Anne Urquhart (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

On behalf of the chair of the Legal and Constitutional Affairs Legislation Committee, I table additional information relating to the Migration Amendment Bill 2024 [provisions] report.

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

I move:

That the Senate take note of the document.

The Albanese Labor government, at the end of last year, teamed up with Peter Dutton's coalition to push through the most extreme anti-migrant and anti-refugee policies Australia has seen since the White Australia policy. They made this law even before the report into this bill was tabled and they used the guillotine to avoid debate in this house. The bill is part of a race to the bottom on migration that we are seeing from both Prime Minister Albanese and opposition leader Peter Dutton, and the bill builds on the cruel regime of offshore detention and processing that they started together over a decade ago, deliberately subjecting thousands of people to torturous conditions. It allows the government to bribe foreign governments to take people who Australia is forcibly removing from Australia. Someone can be removed to a third country when they are without a visa or are on a bridging visa and cannot return to their country of origin. That is tens of thousands of people—over 80,000 people, the department told us.

The law cannibalises parts of Labor's earlier failed Trump-style travel ban which they then picked up and passed. In particular, it allows the government to force people to choose between indefinite detention or forced removal to a third country where they will have no rights and no protection. On past practice, we know where Labor and the coalition want to send people. They want to send them to Nauru, PNG or even Cambodia, which have very poor human rights records and where it can even be a criminal offence to identify as LGBTIQ. Many countries point to Australia to legitimately criticise our human rights protections when we do things like this. Once people are deported to that country under Labor's laws, there will be no protections. The country doesn't even have to be a signatory to the refugee convention. It will be lawful under the bill for people to be deported to that country and then jailed straightaway, with no work rights and no medical rights—just straight to jail. In fact, the only protection in the bill is for decision-makers, who can't be held liable for sending people to third countries even when they know it's likely to cause serious harm or death, protecting themselves as they deliberately harm refugees. You know the government are about to do something extremely cruel when a large part of the bill is dedicated to making sure that, when they harm people, they can't be held to account.

We've already seen in the context of Nauru and PNG that Australia bribing third countries to commit human rights abuses on our behalf causes lasting damage to the people we send, often corrupting those governments' own processes, and to political and moral standards here as well. I went to PNG at the end of last year and I saw just some of the people who have been so brutalised by Australia's deportation. I went to Port Moresby and I saw the appalling state of health that they are in. Australia is working with PNG to withdraw even their bare level of health cover now and, for many of them, throw them into homelessness by withdrawing the medication and any access to health. It's a death sentence being delivered as we speak by Home Affairs officials in PNG, working with the PNG government. It's appalling.

This bill has also given this government or a future coalition government the power to share people's criminal records without their consent with any other government to help facilitate their removal once they've bribed that government. That means you may well have a situation where someone has, say, fled Saudi Arabia because they were being persecuted or feared persecution because of their gender identity or maybe homosexuality only to have the Australian government force them into a third country that also criminalises them for their identity and then share their criminal record from Saudi Arabia with them to see them persecuted and prosecuted. When this was pointed out to Labor in the inquiry, they just brushed it away as if it didn't matter. These people don't matter to Labor, and they certainly don't matter to the coalition.

When someone commits an offence in our country, they are meant to go to court and a judge is meant to decide what happens. That's how the law is meant to work. Everyone is meant to be treated the same and equally. But, instead, Labor and the coalition have joined together to create this new pretend legal space which lets politicians and bureaucrats punish people outside of the courts. It's obviously a threat to the rule of law in Australia. If you think it will end there, if you think the likes of Peter Dutton will end it there, with just applying bureaucratic and political imprisonment on refugees and migrants, you haven't been a student of history.

Under this bill, a person who has fled a country fearing persecution and has maybe lived here for a decade and had kids, worked here and paid taxes can now be literally forced to choose between detention forever, away from their kids, or forced removal, breaking up families, to countries like PNG or Nauru. The government actively demonised and dehumanised migrants and refugees when it pushed this bill, and it joined with Peter Dutton to do it. But make no mistake: the people who will be punished here are our neighbours, our friends and often our loved ones.

The Greens keep asking Albanese and Labor to work with us to protect multicultural Australia and stop the fear and division around migrants and refugees, but instead Labor have handed immigration policy to Peter Dutton's coalition, using people who migrate to Australia as political scapegoats to distract from their own major failings to deal with the housing crisis, fairness and properly funding Medicare. I don't think the public will fall for this, and I think this Prime Minister has shown that he cannot beat Peter Dutton on this issue, but I know the Greens and millions of Australians can join together and do that. We want a multicultural Australia where everyone is treated fairly and migrants have the ability to build their lives here with their families as part of the community, and that's a country that I and the Greens know is worth fighting for. I seek leave to continue my remarks later.

Leave granted; debate adjourned.