Warren Snowdon (Lingiari, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for External Territories) Share this | Hansard source

What an insult to the intelligence of the Australian community you are. And you think, somehow, that this gratifying and elevating argument is something we should all support.

Let's understand what others think. Amnesty International has said:

There was a time when Australia led the way on refugee protection.

Following World War II, Australia came second only to the United States on resettling European refugees. Its signature brought the Refugee Convention into force a few years later. And, in the 1970s, it resettled the third highest number of Indochinese refugees following the wars there.

In October 2016, the Turnbull government attempted, before backing down, to introduce laws that would imprison for up to two years doctors, nurses, counsellors and other health professionals if they publicly revealed physical or sexual abuse or medical negligence in Australia's offshore detention centres. How do you equate that with someone who respects human dignity? How do you equate that?

We know that that position is consistent with their current opposition to preventing people visiting Nauru and Manus Island to understand the situation which currently exists—preventing journalists and politicians travelling freely to visit these places and to interview people to get a first-hand account. The secrecy and lack of transparency is mind-boggling. And what is it for? What is it to hide? A corruption of a process by a political party that is so inept that it cannot come to terms with its obligations to treat people respectfully and with dignity. That is what this is ultimately about—understanding that people need to be treated with dignity, humanity, civilly and respectfully.

These people may be there, unfortunately, on Manus and Nauru. Most of them there would be seen as genuine refugees. We will have them resettled somewhere else. Even though they are genuine refugees, when they are—

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