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

To this day, the survivors of the SIEVX say that a ship came and put lights on the water. They started shouting and swimming towards the lights. The lights went off and the ship went away. That is what the survivors say. What did Australia know about where they were? Why were the ships not dispatched to rescue them? To this day every inquiry we have tried to get up into the SIEVX has been blocked, and so it goes on. We are involved in a cover-up over what has gone on on Manus Island. I say that because you have Prime Minister O'Neill in PNG saying:

Under agreement, all media queries relating to this deceased transferee are being handled by the Australian government. You have to direct your queries to Canberra …

Then we have an Australian government statement saying:

This is actually a police matter in PNG, so our role has been to support the PNG police in the investigation of a crime, and any matters that follow in relation to an autopsy or a coronial inquest are matters for the PNG government, and we have provided all the support that has been required for that. It is not a matter that is within our control.

So the Australian government puts in a detention centre, does its memorandum of understanding, says it is going to be in control, says it can guarantee safety, and then disaster occurs and it immediately says, 'It's actually up to the PNG government.' The PNG government brings out a statement saying, 'It wasn't our police. No—everything on our end was fine.' This is a cover-up and that is why we need a royal commission to get to the bottom of it, but we need to close that centre right now. If you had any sense of decency and humanity, that is what you would do.

I want to congratulate the 500 academics who signed an open letter to Prime Minister Tony Abbott. It says:

We believe that the current approach to dealing with asylum seekers arriving by boat, especially offshore detention and claims determination, is seriously flawed and unsustainable.

It breaches Australia's international legal obligations, including its obligations as a party to the Refugee Convention. It demonstrably harms the physical and psychological health of detainees.

Furthermore, it seriously undermines the status and good name of Australia as an international citizen.

We call on the Australian government to close the detention centres on Manus Island and in Nauru immediately.

Yours sincerely—

and it is signed by 500 academics in all kinds of academic pursuit around the country. I congratulate them and urge every Australian to stand up to this. It is a cover-up. We need it to be opened right up, but we need Manus Island and Nauru to be closed immediately. This is a disgrace to the nation. In future, people are going to look back and say, 'How did this parliament allow this to continue?' Frankly, Liberal and Labor are complicit in keeping Manus open and in keeping this an internal inquiry when it needs to be a royal commission.