Monique Ryan (Kooyong, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to support the motion moved by the member for Curtin, and I do that because so many members of my Kooyong community have contacted the electorate office in the last week with their grave concerns around the precedent set by this piece of legislation. All of us care about community safety. Certainly, in Victoria, we've had a significant increase in the incidence of aggravated burglaries and home invasions in recent years. They cause fear and anxiety, and the reports that we've seen in the media regarding the activities of some of the cohort that this legislation is targeted at have raised considerable concern. All of us care about keeping Australians safe; all of us care about protecting our borders, and it's the government's job to do that. It's the government's job to ensure national security, to protect the nation, to enforce our laws and to manage our borders. But it's also the government's job to act as a democratic government, to deal fairly and justly with some of the most consequential decisions that a government can make—decisions about the deportation, detention and transfer of vulnerable individuals who lack the ability or the power to defend themselves.

We've seen, in relation to the NZYQ cohort and the way that the government has chosen to deal with it, a really concerning tendency to keep moving the goalposts when they don't suit the government. What we've seen is that the government is unhappy with the High Court rulings around it that its actions have previously been illegal. So what the government is seeking to do with this legislation is to retrospectively change the law, to move the goalposts and to remove the requirement for natural justice. That phrase in and of itself—removal of the requirement for natural justice, procedural fairness, for people who are noncitizens, when we would expect nothing less from our government for ourselves in that regard—is deeply concerning. What we're seeing with this government and this rushed legislation is a desire to remove noncitizens to a third-party country, one which is economically vulnerable and houses fewer than 11,000 citizens of its own, such that this cohort would constitute a significant percentage of the population of that country should they all be rehoused there, while implementing what is essentially a system of bullyboy tactics, where we're offering the government of Nauru huge sums of money to rehouse people because we simply can't deal with them domestically.

This legislation flies in the face of the values of our community; it flies in the face of the fundamentals of our legal system. So, before we enact something which could well prove to be just the very beginning of a pattern of governmental activities, the limits of which are not at this point clear, it makes perfect sense that we subject this legislation to further examination. As a member of the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights, I think that that committee should have the opportunity to examine this legislation. We owe nothing less to our own communities and to all of the vulnerable people in this country who could potentially fall under the limits of this sort of legislation in the future than to legislate it with justice and with the sort of patience that decisions of this magnitude deserve. So I ask the government to rethink its punitive, rushed attitude to this group of vulnerable people; to take very seriously the responsibility that comes with the supermajority that it has; to not bully the parliament in the same way that it proposes to bully these vulnerable people, this cohort of individuals who will have no ability to defend themselves before the law with the removal of such considerations as natural justice; and to treat them with the sort of respect that we, as citizens of this country, expect for ourselves.

See this speech in context