Janet Rice (Victoria, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

This pandemic has been challenging in so many ways. There's been so much hardship, so much hurt, so much suffering. Not least amongst that hardship, hurt and suffering has been the plight of the tens of thousands of Australians who are stranded overseas. And that number is increasing. It's not surprising, as you see the pandemic having such huge impacts all around the world, that people want to come home.

At the COVID committee hearing just on Friday, we heard that the numbers have increased from 18,800, as they were on 20 August, to, just a few month later—despite the number of people who have come home—37,000 Australians who are saying, 'Please, let us come home.' At that hearing we heard DFAT acknowledge what the Prime Minister has been unwilling to acknowledge, and that's that they are not all going to get home by Christmas. On 18 September the Prime Minister said:

I would hope that those who are looking to come home, that we'd be able to do that within months. And I would hope that we can get as many people home, if not all of them, by Christmas.

It's very clear that that's not going to be the case. In fact, we are going to fall well short of that.

I did some quick sums during the hearing last Friday, when we were told that over September, October and November 7,000 people had returned home each month—so, 14,000 throughout September and October. We were told that there's going to be some increase in the number of quarantine spaces over the coming months because there are going to be some flights coming into Melbourne and there are going to be more quarantine facilities in Tasmania and the ACT. But when I asked, 'Well, just how many more does that mean?'—from 7,000 a month, what are we going to get up to, 10,000 or, at a max, 15,000 a month?—I wasn't contradicted. In fact, I would say that the likelihood is that over the coming months—and it's less than a month to Christmas—we're going to be lucky if we get another 10,000 Australians coming home. And of course only half of that 10,000—only about 5,000 of those 37,000 Australians stranded overseas—are actually going to make it home to be with their loved ones by Christmas, because of the two weeks quarantine that's required.

So, of those 37,000 people who, in September, the Prime Minister said we'd be trying to get home by Christmas, we're looking at actually only 5,000 being able to get home. In fact, at the rate of quarantine availability, we're going to be lucky if those 37,000 people all make it home by Easter time. They're going to be stuck there for many months longer. This is tragic, because each one of those people is suffering in their own way. People are running out of money; people whose leases have run out have nowhere to stay; families caring for their children are desperately worried that, if both parents catch COVID, they won't have the family or support network to have somebody else look after their children. This is a real risk. If you look at the tragic statistics in the United States at the moment, in North Dakota, one in a thousand people have died of COVID, meaning about one in 10 people have caught it. These are really scary statistics. If you're an Australian living somewhere in the world with that sort of prevalence of this virus, you would be desperate to come home.

What also makes this such a tragedy is that there is something that we can be doing. There is a solution to this. We heard on Friday—and it was confirmed—that the limitation is not the number of flights or the number of places on flights; it's the quarantine facilities. It's having spaces available in Australia for people to quarantine. It means that, if you put the resources in, there are facilities all around the country that could be used for quarantine. By putting those resources in, we could lift the number of quarantine spaces tomorrow. This is a federal government responsibility because it's the federal government's responsibility to look after Australians and our borders. As the motion says, the review that Jane Halton undertook recommended establishing a national quarantine facility. There is a role that the federal government could be playing that this government is not playing.

I want to acknowledge in this debate the important work of Amnesty International in bringing attention to the plight of those stranded overseas, including through their report, Stories of the stranded Aussies. As that report notes, there is a clear breach of human rights in the Liberal Party's actions to leave people stranded overseas. The report states:

The Australian government has an obligation under international law—including Article 12(2) of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and Article 12(4) of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights—to bring these people home. They are not meeting this obligation.

We've got a breach of international law and we've got a government that could be taking action but is not taking action and is not meeting this obligation. That takes us to a really important point about this pandemic: it shows where your values lie. It's when the world's turned upside down that hard decisions have to be made. And we've now seen what the Morrison government have decided. They have decided to leave Australians stranded overseas.

The Australian Greens believe that universal human rights are fundamental and must be protected and respected in all countries and all places for all people. When you apply a human rights framework to the actions of countries, you can't pick and choose and say that it's okay for some countries to protect human rights and that it's okay for other countries to abuse them. That means that we as a country have to keep challenging ourselves to make sure that we are living up to our human rights obligations. It is our responsibility to call out human rights abuses in other countries, and it is our responsibility to respect the human rights of our citizens. We need to be getting people back to Australia. We need to be acting on black deaths in custody. We need to be not locking up asylum seekers in indefinite detention. We need to be bringing our citizens home.

But, while this Liberal-National government claims it values Australians, it has refused to take any ownership of this issue. We just heard Senator Stoker basically saying, once again, 'No, no, it's all a matter for the states.' The Prime Minister has a nose for a photo op; he can sniff out a shiny announcement a mile away if he wants to be part of it. But when it comes to the real issues that people want help with, then, no, it's a question for the state premiers. Meanwhile, of course, they have shown where their real priorities are. Mathias Cormann hardly had time to exit the building before he had a RAAF jet at $4,000 an hour flying him—whisking him—around at great expense, trying to get a cushy job. It really goes to show that it's one rule for everyday people and another rule for the Liberal mates network.

I want to be very clear: while the government has let Australia down during this crisis, there is a better way. Quite early in the crisis, we understood that there is a massive need for governments to intervene, to be looking after people and protecting our people. That's why we released our 'Invest to recover' plan. That report recognised that we faced, and continue to face, a pivotal moment. We said that for many people things haven't been easy for a long time, and that the inequality crisis, fuelled by the neoliberal politics of the Liberal and Labor parties, has been supercharged by the current health crisis and its disastrous economic consequences. And, while we rightly focused on responding to COVID-19, the climate crisis that drove the devastating bushfires earlier this year has not gone away.

By recognising that this is a pivotal moment, we can take real steps—tremendous steps—which will make a real difference for people, for communities and for the environment. We can intervene. We could invest and bring Australians home by Christmas, if we wanted to. It's not a matter of money; the government are spending $99 billion in giving handouts to their big corporate mates. They could spend the money if they wanted to. This is a moment in time, and the Liberal Party is betraying future generations by not seeing it. They have let down thousands of Australians overseas and left them stranded. It's not good enough. (Time expired)