Adam Bandt (Melbourne, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I and the Australian Greens will be opposing the Migration Amendment (Prohibiting Items in Immigration Detention Facilities) Bill 2017. This bill is nothing more than another power grab by an out-of-control Minister for Home Affairs. This bill really makes you think. How much lower can this government go? More pointedly, is there any room left to go any lower? For this mob, it's not enough to lock up in torture camps people who've committed no crime. It's not enough to send them back to the war-torn places that they fled. Now we're going to strip them of something else. This government's not satisfied with taking away their dignity, their mental and physical health, their freedom and their liberty. It's now taking away their possessions as well.

If this bill passes, the minister can now determine that any item is a prohibited thing, and this can include their mobile phones, their computers or their money, as if the people who are in prison can somehow use these phones to hack through the concrete walls of their immigration prison. These people, if this bill passes, will have no right to privately communicate with their lawyers or their loved ones. These are people who've committed no crime other than coming to this country seeking a better life. This bill will allow existing screening, search and seizure powers, including strip searches, to be used in relation to prohibited things; it will provide a statutory power to search all areas of immigration detention facilities operated by or on behalf of the Commonwealth for certain items, including prohibited things, without a warrant; and it will enable the use of detector dogs to screen detainees and persons entering immigration detention facilities operated by or on behalf of the Commonwealth and to search the facilities themselves.

It's not enough for the government just to break people; their intention is to obliterate them. Their intention is to shatter them into a million pieces. This is the latest in a long cycle of cynical ploys from cynical politicians who are willing to target asylum seekers for political gain. This is straight out of the John Howard political playbook of dog-whistling: target a vulnerable group for cynical reasons, and then deny that that's what you're doing, or justify the unjustifiable by describing your actions as a security measure.

When I hear the home affairs minister saying that he needs unlimited power because the people in detention are apparently all criminals, I feel like we've seen this movie before. We've seen it with the politicians who told us that parents were throwing their children overboard, who were ready to lock up Mohamed Haneef without even a semblance of due process, and who lied and said that asylum seekers were somehow responsible for the death of Reza Barati. The home affairs minister, Peter Dutton, has said that parents have harmed their children in order to stay in Australia. The home affairs minister has said that an asylum seeker who set himself on fire in desperation did so to get entry into Australia. This is the same minister who now introduces a bill that says he should have complete control over what asylum seekers in detention should be able to have access to, or how they can be searched, or whether family members can bring a home-cooked meal to them. Well, I don't buy it.

Vulnerable people seeking asylum have just become fodder for the baying conservative right in this country. They are seen by this government as nothing more than a dog whistle to blow hard on, to race bait and to incite hatred, fear and suspicion. They are being used as a wedge to force people apart in an attempt to bring out the worst in us. And the worst thing is that this government is seeking to normalise this. They want us to believe that this is just part of doing business, that this should just become a normal part of everyday life in Australia, but that view is something that we have to fight. We have to fight so that people in this country do not become desensitised to the cruelty that is part of offshore detention, that is part of imprisonment and that is part of the cruelty that Liberal and Labor inflict by singing from the same song sheet on their refugee and immigration policy. Because, in effect, this bill takes us further down the path of turning immigration detention into a parallel prison system where due process and legal protections do not apply. Let's be clear: in most countries the people who are having this inflicted on them would be living in the community while their immigration status is resolved; not in offshore detention as Liberal and Labor want, but living in the community while their status is resolved.

People who have sought asylum in Australia, who have committed no crime and who have been through a timely security and health check should not be detained indefinitely with their fate decided at the minister's discretion. Any move to weaken the protection for people in detention, whether asylum seekers or not, is troubling. People in Australia's immigration detention centres are incredibly diverse in both background and personal circumstances, and many of those detainees, even on the government's own reckoning, are low risk. So what possibly could be the measure for applying these punitive detentions to those people that even the government says are low risk? The Australian Greens share the Human Rights Commission view that a blanket application of restrictive measures by the designation of prohibited items by the minister to all people in detention, regardless of their individual circumstances, 'may not be a necessary, reasonable or proportionate response to the identified risks'.

Many of the submissions received in relation to this bill have highlighted the potential for this bill to infringe on the rights of people in detention. The Law Council of Australia noted that there are inadequate protections in place for detainees in relation to the bill's expansion of search powers. They said, in terms that should chill us all:

There is no requirement for a warrant, nor is there a requirement for the authorised officer to hold a reasonable suspicion that a detainee might be harbouring a prohibited thing. The Bill contains no limitations on how searches are to be carried out, including in respect of how often they are conducted, what time of day they can be carried out, or how many times individuals can be searched.

