Rachel Siewert (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

In fact, the UNHCR advice is that they cannot do it. So what does the government mean by 'no disadvantage test'? Are people going to be stuck on Nauru for 76 years? How long are they going to be there—20 years? That is why, at least, the government needs to be committing to a time line of detention of individuals on Nauru, and that is why Senator Hanson-Young will be addressing this issue through amendments.

Imagine fleeing violence, persecution, terror and torture and then not knowing your future—being held for an indefinite period of time in inhumane circumstances where this government has not guaranteed that humanitarian standards will be met. People could potentially be there for vast periods of time. We have been told that pregnant women may be sent there for vast periods of time. Children born there could be held for vast periods of time. Children could be held there for long periods of time—20 years. They could enter adulthood being held in an indeterminate future when they are fleeing from a country where their futures were also indeterminate and they were subject to violence. I cannot get away from the fact that these people are fleeing for their lives. They are fleeing war. They are fleeing persecution. And here we are persecuting them further because we have not addressed this issue properly.

Senator Humphries says this is our policy that they are changing. Well, the Greens do not support children in detention. Senator Humphries was proposing that the government is changing this because it is our policy that has been in place. In fact, that is completely untrue. We do not support children in detention. We were not talking about circumstances where the humanitarian intake had been increased and those people were being resettled. The government has only just announced it will increase the humanitarian intake. We have been proposing for years that the humanitarian intake be increased, that people be processed properly and that we restart the resettlement process—so that people do not have to get in boats, so they know they will be properly assessed and resettled, so they do not have to risk their lives.

But, as people are saying, they have had to flee and they have had to take their lives in their hands to flee. And how do we treat those people? We put them in tents in Nauru. These people who have fled are the same as any one of us. I believe that anyone, to protect their family, to protect themselves and their families and their children, would attempt to flee. And what do we do? We lock them up in detention for indeterminate periods of time—on Nauru. And, in the not too distant future, we will have another approval in here designating Manus Island as well. And then where else? Will we find other islands dotted around the place to put detention centres to keep people in inhumane conditions for indeterminate periods of time—simply for trying to protect themselves and their families from persecution, torture, terror, war and violence? Let us keep remembering the people that we are talking about. We keep forgetting why people are fleeing in the first place.

We have an organisation that is apparently now going to be put in place to run this process—Transfield Services, I think they are called—which has no experience in this area. Great; let's just keep racking up the problems on Nauru!