David Shoebridge (NSW, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Work Health and Safety (Operation Sovereign Borders) Declaration 2024, made under the Work Health and Safety Act 2011, be disallowed.

Let's be very clear as to what this regulation does and why the Greens are moving this disallowance motion. The next time a mother and her children seek asylum in Australia—and they travel here, often at huge risk, to build a better life and escape awful conflict—this regulation says not only that they can be stopped by a militarised force and then coerced, under the laws of this country set by both Labor and the coalition, to return to a country they fled when they faced persecution or forced into a detention camp in Nauru but that the quasi-military force authorised by this parliament, under the Albanese government, is now exempt from even taking reasonable care that its actions do not adversely affect the health and safety of that mother and her children. It removes the obligation under work health and safety laws to take reasonable care of women, children and others, often in the most dangerous situations, where they're exposed to terrible risks.

When we say that the Albanese government are competing with Peter Dutton over how cruel they can be to people seeking asylum, this is the kind of action we're talking about. The Albanese government, following the pattern of Abbott and all the coalitions before him, are actually saying to the Australian Border Force, 'When you're at sea, when you're intercepting a boat with some of the most desperate people on the planet on it, often in situations of genuine risk, you don't even have to take reasonable care.' They are green-lighting dangerous cruelty on the high seas. This regulation will exempt Operation Sovereign Borders from the requirement—and I quote from the legislation—to 'take reasonable care that his or her acts or omissions do not adversely affect the health and safety of other persons'. It's a green light to watch a boat sink. It's a green light not to care if someone seeking asylum is lost at sea or seriously injured, harmed in the course of Border Force operations.

The regulation also removes the requirement to preserve a site where a notifiable incident occurred until an inspector arrives. There's no requirement at all to preserve any of the evidence. All of the obligations that exist for police if they're engaged in running down a criminal, or for rangers and inspectors if they're arresting someone or engaging in coercive force—all of those obligations—have a reasonableness requirement. Nobody is required, under the Work Health and Safety Act, to take action that's not reasonable. If a house is burned down, for example, nobody is required to keep a dangerous wall standing. These things are all subject to reasonableness. But this government has removed any of those limitations. It says, 'You don't have to take reasonable care, and then you can destroy the evidence of your failure to take reasonable care.'

And it's literally a cut and paste of what Tony Abbott put before—a direct cut and paste—in this endless fight between the coalition and Labor to see who can be more like the other in their actions to inflict cruelty on people seeking asylum. Removing the requirement to retain the evidence is a government mandated Labor-Liberal cover-up.

In my role as immigration and home affairs spokesman I've met with multiple incredibly brave people who've gone through this system and who've seen the indifference, the lack of care, the outright cruelty that they and their families have suffered at the hands of initially Border Force and then whatever private multinational, bottom-feeding prison corporation Labor or the coalition chose to put in charge of them afterwards, whether it was Serco or any of those. If you take the time to listen, you'll hear about the layers and layers of cruelty that exist in the system already.

Last time this parliament sat, a few short weeks ago, we had a series of young people who'd been held in torture-like conditions on Nauru. They read their poetry about what it meant to be dehumanised by the asylum system set up by the Labor and Liberal coalition. They spoke about the epidemic of self-harm on Nauru, the hopelessness, the systemic violence, the intentional systemic torture they faced. They spoke to it with a beauty and a strength in their poetry that I can't replicate here in this speech. But where were the government members? Where was the coalition? These were truths you didn't want to hear and you weren't willing to attend to. If they listened to the poetry about the existing cruelty of Australia's detention system, propped up by successive governments, maybe that might move this government to agree with us and the Greens and to disallow this regulation.

Betelhem is one of those amazing young people who came and shared her poetry with us. Part of her poems says this:

Let me ask you something.

What kind of people refuse to hear the cries of fellow human beings in pain?

What kind of people refuse to be moved by the suffering of other humans?

What kind of people say no to helping a sick child?

They are the kind of people who are prepared to sacrifice the lives of innocent people for their own political lives.

They are the kind of people who choose to believe that refugees are not human.

They are the kind of people who use false and harmful labels to make other people fear and hate refugees.

They are prepared to make innocent people very, very sick, to even let innocent people die, because they can't think of another, more humane way.

Those are words that apply directly to what the Albanese government is doing here—Labor putting forward fresh regulations to exempt Border Force officers from having to even take reasonable care of people like Betelhem and her family, and families just like them, when they meet them on the high seas to the north of this country, when they interdict them off Christmas Island, without even having to take reasonable care, and then to be able to destroy the evidence afterwards.

That's why we're moving this disallowance regulation. It's because we listened to those who have borne witness to the layers and layers of systemic, deliberate cruelty in the immigration system. If a system is so obviously cruel and harmful that we need to exempt people from taking even basic care of another person in that system, then surely that's an indication that you've got it wrong and that the system should stop. There are currently some 47 people who have been interdicted by Border Force in Operation Sovereign Borders and who are just rotting in PNG, with no support and no help, and with many of them in utterly desperate states. And this government has done nothing. The previous government did less. There are almost a hundred people in that hell in Nauru, which Betelhem wrote the poem about. They're literally living in that hell.

