Kim Carr (Victoria, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister Assisting the Leader for Science) Share this | Hansard source

It is great to be here and to follow Senator Paterson and his remarks. I am not surprised that he is quoting Senator Abetz, because they are bedfellows in many ways. It strikes me that this government has demonstrated that its measures to impose a lifetime ban on entry to Australia for asylum seekers who arrive by boat are crazy and desperate politics. It is crazy because the ban would even exclude people who have been assessed as genuine refugees and have been settled in a third country who then seek to make temporary visits to Australia on business or as tourists. It is desperate because it is a measure of just how far this government is prepared to go to win over the xenophobes of One Nation. And it is a measure of the obsequious capitulation of this Prime Minister to the very hard right elements of Senator Paterson's type within the Liberal Party and the National Party, in a desperate attempt to stay afloat in what is a drowning government. The implication of this measure has not been lost on One Nation. Senator Hanson and Senator Roberts have both crowed about the assertion that they are in fact responsible for this government's measures.

This bill, proposed by this government, is in fact very broad in its sweep. It would permanently exclude from Australia, in all circumstances, anyone who is over the age of 18 when they are taken to Manus or Nauru—that is, anyone taken after 19 July 2013. It may well be that these people are still in an offshore centre. It may well be that they are in a detention centre in Australia. It may well be that they are in community detention in Australia. It may well be that they are people who have voluntarily resolved to return to their country of origin. They may well be people who have resettled in a third country.

This measure, that this government announced, would affect 3,000 people. It is a blanket exclusion, and the very idea of it is so ridiculous, if anyone actually thought about it for any length of time at all. We would see a person excluded who is a refugee who was settled in another country and wishes to come to this country as a tourist. And that may well be in 10 or 20 years time. That in itself is sufficiently ludicrous, I would have thought.

Just think about this for a moment. Are we talking about a surgeon who might want to come here to attend a medical conference? Are we talking about a person who came to Australia as a refugee, was resettled in another country and who ends up winning a Nobel Prize? What would happen to those folks? Of course we might even have a person who has been a refugee, settles in another country and ends up being the Prime Minister of another country! Under these measures, they would be excluded. The government says, 'Yes, but there is this "ministerial discretion".' How ludicrous would it be if a prominent person, a prominent citizen of another country, cannot visit this country on a temporary visa because they had once sought refugee protection in this country and arrived by boat? If they arrived by plane, of course they would not be affected. That measure would not apply. They would have to rely upon the good graces of a future politician, in this case a minister, to show the appropriate discretion in those circumstances.

Labor have made it perfectly clear: we support the offshore processing of people who do arrive by boat. And while we do say that those persons should not settle in this country, it is a very different measure to propose that they should never visit Australia. Of course the attempts to verbal Labor with regard to this know very few limits. What we are seeing in this circumstance is just how far this government is prepared to go to try to wedge Labor. We know that this is a proposition that flies in the face of common humanity. Labor have always said, 'Yes, we want offshore processing', but we have made it very clear that it cannot be on the basis of indefinite detention. We never ever have said that the conditions of confinement of detention in themselves should be a deterrent for people seeking to apply for refugee status in this country. But that is exactly what has happened under this government: the very conditions on Nauru and Manus have been used by this government as a deterrent in itself.

The inhumanity of that proposition has drawn worldwide protest. And this measure that the government is proposing now goes even further, because it demonstrates that in these circumstances there is no depth to which this government will not sink to when it comes to the question of seeking to actually force people into a position of demonising refugees. This is irrespective of the international implications of this measure. It has been made perfectly clear that Labor would not support breaches of international law. And we have a situation where the UNHCR regional representatives in Canberra have made some comments on this matter. What we are raising are very serious concerns: Australia is a signatory to the Refugee Convention, and in article 31 it states:

2. The Contracting States shall not apply to the movements of such refugees restrictions other than those which are necessary and such restrictions shall only be applied until their status in the country is regularized or they obtain admission into another country.

Professor Ben Saul, the Challis Professor of International Law at the University of Sydney, has raised very serious concerns about the government's approach in terms of its potential breaches of Australia's international law obligation. He argues that this measure breaches article 31 of the Refugee Convention as well as Australia's family reunion obligations under article 17 and article 23 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

This is a situation where the government is quite prepared to verbal its opponents, is quite prepared to say and do anything to try to justify its actions. And what we know is that under these circumstances it is constantly engaged in a downward spiral of brutality when it comes to the question of asylum seekers. We demean ourselves as a country when we allow that type of behaviour to go unchallenged. We simply cannot allow people to be abused in our name in that way. That is why the Labor Party were very keen to participate in the Senate inquiry into the reports of abuse on Nauru. And we have sought to ensure that our offshore facilities are subject to proper independent oversight, because we want to make sure that we do not have a circumstance where our international reputation as a compassionate society is actually brought into question.

This government argues that this is now a matter of national security. Is there any limit to the hyperbole that we are going to be subjected to on these questions? We have seen a government that has offered no rational and certainly no consistent explanation for why these measures are necessary. That is why we are left with the conclusion that this is a government that is desperate to find yet another example to divide the community. This is another example of the way in which it seeks to demonise refugees no matter what the circumstances of their departure from other countries have been or the conditions under which they are held. Instead of paying proper attention to finding alternative sites for people to take up residence in another country, this is a government that is now seeking to use this as a device to delude the Australian people about its actual intentions here.

We have on Nauru a situation where thousands of people have been left completely without hope of future engagement and without the prospect that they are entitled to have of saying that the people who are detaining them—the legal fiction is that it is the government of Nauru, but the reality is that it is the actions of this government—have obligations to ensure they are treated humanely and that their conditions are not in themselves part of any deterrent regime. This government has an obligation to ensure that there are third-party settlement arrangements put in place.

The government is deluding itself if it thinks there is widespread support in the Australian community for these types of demeaning measures. My office has been subjected to quite a large amount of correspondence and a number of complaints on this matter. I have not seen anything quite like it from such a wide group of people who are genuinely concerned that this is a bridge far too far.