Richard Marles (Corio, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Immigration and Border Protection) Share this | Hansard source

The government comes to the opposition in relation to this legislation seeking bipartisanship and support. We will give that bipartisanship and support even though the fundamental bipartisanship around this issue—which had been in place for most of the history of this country since Federation—was fractured by the coalition in the way that it handled the boarding of the Tampa in the lead-up to the 2001 election and in the way in which it argued that case.

When John Howard said, 'We decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come,' that was a statement which pushed a red-hot button and became a rallying call for the darker angels of humanity. That was the moment at which bipartisanship in this country, around a matter of enormous complexity, was fractured in a way which is yet to be resolved. We give our bipartisanship today notwithstanding that; and we give our bipartisanship notwithstanding the fact that, in speech after speech after John Howard made that statement, there was reference to asylum seekers as being 'illegals'—as if they are the problem, as if these are people who mean to do us harm, who are seeking to come to this country to invade. And yet everyone knows that those who seek asylum, who flee persecution, are the most vulnerable people in the world today.

The government comes and seeks bipartisanship even though, during the time of the Rudd-Gillard governments, we saw time and again the then shadow minister relentlessly pursue this matter in the most political of ways, referring to the dedicated and dangerous work of our defence personnel and our Customs personnel on the Timor Sea as being equivalent to a taxi service.

The government comes to us seeking bipartisanship and we will give it, even though throughout the period of the Abbott government we have seen in question time after question time the government beat its chest and point to a political scoreboard—which is actually about the lives of people, the lives of the most downtrodden—seeking to leverage human misery to pursue a political result. The government comes to us seeking bipartisanship and we will give it, because this is a profoundly complex and difficult issue—an issue which, even if we were on the same page, would be difficult to solve. But in circumstances where this issue has been the subject of the most appalling partisan politicisation, it becomes an impossible problem to solve and, as a result, people die.

The government comes to us seeking bipartisanship and we will give it, even though four years ago in almost a precisely similar circumstance the then Gillard government faced the difficulty of a High Court which had struck down Labor's arrangement with the Malaysian government. At that moment, we saw the grubbiest of deals, the unholiest of alliances, as the government sought to work with the Greens to make sure that no legislative remedy could pass this House and this parliament in order to deal with that High Court's decision.

The government comes to us and seeks our bipartisanship, even though the circumstance of this day is precisely the same to deal with the potential for such a decision. We saw Tony Abbott at the time say in this place:

It is not the opposition's job to save the government from a mess of its own making …

In a letter to the then Prime Minister, he writes: 'It is your mess. You can fix it.' The government seeks our bipartisanship and we will give it, even though we saw all of that, even though we saw arguments being presented at the time by the coalition, which, given what they have now done, no-one could possibly believe were sincere. We saw the teary shadow Treasurer at the time raising human rights concerns around children as a basis for opposing the Malaysian arrangement. We heard arguments around the fact that Malaysia was not a signatory to the refugee convention, even though our nearest neighbour, Indonesia, is not a signatory to that convention either. We have seen the tactics and the processes that have been undertaken by this government since.

It is worth understanding what the Malaysian arrangement would have done. The Malaysian arrangement provided for the virtual turnaround of 800 people. Because this government's turn-back policy happens under a shroud of secrecy, we do not know precisely how many people have been turned around over the period that the government has been turning back boats, but we can be certain that it is a number measured in hundreds. If that is the reason by the government's own logic that the flow of asylum seeker vessels has stopped from Java to Christmas Island then, by their own logic, this is an issue which could have been resolved four years ago.

The government comes and seeks our bipartisanship and we will give it, even though four years ago when we asked for that cooperation they turned their back on us. And there has been so much in seeking to attribute blame for the past, in seeking to put on record a political scoreboard around this issue, but the one figure you will never hear from the coalition when it comes to this issue is the number 689, because that is the number of people that we know of who perished at sea after the Malaysian arrangement was blocked in this place by virtue of the agreement between the government and the Greens.

In seeking our bipartisanship, and we will give it, no-one should assume for a second that this represents the Labor Party condoning the manner in which this government has conducted offshore processing. Offshore processing has been critically important. Offshore processing has been the single most important decision that a government has taken in this country to see an end to the flow of asylum seeker vessels from Java to Christmas Island. But if Labor were in power we would not be doing offshore processing in the way in which this government is pursuing that policy, and our support for this legislation today should not be taken as condoning it. It should not be taken as condoning the decision of the former minister to not complete the hard-walled facilities on Nauru such that those people who remain in the detention facility on Nauru have been living in tents for almost the two years since the Abbott government came into power. They have been living in tents by virtue of an active decision of a government.

