Mr Tony Burke (Watson, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Immigration) Share this | Hansard source

Earlier today, this parliament took the unfortunate step of deciding to gag the Australian members of parliament, deciding to gag members of the House of Representatives. After the government spending weeks and weeks listening to the Indonesian parliamentarians, after allowing them to determine when our immigration laws ought to be changed and the way in which they ought to be changed, we then find that there is one group of parliamentarians that this government will not allow to speak. It will hear the Indonesian politicians as much as they want, but, if you are an Australian member of parliament, at 20 past one tomorrow afternoon, nothing more will be heard.

And let us not pretend that this is only about the opposition. It is not just the people on this side of the House that the government wants to silence. There is no shortage of people on the other side of the House who know exactly how wrong these changes are. That was made perfectly clear in the Senate Legal and Constitutional Legislation inquiry report that was brought down yesterday—a government-controlled report, a government majority report. Recommendation 1 says:

In light of the limited information available to the committee, the committee recommends that the Bill should not proceed.

That is not a recommendation saying, ‘Here’s how you could improve it.’ It is not a recommendation saying, ‘There are a few changes around the edges you could make.’ Recommendation No. 1, front and centre, has members of the coalition saying: ‘This legislation is wrong. It’s wrong in its motivation, and it’s wrong in its content.’

We all know exactly where the motivation for this legislation came from. There was no-one in Sydney demanding this, no-one in Melbourne, no-one in Brisbane, no-one in regional Australia, but there were people in Jakarta demanding a change. And isn’t it great that the government then chose to delay this debate until this week, when the delegation was here from Indonesia, so that parliament could be a showpiece for them, so they could say to the delegation from Indonesia: ‘Here we have our Australian parliament. It’s on show for you. What just passed is a law that we did not want but you did.’

The reason for this being done was that Indonesia was concerned about its own sovereignty. There was no argument from the opposition saying that the people who came here from Papua were anything other than citizens of Indonesia. But, in order to make it clear in flashing lights that Indonesian sovereignty was secured, this government decided to abandon Australian sovereignty. This government decided that Indonesia will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they will come. This government decided that Indonesia would take control of the immigration legislation and that, as far as Australia was concerned, we would pretend that people who arrived here by boat were somewhere else—they did not really come here. That is not border protection. You do not protect your borders by pretending you have none, and that is exactly what the government is doing, out of a demand that has come not from Australia but from Indonesia.

Twelve months ago, this parliament had a really good moment of what you would call decency and bipartisanship. Twelve months ago, a whole lot of people thought: ‘Maybe things are going to change. Maybe the time when the minister at the table, the Attorney-General, was minister for immigration really is at an end. Maybe now we will see children out of detention, the end of indefinite detention, a decent approach to case managed mental health care. Maybe, just maybe, the oversight of the Commonwealth Ombudsman will be meaningful.’

How did the government respond 12 months later—because that is all it took? After all the bipartisanship and all the speeches of goodwill from each side and after the Prime Minister stood at the dispatch box immediately opposite and said, ‘Mandatory detention will now be given a softer edge,’ we now find the great con. It was not just people on this side of the chamber who were conned. It was backbench members of the Liberal Party and the Australian people who were conned, because we now get told: ‘Oh, but look, you only negotiated that. That was only about mainland detention centres. That’s all that was about. These detention centres are offshore detention centres; therefore, that’s nothing whatsoever to do with last year’s agreement.’

Can somebody please stand up in the parliament and let us know why it is wrong to lock up children in Australia but okay to keep them restricted in Nauru? Why is it wrong to be indefinitely detained in Australia but fine to be indefinitely detained on Nauru? Why do you need to make sure that you do not get a complete trail of human wreckage because of the mental health impacts of long-term detention in Australia but it is not a problem at all for people in identical circumstances to go through a similar level of torment so long as it is happening on Nauru? Why is it important to have the oversight of the Commonwealth Ombudsman not only there to investigate departmental officials but also to investigate everybody who is involved in the detention system? The ombudsman could already investigate departmental officials, but we specifically changed the legislation last year to make sure that, when operations were outsourced, we would still have the oversight of the Commonwealth Ombudsman, now serving as the Immigration Ombudsman, in those circumstances. Why does one system of decency arise and become important in Australia but does not matter one bit on Nauru? The answer to the difference is simple: the government never believed for one minute in what we saw last year.

