Andrew Wilkie (Clark, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

Of course I will withdraw it, but I think these are matters we sometimes should reflect on. I'm not saying that this group of people—let's face it: there are some very unsavoury people in this group. Mind you, some of them have never been charged or convicted of an offence. Some have been charged and convicted of an offence and have done their time and deserve a fresh start. Some of them have spent so long in detention in Australia that they have done multiples of the time they might have spent in prison if they ever had been charged and convicted. It's not 280 people all out of the same mould. This is quite a diverse group of people, and they are all being dealt with with the same blunt instrument.

To the degree that there are some members of this cohort who are unsavoury and judged to be a continuing threat to public safety, I'm the first to say they shouldn't be allowed into the community, but there are other ways to deal with those people rather than shipping them off—or flying them off, I suppose—to what I liken to a gulag, or a hulk that might be on the Thames. I haven't been to Nauru, but I know enough about it to know it is a tiny speck of an island almost on the equator in the middle of the Pacific Ocean—a hot, dry, harsh place. Hardy people live there; full marks to the Nauruans. But it's not where you would send people from this country to get rid of them. It's a horrid place in that regard. We should be looking at ways to deal with these people ourselves.

Deputy Speaker Chesters, you might remember, some years ago now, I tabled a bill that would have ended mandatory and indefinite detention. Even that bill—advised by human rights lawyers and other people and organisations—went to the point of saying that, if someone were a genuine threat to public safety, then an application could be made to a court, and a court could decide whether that person should continue to be detained. Why don't we do something like that? Instead of shipping our problems off to other countries and giving them almost half a billion dollars, why don't we deal with it ourselves? We are one of the wealthiest and cleverest countries in the world. We pride ourselves on being good international citizens that comply with international law. We're proud of the fact that we live by the rule of law in this country. Surely, if there's one country in the world that could set the example on how to deal with this, it's us.

I don't mind if the government and the opposition pull out my old bill that would end mandatory and indefinite detention and go to the relevant part—they could lift it, they could use it; I'd be delighted if they copied it—and, instead of these 280 people being treated as a job lot, go through them one by one and work out what the best solution and the best outcome is for each and every one of them. For those that do need to be kept in detention, we should frame our laws so they allow a court to make that decision. I think that would be the humane, legal and decent way to respond to this.

That would send a signal to people who might seek to come to this country via irregular means. Let's face it; our so-called border security policies—I'd call them our irregular immigration policies—are based on punishment and deterrence. They've been that way probably ever since a Labor government introduced mandatory detention decades ago. It might have been the Hawke government, if memory serves me correctly. So no side of politics has clean hands here—no side at all. In fact, I think the only people in this place who have got clean hands at the moment are the crossbench, who are fighting for natural justice, fighting for the rule of law and fighting for adherence to international law and for acting as a decent country with integrity.

What we've got instead is this political fix—a political fix because the government's in a hole. They're in a hole because they've got to do something with this group of people. They've got the opposition on their back, who never miss an opportunity to try and score political points when it comes to irregular immigration in this country. So we're going to ram this through with a bill of $400 million in the first year for 280-odd people, and $70 million a year every year thereafter—I assume until there are none of the 280 left.

This is an appalling turn of events. I certainly won't be supporting this bill. I would be happy to support another bill brought to this place that sought to come up with a humane, decent and principled way to deal with this cohort of people, one that would look at each on a case-by-case basis and ensure that there was some mechanism like a court making decisions on ongoing detention for anyone who was genuinely a threat to public safety.

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