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

I move:

That the Senate take note of the document.

I rise to speak to Migration Act 1958 Commonwealth Ombudsman's reports Nos 20 to 22, 24 and 25 of 2022, as well as the government responses to those Commonwealth Ombudsman reports.

I want to be very clear here that the average length of time that people spend in immigration detention in Australia is a human rights calamity. When you compare us to other countries in the world, we imprison people in immigration detention in this country—in some cases for many years, and in a small number of cases for over a decade—for far longer than comparable countries around the world, whether it be the United Kingdom, Canada or the United States. We are a global outlier in terms of how long we keep people in immigration detention, why we put them in immigration detention in the first place and the way we treat them in immigration detention. That is why the Greens have consistently argued for a royal commission into immigration detention not just onshore but offshore, on what we did to people on Nauru and Manus Island.

I want to say right here that there are still over 200 people in either Papua New Guinea or Nauru who are in their 10th year of suffering. They were put there by the Labor Party in 2013, and they remain there now—after long years of Liberal government—under a Labor government, exiled in Papua New Guinea or Nauru. I know some of those people, and I'm in contact with some of those people, either directly or indirectly. I can tell you now that some of them are doing it incredibly tough.

There is no excuse, no reasonable rationale for leaving those people in exile in Papua New Guinea or Nauru for one day longer. They should be brought to Australia and settled here. Even if the Labor Party won't do that, what the Labor Party should do is bring them here to Australia and allow them to stay here in this country until they are resettled in a third country. That would actually be in line with Labor Party policy. It is unconscionable that in the 10th year of suffering they are still suffering so much and so grievously. In onshore detention, we have stateless people who've been locked up year after year, arbitrarily detained with no hope of ever being released, locked up in our onshore immigration detention system.

We have to have a royal commission into onshore and offshore immigration detention in this country because we need to make sure that the grievous suffering that has been endured by so many for so long—whether it be here in Australia, on Manus Island, in Port Moresby, on Nauru—that that suffering is brought to an end and that we never in this country write such a foul, dark and bloody chapter in our national story again. We need to hold people to account for what has happened here, for what happened on Manus Island, for what has happened on Nauru—the murders, the rapes, the child sex abuse, the deliberate dehumanisation, the deliberate imposition of suffering in an attempt to make people's lives so bad that they flee back to the persecution that they fled from in the first place. We need to make sure that never happens again in this country. We need to make sure that people are held to account for what happened, and the way we can do that is through a royal commission, so we can get the truth out about what happened and make the improvements that need to be made so that we can regain our human rights credibility. I seek leave to continue my remarks later.

Leave granted; debate adjourned.

Question agreed to.