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

I move:

That the Senate take note of the report.

I rise to take note of Human rights scrutiny report: report 12 of 2023 of the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights. This report relates to regulations which pertain to the Migration Act and, more specifically, to the resolution of status visa. The section of the report that pertains to those matters does raise concerns about a number of issues. Again I have to say there is a pattern emerging here around migration, and we are seeing that pattern play out in this parliament today. The Migration Act amendments that are in Labor's anti-refugee bill, the Migration Amendment (Bridging Visa Conditions) Bill 2023, are going to be jammed through this parliament perhaps as early as the middle of the evening tonight, because the Labor Party and the LNP are going to collude to make that happen. We are in that position because Mr Dutton has confected an emergency and, with the backing of the Murdoch media and some other media outlets who should know better, has put so much pressure on the Labor Party that the Labor Party has cravenly capitulated.

That is what we know was happened this morning, but things have got a lot worse in the last hour. Now we are not just getting a bill that Labor has brought in because it is scared of Mr Dutton's politicisation and demonisation of refugees, but we know that the Labor government is going to accept six amendments from Mr Dutton, including an amendment that would ensure that a breach of the new draconian visa conditions would attract a mandatory minimum sentence. I want to remind colleagues that Labor's policy and election commitment said, 'Labor opposes mandatory sentencing.' That is what they committed to the Australian people when they went to the election. Now, because they are too scared of Mr Dutton's rampant politicisation of refugees and his demonisation of refugees, Labor are going to walk away from their election platform and support an amendment from Mr Dutton to impose mandatory minimum terms of imprisonment on refugees who breach draconian visa conditions.

Make no mistake, what this bill is going to do is set people up to fail by imposing draconian conditions on their visas—curfews, electronic surveillance—and if someone inadvertently breaches those conditions maybe because they are a few minutes late to get home outside the curfew time, they are then going to be subject to mandatory minimum sentences because they breached their visa conditions. This is exactly what Mr Dutton has always wanted. Mr Dutton has always wanted the people the High Court effectively set free last week to be returned to detention. That is what he has always wanted, and the Labor Party is going to give it to him by supporting mandatory minimum sentences for breaches of visa conditions in direct contradiction to the policy Labor took to the last election. That is where we find ourselves today, and it is a dark and shameful day in the history of this parliament when the political duopoly in this place join together, as they have done time after time after time in the last two decades, to ride roughshod over the rights of refugees, to demonise refugees, to divide our community and to stoke fear and hatred of refugees in our community. It is an extremely sad day.

In regard to the Migration Amendment Resolution of Status Visa Regulations, which are the subject of this report, I do need to be clear that the government still has not provided a satisfactory pathway for people who were denied natural justice and procedural fairness through the fast-track process. The fast-track process was unfair. It ran contrary to the principles of natural justice. It meant a lot of people did not get a reasonable opportunity to put their case. That was the fast-track process that was put in place by the former government. Labor, to its credit, has addressed these issues for some of the people who were affected, but not all of them. There are over 10,000 people who still do not have a satisfactory and fair pathway or a satisfactory and fair process for assessing their claims. Labor needs to act to make sure that that process is in fact created for those people.

I met this week a group of women who walked hundreds of kilometres to come to this parliament. They were from Sri Lanka. They were from Iran. They walked here and they told me when I met them that they, who had been impacted by the fast-track process, believed they'd been denied natural justice and procedural fairness—and they were right. They had been denied those things, and it's time that justice was served. It's time that a process and a pathway is created for those women and for the thousands of others like them in Australia who had their claims denied by an unfair fast-track process created by people like Mr Dutton and Mr Morrison, and the onus is on the Labor Party to fix it.

I seek leave to continue my remarks later.

Leave granted; debate adjourned.