Peter Garrett (Kingsford Smith, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Reconciliation and the Arts) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It has been a week where the consciences of government members in this parliament have been challenged—challenged because our opportunity to participate in full and extensive debate, which is the hallmark of a democracy, has been curtailed by the use of the gag; challenged because the Migration Amendment (Designated Unauthorised Arrivals) Bill 2006, which clearly concerned some members opposite, was withdrawn; and challenged because the government continues to resist repeated calls made, including calls made in a motion in the Senate this week, for Guantanamo Bay to be closed.

I support the remarks of my colleague the member for Banks. I want to say that Guantanamo Bay is a prison of shame and that it is to Australia’s great shame that, as a government, we continue to participate in the operation of that prison. Revelations this week that three inmates at Guantanamo Bay had committed suicide is again confirmation that the conditions experienced by those who are held there are in breach of basic human rights, of the basic principles of our legal and democratic system and of the rule of law. Not one of those three who committed suicide had been charged. And no argument need come from this government, including the Attorney-General, that to question the conditions and the inhumane periods of detention is to countenance terrorism. It is a false argument, it is a false imputation and it does them no favour.

The fact is that Guantanamo Bay is a prison camp that is a discredit to American democratic traditions as much as it is to our own. Incidentally, it is such a discredit to the American political and democratic traditions that it is not located in the United States. But even more so, it is a discredit to our democratic traditions because we, alone amongst countries, continue to acquiesce to the conduct that goes on in this prison. The United Kingdom Attorney-General stated it clearly:

... the existence of Guantanamo Bay remains unacceptable. It is time, in my view, that it should close.

The United Kingdom Attorney-General had already determined that the military commission set up to try the detainees would not guarantee a fair trial. That point has been emphasised by a number of leading human rights lawyers and journalists here in Australia as well. British detainees were subsequently returned to the UK, but in the case of an Australian citizen, the Australian government was mute.

It is to the discredit of this Attorney-General that he, as first law officer of the Crown, is so indifferent to the fundamental principles he is charged with protecting that the aberration of Guantanamo Bay continues without a murmur from him or any minister in the government. The best the justice minister can come up with is that he wants to get the military commission to consider the Hicks case. But recent events, including the suicides, mean the case is delayed. Hicks’s attempts to become a British citizen have been stymied and the Pentagon itself blocks the access of British consular officials attempting to reach Hicks in prison, notwithstanding the links between those two countries.

The debate rages in the US, Europe and afar over Guantanamo Bay, and calls for its closure are repeatedly heard. Yet the government says and does nothing. The government’s absence and silence on Guantanamo Bay shows the extent of its capture by the hardline neocon elements of the US government. That is clear. The foreign minister was on television this week assuring Australians that the conditions Mr Hicks was experiencing were acceptable. An Australian consular official was cited by both the Prime Minister and the foreign minister as saying that, in their words, ‘the visit was positive’. I would like to see a report from the consular official on Mr Hicks’s state of health. But at the same time as these comments were put through, Mr Hicks’s legal adviser, the American, Major Mori, was saying clearly that Hicks was in poor health:

No, David is in isolation. He is not fit and well—he is depressed.

Who are we to believe—the foreign minister running his line or Mr Hicks’s American lawyer? Whatever the circumstances or past activities of any inmate in this institution, they should not be subject to long periods of indefinite detention or the possibility of suffering subtle and continual psychological torture. It is a mark of a civilised and humane society that it treats prisoners, any prisoners, in such a way so as not to deny them basic rights. It is a mark of politicians that they stand and argue for those rights, wherever they are being impeded upon. The Howard government, the foreign minister and the Attorney-General are failing us terribly on both of these counts.