The literature around the world on how people are treated and how they survive and the human behaviour which occurs in refugee camps makes it clear that issues of domestic violence and issues of sexual assault are much greater when people are living in tented facilities than when they are living in hard-walled facilities. It is not rocket science. When you live in a tent, you do not have security. When you live in a tent, you do not have privacy. All of that literature was at hand for this government when it made the decision not to construct buildings on Nauru or not to finish the constructions of the buildings on Nauru and to keep people living in tents. For me, having that information at hand when that decision was made means that everything that has flowed since and that we have seen reported in the Moss review is conduct and behaviour which this government absolutely knew would flow from the decisions that it took.

We would not, in supporting this legislation, be seen to condone the fact that until the beginning of this month we have seen the most substandard medical facilities on the Manus Island detention facility—substandard medical facilities which saw a man, Mr Hamid Kehazaei, manage to contract septicaemia and that not be resolved and him pass away in a hospital in Brisbane. Not until his death do we see medical facilities being built, which are now coming into effect as of this month.

The fact that we are supporting this legislation should not be seen as any kind of absolution that you will never hear from this government the phrase that people in our facilities, which are funded by Australia, should be in those facilities in a manner which is safe, dignified and human That is not a phrase which ever passes the lips of this government. What we see is an offshore processing network which has been conducted in a shroud of secrecy, which has left the fate of 2,000 people out of sight, out of mind and unresolved. The government sits here today without any clear sense whatsoever about what the ultimate fate of those 2,000 people will be.

We supported offshore processing because offshore processing, as I said, was the most important step that any government has taken to see a reduction in the flow of asylum seeker vessels from Java to Christmas Island. We stand with resolution to ensure that that journey will never be reopened again. Labor in government made mistakes, and we have absolutely acknowledged that, since the beginning of our time in opposition. With the benefit of hindsight, it would have been better if offshore processing had not been closed. We made this acknowledgement more than a year ago and we did so because we believed that this is an issue of such import that we need both sides of politics to come forward to work out where, as a country, we have gone wrong and how we can move together down a path to make sure that we get it right.

The fact of the matter is—and people need to understand this—that what characterises the journey between Java and Christmas Island is criminal syndicates of people smugglers who prey upon the most vulnerable. In the process of their preying upon the most vulnerable, we have seen people die in their hundreds and, ultimately, their thousands, and that has to stop. That it has stopped is an unambiguously good thing, something which we in opposition support. We will never be a party to seeing that start again, because there is nothing moral at all about supporting policies which would see people smugglers put back into business to prey upon those vulnerable and which in turn would see those vulnerable die.

In ensuring that that never happens again, we stand from a position of compassion. In articulating that principle, we should not be seen as I think the government is seen. That closing of the journey for the government is a central piece of an architecture which is basically about turning our back, as a nation, on the world's problems. That is not how Labor views this issue. Labor sees that the world is going through the biggest humanitarian crisis since the Second World War. There are more displaced people, more asylum seekers, more refugees, on the planet today than there have been at any time since the Second World War. It is Labor's view that we need to be more engaged on that issue than we have ever been before, befitting a modern and civilised nation which, at its best, has a multicultural society which is genuinely the envy of the world, a multicultural society which sees that the heritage that people bring to this country enriches us as a nation but, importantly, becomes very much an instance of what it is to be an Australian. It is possible to bring your heritage here, for that to become a part of who we are, for that to define what modern Australia is.

This is a debate which since 2001, in our view, has torn at the very fabric of that idea, torn at the very fabric of a modern, multicultural society. We need to move beyond it. We need to move beyond it and take the politics out of it—acknowledge where mistakes have been made but work together. We need to take the politics away from it so that we can ensure that we do not see people dying on our border, that we do not see a human tragedy unfold there ever again but that at the same time we remain a modern, civilised, multicultural country which celebrates diversity within our land.

On that basis: the government comes to us seeking bipartisanship and we will give it, because we know that the only way there is going to be an enduring resolution, and we will not see asylum seeker vessels coming from Java to Christmas Island, is if there is bipartisanship, and the only way we are going to be able to promote the multicultural, modern Australia that we want is if there is bipartisanship, and it is Labor who will bring bipartisanship to this table.

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