Christine Milne (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

This is a continuation of my speech from just before question time. I rise to remind the Senate that the government and the coalition argued that we had to change the law in Australia to abandon our commitment to legally binding protections for refugees in order to save people from getting on leaky boats and to save them from risking their lives at sea. Well, there has been a spectacular failure of that compromise. What the government and the coalition have done is abandon the rule of law when it comes to protection for refugees. They have abandoned the principle that the minister is the guardian of unaccompanied children. They have abandoned the idea that he has to act in the best interests of those children. They have legislated to say that refugees will not have the legal right to natural justice and legislated to say that none of the protections needs to be legally binding. Yet it is such a spectacular failure that the refugees continue to come and continue to risk their lives on boats. As Michael Bachelard's piece in the Age today, 'PM asylum-seeker policy fails to deter boats' says, the asylum seekers have said themselves:

‘‘They know [ about the new policy], but they don’t stop. They say it’s too dangerous to stay in Pakistan.’’

In fact:

The recent drowning of more than 100 Hazara asylum seekers had also not deterred them. ‘‘Everyone knows [about the drowning], but . . . they say ‘When I go back to my country, I am sure that Taliban or al-Qaeda or the other agents of the Taliban will detain me, kill me’,’’ he said.

‘‘I’m sure, 100 per cent sure, that the Taliban will kill me . But if I go, maybe I wait to get to Australia, maybe one year, two years, to Nauru island. The Australian government does not kill you.’’

So you have got an issue here where the refugees are not going to be deterred. All that has happened is that this parliament has abandoned its commitment to the refugee convention, to the rule of law, to natural justice and to the protection of children for no other reason than to punish people and send them away for no outcome when it comes to deterring them from taking this risk. I want to go to this issue because I do not think most Australians realise that what the parliament did, at the request of the government, was to exempt the minister from being the guardian of unaccompanied children. Until the legislation went through this parliament, the minister had to act in the best interests of the child. He was legally bound to do that and the High Court had made it clear that sending children into offshore detention was not in their best interests. The minister could not send the children away, so he came to the parliament to say he wanted to be exempted from that and the coalition voted with the Labor Party to do exactly that, to allow the minister to send unaccompanied children to Nauru with no guardian. That is exactly what has been voted for.

I put it to the Senate that when people said, 'Oh, the Greens won't compromise on this legislation; they are not going to be part of this so-called solution,' they were right. And what did compromise achieve for the coalition and the government? Firstly, a record number of people risking their lives at sea for a start. Secondly, what they compromised on were basic tenets of our democracy: a legally binding protection for refugees, a protection of the child so an unaccompanied child has a right to be represented by the minister and the minister has to actually act in the child's best interests, and the right to natural justice as a refugee. I find it extraordinary that the way this issue was presented out there in the community was that everyone in this parliament was trying to do so much to save people from getting on boats and the Greens would not compromise. Well, now this has happened what has been shown is that the Greens stood up for the rule of law, for natural justice, for the refugee convention and for the rights of the child.

This parliament sold all that out and now it is faced with the humiliation that what has been said by all refugee advocates and the Greens was true: deterrence does not work; it does not stop people trying to get to Australia

In fact, what has been shown to help people is an increase in the humanitarian intake, investment in regional assessment in Indonesia and elsewhere in the region and codifying our safety of lives at sea legislation. All of those things that the Greens proposed that actually address the situation are now being done, because we held out. If the government had got its own way and had put through the Malaysia proposal in the first place, none of those things would have happened. We would not have had the intake increased to 20,000, we would not have had the investment going into the UNHCR, and nor would we have had this investment in trying to help people across the region to get to a decent solution. Instead of that, we have humiliated ourselves globally by abandoning our legal obligations under the United Nations human rights convention and we have abrogated our responsibility to innocent children. If one of those children gets sent from Australia to Nauru, let it be on the heads of all the people in this parliament that you voted to abandon them having a guardian.