The Attorney-General, who is at the table right now consistently defended locking up children. He consistently said that it was not a problem to have children detained. Now the minister has found his way to fix what I am sure he regarded as the mistakes of 12 months ago. Now the government think, ‘If we can’t detain the children in Australia any more, there’s another way of going about it; we will just move the children to Nauru, and it can happen right there.’ There is no decency and no principle. There are none of the things we thought the government might have become fair dinkum about 12 months ago. It has all gone. All it took was 10 months and one canoe, and everything that we were told mattered was thrown out the window never to return.

Indonesia was right to be concerned about its sovereignty—Papua is one-third of its territory—and we can all understand why. But I do not for one minute understand why the Australian parliament, of all places, should be the place to assert that Indonesian sovereignty is more important than Australian sovereignty. That is exactly what we are about to see—not border protection but the pretence that we have no borders at all and the creation of a situation where there is some magical difference between coming by sea and coming by plane. When 50 or so people arrive here by sea, it is cause for alarm but not when more than 1,000 people arrive by plane. I guess that maybe there is something magical about the seats they sit on on their way here. But that does not mean there is a problem—a completely different set of rules applies for people who come by plane! Why is it that there is a different approach to the border depending on whether you come by sea or by plane? Why is it that if you come by sea there is no border at all? There is no principle behind it; there is no good public policy behind it. The answer is very simple: Indonesia was concerned about 43 people who came here by sea—that is the reason—and it is nothing more sophisticated than that. The government has not managed to come up with an argument that explains that there is anything more than that behind it. It is simply for the appeasement of Indonesia—nothing more, nothing less.

What we should have done is so simple. We should treat Indonesia in the way Indonesia treats Australia—that is, respectfully. Let us not forget what happened last year. Last year, there was no end of occasions when many, many Australians were deeply concerned about the way in which the Indonesian criminal law was being applied to our citizens. What did Indonesia say? Indonesia said: ‘They might be your citizens, but they’re in our country. Our law will apply and you have to respect our legal system.’ Why couldn’t we say the same thing to them? A Labor government would have had the courage to say: ‘They are Papuans. They certainly are citizens of Indonesia, but they have entered Australian territory and Australian law is what should apply’—not, ‘We’ll change the law for you.’ The moment you say that you will change the law, you are acting as though you have done something wrong.

We congratulated the government on the issuing of 42 protection visas. When the Papuans arrived, we insisted publicly that the decision-making process should be done independently. It should be done at arm’s length, and our foreign affairs interests should have nothing to do with a solid legal assessment of the claims before us. I have to say that we all feel a bit guilty for having congratulated the government, because the government’s response was to make sure that they never made the same mistake again and that the level of decency shown to the first 42 Papuans will not occur again. There is talk going on in government corridors at the moment about how they might amend it. That is the other reason we have had the delay. We could have debated the bill today or we could have debated it yesterday, because at least the Indonesian delegation was here on time so we still could have been on show. But they still want to do it later because of the discussions that are going on with their own backbench.

I will tell the parliament now: there is no way in which you can amend the bill we will be looking at that will affect the law of Nauru. No amendment will be moved in the Australian parliament that will change the law of Papua New Guinea to affect people who are dumped on Manus Island. There is a really simple principle: if people enter Australia, Australian law should apply. That is it. It is straightforward and it is simple.

Labor supported the first three excisions with respect to the Cocos (Keeling) Islands, Ashmore Reef and Christmas Island—and we supported them for a very particular reason. People-smuggling operations were occurring and we were about to enter the fifth anniversary of SIEVX. People were drowning and lives were being put in peril by appalling operators—and that had to stop. The excisions are not the only reason for that stopping but they are part of it. Forty-three people directly fleeing persecution in their own canoe is not a people-smuggling operation. Forty-three people directly fleeing persecution in their own canoe throws out every argument that the minister at the table had told us was important. We thought the concept of country of first asylum actually mattered. We thought the concept of people going through multiple nations, paying money to dodgy operators and putting their lives in peril was the argument; we were told that was the argument. But now, when we are the country of first asylum, the government decides to be even worse, to be even meaner and to be even more callous—to pretend that, once you are here, you are not in Australia. To quote the tourism commercial, if you are not in Australia, where the hell are you? Where the bloody hell are they, if they land on the mainland of Australia?

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