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

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answer given by the Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations (Senator Watt) to a question without notice I asked today relating to migration.

The three pieces of legislation that Labor's trying to ram through on migration in an ugly deal with the coalition are some of the most extreme pieces of antimigrant legislation that this parliament has seen since the abolition of the White Australia policy. Today we've literally seen the opposition bragging about how they are running the immigration system for the government. The question we asked the government was: why are Labor, even when they're in government, still having migration policy driven by Mr Peter Dutton? To the government's shame, it failed to even pretend to answer any of those questions.

The closest we got to an answer about why Labor is working with Mr Peter Dutton to deport parents and leave their kids, even if they're Australian citizens, without parents here in the country; the closest we got to hearing why Labor is working with Mr Peter Dutton to put dogs into detention centres and to stripsearch people without a warrant; the closest we got to hearing from Labor about why they're working with Mr Peter Dutton to be able to cook up deals with Nauru or PNG or any country on the planet, to forcibly deport people without any protections for their human rights—the closest we got to an answer was Labor saying the Greens wouldn't work with them to do any of that, so they had to work with Peter Dutton to put in place all these mean and nasty and appalling laws.

We say to Labor we were never going to work with you to put asylum seekers in jail or to cut deals to deport parents and leave kids here without family. We weren't going to work with you to have people whose only crime is seeking asylum stripsearched, or to put dogs into detention centres. We weren't. But the Greens have repeatedly said that we will work with anyone with a conscience in Labor and anyone with a conscience in other parties in this place to protect multicultural Australia and to stop the fear and division around migrants and refugees that now the Albanese government is doing in tandem, hand in hand, with Peter Dutton. We say to Labor: be better. You can't beat the politics of Dutton by trying to wedge him on the Right. You can't out-Dutton Mr Peter Dutton, and you don't win the case by surrendering to your opponents. On migration, the Labor Party in government are like a dog whose tail is being wagged by Mr Peter Dutton in opposition.

Looking at the results of the recent US election, you would have thought that a party that pretends to be progressive, like Labor, would have worked out that the answer isn't to follow Mr Donald Trump into punching down against migrants. You would have thought the lesson to learn from that is don't follow Trump style politics to punch down on migrants but instead make the case for decency. Make the case to resist the ugly far-right politics of the coalition. But, instead, we are seeing a generational attack on migrants and people seeking asylum.

And, I've got to tell you, this is not the first time Labor has done this. We've now seen repeatedly in Labor's history that they will do things the coalition had never dreamed of to attack the rights of multicultural Australia and people seeking asylum. It was Labor that came up with indefinite mandatory detention, a notorious ongoing human rights abuse. It was Labor that came up with offshore detention in PNG. It was Labor who made the rule that nobody coming here seeking asylum by sea will ever be able to find a home. And now it's Labor that is bringing in Trump style travel bans, deporting parents—leaving Australian kids without a mum and a dad—and putting dogs and stripsearches into immigration detention centres. That's Albanese government legacy. That's Labor's legacy for 2024.

Question agreed to.