back in September. The number of stranded Australians who want to come home now stands at some 37,000 and it is quite likely that that number will grow. We have seen 35,000 Australians come home since the start of the pandemic. I think it's a bit rich to say 'we've already got 35,000 people home'. Many of those people came home quickly, as they were instructed to, under their own steam—no thanks to the government's assistance. Of those 26,800 who were registered with DFAT back in September, 14,000 have been able to come home. I know the great joy and the ending of stress and suffering that comes when families are able to be reunited. I have seen firsthand among close friends and family what a difficult and stressful time this has been, with dozens of tickets booked and dozens of tickets cancelled by airlines and with people being bumped from flight after flight after flight.

The government has tried to cast some blame on the state governments for needing to be rational about the number of people they can afford to let into each state in terms of safely managing the quarantine provisions. I do understand that some limits have been needed in order that quarantine can be safely managed; but the government said it was organising to prioritise Australians over other people wanting to enter Australia, and our inquiries at estimates demonstrated that there was no such plan to ensure Australians had priority over other people for whom who the Department of Home Affairs has issued a visa. Over 70 international students arrived into Darwin this week, and I know that universities made their own private arrangements to do that so they could be safely quarantined. But I fail to see how the government can use as an excuse the lack of suitable options for quarantine provision around the country—and they failed to make provision for that—when universities, in this case, have been able to make accommodation for those 70 international students to be able to quarantine.

Three hundred foreigners—which should have been 300 Australians—were allowed into the country and allowed to take up a place in quarantine by this government when visa holders under the Business, Innovation and Investment Program were issued visas. When we asked in estimates how this was possible, they said that, once they have been issued a visa, it was up to returning Australians—and anyone else who had been issued a visa—to get a spot on a plane and make their way here. Those spots on planes are very, very limited. In fact, the government had no process or procedure for prioritising Australians being able to take those flights. Anyone with a valid visa to Australia was able to hop on those flights. So, when they said that stranded Australians would be at the front of the queue, this was a falsehood. I think many Australians would see it as an absolute slap in the face.

It's all very well for this government to blame the states for their caps. With the lack of support—the complete nonsupport—that the Commonwealth has given to creating Commonwealth places, our nation has had to instead rely entirely on the places created by the states. As Jane Halton revealed in her report: 'Travelers can be quarantined under either Commonwealth or State/Territory legislation.' It was highlighted in her report that it is, indeed, a viable option for this government to be setting up Commonwealth quarantine facilities. I simply do not take at face value what those opposite have said: that they've tried and they've looked hard enough at doing that. I know those opposite have raised the fact that Christmas Island is full with its legitimate immigration uses. That may well be the case, but why not move people who don't need quarantining for COVID purposes? There are any number of different options that you could potentially look at in order to get Australians home. There are any number of locations around the country that I think could be viable places in which to conduct quarantine under Commonwealth legislation. And yet, this Christmas—(Time expired)

Hollie Hughes (NSW, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I speak to the issue of Australians stranded overseas. The health and safety of our Australians, both at home and abroad, is the government's No. 1 priority in these unprecedented times. Global travel and border restrictions that were introduced to curb COVID-19 resulted in a consular emergency unparalleled in its scale and in its complexity. Without these measures, the pandemic would have hit our nation much harder. We recognise that the caps, agreed by national cabinet, are making it harder for people to return. We're keenly aware that many Australians face hardship overseas because of global travel restrictions.

Many Australians, though, have been able to return—more than 432,000 since the government advised Australians to reconsider their travel needs. DFAT has helped over 31,000 Australians to return on over 370 flights, including almost 11,000 people on government-facilitated flights. Ten commercial flights have been facilitated by government since 23 October, returning 1,583 Australians to our shores, including a Qantas flight from London that landed in Darwin today with 165 passengers onboard and a Qantas flight from Delhi that landed in Darwin on Saturday with 148 passengers. Since national cabinet met on 18 September, over 39,600 Australians have returned home. Melbourne airport, our second largest, has not been taking international arrivals since July. We're pleased, though, that the Victorian government is now working towards having 1,120 passengers per week arrive on commercial flights from 7 December, with further flights to follow.

The outrage that's being feigned by the opposition is rather juvenile in this crisis, particularly since the mismanagement of the crisis has resulted in states remaining closed to travellers. Labor would have you believe that Australians have been abandoned by the federal government, when we all know that it's the Labor premiers running their own dictatorships that have hampered our nation's recovery. We saw what happened when Victoria's Dan Andrews tried to process returned and international travellers and the debacle that followed.

Processing quarantined Australians is an important role for responsible leaders. In Queensland, Princess Palaszczuk's desire to close the borders to ensure her own re-election saw Queenslanders and other Australians locked out of their home, and not just the international travellers who wanted to return home. We witnessed families with small children torn apart, the dying denied the right to be with their loved ones in their final moments and the carnage that the closure of Queensland's borders caused among tourism businesses, which has yet to be fully realised. What chance did Queenslanders stranded in foreign countries have? The answer is 'none'. The biggest overreaction has been in WA, where Premier Mark McGowan has traded the needs of travellers, with a personal popularity contest proving more enticing than responsible leadership. It's interesting that now it's Labor demanding a solution to a problem that is truly of its own making. New South Wales has been doing an exceptionally strong job processing international travellers—in fact, it has been holding up the absolute weight of this task for the nation. Its excellent record in managing the health crisis, superior contact tracing and a measured approach to closures means that New South Wales has been carrying the quarantine burden for these failed, Labor-led states.

The global pandemic is far from over and we cannot guarantee when international travel will return to a level of normalcy. However, Infrastructure, the ADF and DFAT will continue to work on relocation and will use any spare capacity to get vulnerable clients on board as a priority. We're helping vulnerable Australians overseas by facilitating access to flights to Australia and providing financial assistance, where required, through the hardship program. Our consular staff are to be commended for their efforts during this time. The Morrison government is committed to helping Australians come home as quickly and safely as possible, even in the absence of sensible state Labor governance, and we will continue to do that until all Australians are home.

Question agreed to.