This bill is indicative of an alarming trend to increase the discretionary power of the home affairs minister. If there is anyone in this country who deserves to have the parliament watching every move he makes, it's the home affairs minister, Peter Dutton, but instead he comes in here saying, 'I want more power, I want more power.'

The Refugee Advice & Casework Service and the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre submitted and they made this point:

It is significant that legislative instruments made by the Minister for the purposes of determining new prohibited things would not be disallowable by the Senate. This limit on parliamentary oversight of the Minister's open-ended power to ban and confiscate classes of objects should be of concern …

And they were right to say that. Indeed, it is worrying, as the submission goes on to say, that the minister's already broad discretionary powers are proposed to be expanded in such a broad and vague manner.

Ask yourself: who benefits from stripping people in immigration detention of mobile phones? Who benefits from that? Why is that necessary? Why strip people of the ability to communicate with loved ones or simply access the internet? The evidence is clear. The telecommunications that are available to detainees at the moment are not available without their mobile phones, so what is the possible justification? Who could benefit from it? Only a government that wants to bury in secrecy what it is doing in these offshore hellholes. This government and this home affairs minister have built an entire system on secrecy and on lack of transparency.

When the minister talks about on-water matters or operational matters, he is saying that Australians do not have the right to know what is being done in our name. That is the secrecy which allows this minister to keep abusing human rights. Brave journalists in detention have been able to communicate with the outside world, despite the controls put on them. Behrouz Boochani, in particular, has reported tirelessly from Manus Island, directly via social media. Australians and people worldwide have seen the art of the cartoonist Eaten Fish. Reports have come out about the reality of Australia's cruel detention regime—and let's remember this is a detention regime that enjoys the support of Labor and Liberals—and the government has been unable to control those reports because the truth has been revealed.

I've heard justifications for this bill from the minister, but when a minister who has spent an entire career increasing his own unaccountable power and obscuring as much information as possible from the Australian people tries to introduce a law to remove one of the remaining tools to share information about his actions then you don't have to be a conspiracy theorist to be worried. Let's also be clear that, in introducing this bill, the government is setting out to formalise a system of increasing criminalisation of people in immigration detention. We are already seeing harsher and harsher measures directed at people in detention centres, both in Australia and offshore. It is clear now that this system, set up and supported by Labor and now run by the Liberals, is a system that is designed to punish people—people who have committed no crime. It is becoming increasingly a system designed to punish people. We are now endorsing a process that says, 'We want to turn Australia and its detention centres into places that are worse than the places that you fled, in the hope that conditions in these hellholes might be so bad that you decide to go back and face war, face persecution and face torture.' That is not something which we should sign up to.

I'm pleased to hear that on this issue Labor said that they were going to vote against the bill, although they have offered to work in a bipartisan manner to come back and do it again—which should send shivers down everyone's spine. But I say to the opposition: this is what happens when you sign up to a system which says that innocent people who come here seeking our help have to be sent to offshore prisons. This will happen again and again and again. It is not an anomaly. It is the point of offshore processing and mandatory detention, which both Labor and Liberal signed up to. The point of it is to put people far away—out of the way of support, and now, increasingly, out of the way of the ability to connect with the rest of the world and tell them what is going on. They will become abused and abused and abused until they become broken people or they take their own life. I refuse to believe that in this country we can somehow justify breaking people and killing them in the name of 'We've got to stop people taking to the boats.' The choice is not between people getting on boats or torturing people. What that is saying is that somehow this is some kind of necessary evil. We have to torture people in these hellholes, otherwise the boats will restart. Well, it is not beyond our wit as one of the world's richest countries to work out a way of doing what Malcolm Fraser did 40-odd years ago, to say to people, 'There are safer pathways to come to Australia.' If we assist the people and the countries in our region, like Indonesia and Malaysia, we will bring people here safely, in a way that can stop them risking their lives and without having to torture them in offshore hellholes.

So I hope that this bill is not only potentially defeated in the Senate but is the start of saying that we need to end mandatory detention once and for all. That will happen. That will happen (a) when this government is kicked out and (b) when the Labor Party have the courage to say, 'We're going to end mandatory detention and end offshore processing.' Until you do that, these kinds of abuses are going to happen time and time and time again. And what we find every time is that you might make the right noises, but when powers like these are given to the minister, very rarely do these powers get reversed. So let's take this opportunity not only to chuck this bill out—and let's take the next few months to, hopefully, chuck the government out—but also to join together to end the system of mandatory detention which leads to people taking their own lives and destroys people who are doing nothing more than coming here and seeking our help.

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