Tim Watts (Gellibrand, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

This week, the UNHCR released its annual global trends study, which found that 65.6 million people around the world had been forced to flee their home because of violence or persecution by the end of 2016. That is an increase of around 300,000 people over the last year, and it is the largest human exodus since World War II. More than 22.5 million people were seeking safety in another country as a refugee in 2016—another record.

The global refugee crisis is the defining humanitarian crisis of our times, but my view is that Australia has a special obligation to assist with this crisis in our own region. It is also in our national interests that we do so. Australia's strategic and economic future relies on being seen as a valued and trusted partner in South-East Asia. So it is in our interests to support and be a part of regional efforts to respond to this crisis in our own backyard. That is why I spent the April parliamentary recess travelling through Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and Myanmar, to see this issue firsthand. I funded the cost of this trip myself, but it would not have been possible without the invaluable logistical help and local expertise of Save the Children Australia. I wanted to experience for myself the way refugees are registered and assessed in transit countries; how they live while in transit, whether in detention or in local communities; the conditions they live in while waiting for a durable solution to their situation, whether their kids can go to school, whether adults can work and whether they can all access medical care; and to see conditions in the dominant source country for these refugees in South-East Asia—Myanmar.

I heard some heartbreaking stories. A 10-year-old girl in Thailand told me that her only dream in life was to see her father again. Another in a Myanmar displaced persons camp told me how happy she was when she first had been able to go to an Australian aid-funded school for the first time, because 'a school life is my best life'.

The good news is that irregular movement of people by boat across the Andaman Sea in this region has fallen dramatically in recent years owing in no small part to intelligence and interdiction measures supported by Australia as part of the Bali process. This was viewed as unambiguously good news by everybody that I spoke to on this trip. The mass graves discovered in the region in 2015 are a testament to the violent extortion and exploitation that people traffickers subjected asylum seekers to on these routes. However, this alone is obviously no solution to the broader crisis. Indeed, half a million refugees and asylum seekers remain stranded in the region waiting for a durable solution. For the majority of these people, their ultimate durable solution will involve integration into their transit country of asylum through residency and associated rights or a safe voluntary return to their country of origin when the cause of their being forced to flee is resolved.

I saw firsthand the way Australian aid is supporting refugees while they wait, often for many years, for these solutions. I was particularly impressed by Australian government support for the rollout of biometric identification cards in Malaysia to give refugees in that country a basic level of status that affords them freedom from harassment by police and improves their ability to find work. But also in delivering access to education to children living in internally displaced-persons camps in Myanmar there is much more that Australia could do on this front. I am pleased that last federal election, Labor committed to taking a leadership role within South-East Asia to build a regional humanitarian framework for refugees from this region. We pledged $450 million over three years to the UNHCR to support these measures and to support the UNHCR in advocating for work rights and the delivery of health and education services to asylum seekers and refugees.

I was pleased to see reasons for optimism on this front. In Indonesia, a new presidential decree on refugees was signed, giving nationwide consistency and direction to their approach. In Malaysia, a pilot project on work rights for 300 Rohingya refugees has started, and senior ministers have given a broader statement of commitment to expand work rights to all refugees. The Thai government has passed a cabinet resolution to develop a screening mechanism to distinguish refugees from economic migrants. The peace talks between the Myanmar government and minority ethnic groups, as well as that government's response to the interim findings of the Annan report on the Rakhine State, provide some reason for hope that outbound flows could be stemmed.

However, for some for these people the only workable solution is third-country resettlement, a process that even today can take a decade. For these people, the wait for resettlement is likely to get even longer, with the total number of resettlement places globally falling this year as a result of President Trump's decision to halve the total number of refugees that will be resettled by the United States. I am pleased that the Labor Party has committed to increasing our humanitarian intake to 27,000 per year but we need to ensure that we are doing all we can possibly can to respond to this humanitarian crisis. I have spoken previously in the chamber about the potential to expand the existing government community sponsorship program to provide an additional pathway to settlement. I encourage Australian businesses, community and civil society groups to make the case across Australia for the potential benefits of this scheme.

It is all too easy to be awed by the scale of the humanitarian crisis in Syria and it is something that we should not look away from. But there is a similar crisis in our own backyard that we all have a responsibility to address.