Gavin Marshall (Victoria, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

you can make that interjection—refer to people as ‘queue jumpers’. This is a simplistic argument which you run to try to demonise people seeking asylum in this country. Where was the queue in Sri Lanka? As the Sri Lankan army was closing in on hundreds of thousands of the population who were in the bombardment range and who were actually being driven into the sea, where was the queue for those people, Senator Back? There is no such thing as a queue for people who are escaping human rights abuses, torture, human misery and war. It is just simplistic and typical of the dog whistling attitude of the coalition, who will do and say anything to try and make some political advantage about any issue that they can. This is the great tragedy across the world. The fact is that people need to flee their homelands because of the human misery that they are suffering, because of torture, because of human rights abuses and because of starvation. They need to flee from it and seek political asylum in other countries around the world. People on that side have no sympathy, no compassion; they seek to make political advantage from their misery. Quite frankly, as I said, it sickens me and it disgusts me.

There is of course enormous difficulty for all governments across the board when there are periods of instability, as there have been—and there will be more of it. We see what is happening in Northern Africa. We see it happening in Libya and in other countries. I can tell you: there is no queue in Libya. We will see people displaced for what is looking like a long civil war in that country. We will see people displaced and we will see refugees. Some of them will be fleeing harassment. The very thing that the UN is doing now is trying to protect civilians. They will not be able to protect them all and people will flee that country. A lot of them will go to Europe, some of them will try to make their way to America and some of them will try to make their way here. And you will say, ‘Why didn’t they get in the queue? Why didn’t you get in that queue in Libya or wherever that queue might be?’ They will be fleeing torture; they will be fleeing war. They have a legal international right to seek asylum in third countries. We have a legal obligation to take them and process their claims for asylum. We have a right to do that, and we have a legal obligation to do it.

Whenever there is widespread conflict in places across the globe, there are going to be more people seeking refugee status, not just in Australia but across the world. It is not a problem that is unique to us. It is appalling that those on the other side try to politicise this. It is a balance. When most of these people flee torture and war, they do so genuinely without papers or luggage or anything else.