Larissa Waters (Queensland, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

Australia's relationship with China has been a hot topic in the community and the media in recent times. Of course this is an issue that our parliament should consider. This is something that the Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade Committee should inquire into. How we manage this relationship is a critical foreign policy question for this government, and it will no doubt continue to be for future governments. There are myriad facets to this complex relationship, from how we address the coronavirus health crisis and investigations into international responses to our trading relationship, to the impact Chinese government decisions can have on sectors like our universities or farmers, to the increasing competition between Xi's China and Trump's US, to China's Belt and Road Initiative and its influence in the Pacific.

However, in my limited time today I'd like to focus on an aspect that, sadly, gets neglected by the Australian government, and that is the Chinese government's human rights record. The world's focus is understandably diverted, but human rights abuses continue to occur in China on a massive scale. In the past few months, while China was publicly touting its success in containing the virus, it was also forcibly disappearing people who were independently reporting on that issue. The Chinese government has detained five activists and citizen journalists who publicly reported on the outbreak. This is just another example of the Chinese government's opaque justice system and its government's efforts to censor people. The Chinese government must immediately and unconditionally release these people.

And, of course, front of everyone's mind at the moment should be the erosion of fundamental rights in Hong Kong. One year ago yesterday, on 9 June 2019, over one million Hong Kong people marched peacefully against the extradition bill—a law that would have allowed the Hong Kong authorities to transfer criminal suspects to China and into the hands of its dangerous and unfair criminal justice system. Thankfully that bill did not proceed, but in the past few weeks we've seen the Chinese government double down and announce that it will impose draconian national security legislation in Hong Kong. Instead of addressing the protestors' demands, particularly for universal suffrage, Beijing has called the protests 'riots' and the protestors 'a political virus'. The national security law would further trample Hong Kong rights and freedoms; protest could be treated as subversion.

The Greens have been vocal in our calls for Beijing to abandon the planned laws. We call on the Australian government to do more than simply issue strongly worded statements. We should be offering safe haven to those in Hong Kong who fear retaliation for exercising their basic rights, as well as permanent protection to all those from Hong Kong who are here in Australia and currently fear going home, just as Bob Hawke offered to do after Tiananmen Square. And we should reassess Australia's recently signed free trade agreement with Hong Kong. As the Greens said when the legislation passed through the parliament late last year, of course we shouldn't enter into such an agreement when Hong Kong's fundamental rights are under threat. The events of the past few weeks have demonstrated how true that was. It's now time for the government to follow words with actions and revisit that agreement.

I'll go on to the appalling human rights abuses being committed in China's Xinjiang region against its Turkic Muslim population, which have not stopped in the face of COVID-19. Xinjiang has a Turkic Muslim population of 13 million people. Of that 13 million, approximately one million are arbitrarily detained without any legal process. They are detained for weeks, months and sometimes even years. Families have been torn apart. Those who are incarcerated are subject to forced labour, sometimes to torture, and to forced political indoctrination. Outside the camps, Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims are denied the right to freedom of movement, to privacy and to freedom of religion. The mass surveillance that is occurring in Xinjiang is terrifying. People going about their lawful daily business are watched constantly by the state. They're forced to give their biometric data, and face and voice recognition technology is being used as a tool of repression. My colleagues have in this place spoken before and no doubt will again about some of the Uyghur Australians whose lives have been irreparably altered by the Chinese government's devastating repression—people whose wives and babies have been trapped in China for years or whose family members are imprisoned for so-called transgressions like studying overseas in Muslim-majority countries.

Then of course we have the injustices being perpetrated against the Tibetan people by the Chinese government. Tibetans have been deprived of their right to democracy, their right to freedom of speech and their right to freedom of religious observance. Right now in Tibet people can be locked up for years and years for simply doing things like making documentaries. Tibetan monks and nuns are being forced by Chinese authorities to act as propagandists for the Chinese government and the Communist Party, and Tibetan children are being denied the right to be taught in their own language. Plans for massive nature reserves in Tibet threaten to further dispossess Tibetan nomads, under the guise of protecting a unique and important ecosystem.

And of course there's the 11th Panchen Lama of Tibet, who was forcibly disappeared with his parents by the Chinese government at only six years of age. He has been missing for the last 25 years. On 25 April he turned 31. He has been disappeared for the last 25 years in blatant contravention of international law. Australia must urgently make it clear to the Chinese government that the world has not forgotten him or his family, despite the Chinese government's best efforts to erase him from our memory. He and his family must be released.

Of course the Senate should be considering our relationship with China in the Senate Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade References Committee. If not this issue, then what? If not now, then when? The Morrison government has thus far failed to take any meaningful action against the Chinese government's egregious human rights abuses, so perhaps the Senate can provide him with some suggestions.