According to the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre, 20 per cent of the refugees in PNG are so unwell that their lives are at imminent risk, and this government does nothing. A hundred per cent of the refugees in PNG and 65 per cent of people held in Nauru suffer serious physical health conditions. Eighty-eight per cent of the refugees in PNG—and they've effectively all been found to be refugees; it's just that they came in a way that Labor and the coalition are offended by—and 22 per cent of the people held in Nauru suffer severe mental health conditions. That's because that is what the system is designed to do. It's a torture system. It's designed to create mental trauma. It's designed to harm. It's some kind of obscene warning system. It's doing what it was designed to do. It's not an accident; it's actually designed to harm people's mental health. It's designed to harm their physical health. A hundred per cent of people in PNG who are the subjects of this system—who are stuck there and trapped there—report difficulty accessing medical care. They're being declined care. They're being asked to pay for care when they have no possible financial capability to do it. Over half the people in Nauru reported concerns with the limited health care available in Nauru. A hundred per cent of people detained in Nauru and PNG have reported experiences of trauma, including persecution, treatment at sea by Australian authorities and others, family separation, medical trauma and experiences of violence in detention. That's 100 per cent of the people detained in Nauru. Forty per cent of the refugees in PNG suffer chronic suicidal ideation and have a history of suicide attempts. One in 10 of those held in Nauru experience suicidal ideation.

This government must know this. Labor knows this. These aren't secrets. The ASRC share that with us as they share it with Labor and the coalition. You know this. And yet Labor is actively moving these regulations to make the system even crueller and to reinstate Tony Abbott's brutal cruelty, because they want a bit of it themselves—because they think that might play out well in the upcoming federal election. That's their plan. It's just like Labor in the NT. Their plan was to 'out-cruel' the coalition on criminal justice, but Labor are doing it here on refugees. It didn't work in the NT. It turns out that, if you want cruelty and nastiness—if that's where your politics lie—you vote for the real coalition, not the fake one. That's what the NT told us. If you want cruelty and nastiness, get the real stuff! Vote for the coalition! Don't vote for the faux Labor effort! Where's it taking them? Where's it taking our politics? And, more fundamentally, where is it taking people seeking asylum? It's taking them to new levels of cruelty. That's what it's doing. They're losing the politics, losing the principles, losing the vote and treating people who have come here seeking asylum like just expendable political assets.

The Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights has said of these changes that they 'may limit the rights to just and favourable conditions of work, rights of life and security of the person'. The committee has been chasing further information from the minister to try to explain why these regulations are necessary. (Time expired)

Tim Ayres (NSW, Australian Labor Party, Assistant Minister for Trade) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The government doesn't support this disallowance motion. Having listened to this lawyerly exposition of the Greens political party position about this, I have to say this is the most cynical contribution I've heard from Senator Shoebridge thus far. It is reprehensible.

The language that has been applied here to public servants doing their jobs as a 'quasi-military force'—that is cynical. It is calculated to create apprehensions in the community about decent people doing a difficult job under difficult circumstances. Suggesting that those people would watch a boat sink and that then they would act to cover it up—that is what Senator Shoebridge said not once, not twice but several times over the course of his contribution—is reprehensible. It is cynical. It is calculated to create more division.

Senator Shoebridge talks about 'dangerous cruelty'. Dangerous cruelty is adopting a position that you know will cause little kids and women and men to drown at sea. That is what dangerous cruelty is, and that is precisely the position that is being advanced here.

I have watched this debate over several decades. I have changed my view about some aspects of this, from bitter experience. For Senator Shoebridge, this is all about votes. That's what he said at the end of his contribution. Well, for the government, this is about security, and I want to go into some of those questions, but it is also about the responsible management of borders, and that has an absolute impact on securing the maximum amount of safety and discouraging people from engaging in dangerous voyages at sea. That is what this government's approach is and what previous governments approaches have been. The kind of soaring rhetoric that Senator Shoebridge seeks to engage in on this question is calculated to undermine that, and that should not stand.

A nation's security is fundamentally linked to its capacity to effectively control its own borders, including the flow of people and goods across those borders. That is a basic proposition. Our security and our prosperity depend upon robust border policies. The primary deterrent to any resumption of significant people-smuggling networks is in fact that policy framework. That includes boat turnbacks and other activities under Operation Sovereign Borders, conducted by Australian Border Force and Australian Defence Force personnel to combat people smuggling and irregular migration.

For a decade, this has effectively suppressed maritime people smuggling targeting Australia. It is essential to save lives, to ensure the integrity of our borders and to maintain public confidence in Australia's migration program. This instrument supports that by ensuring that personnel can conduct a full range of activities necessary to achieve these vital national security outcomes while protecting their own and others' safety.

Penny Allman-Payne (Queensland, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The question is that the motion moved by Senator Shoebridge be agreed to.