Nick McKim (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answers from the Minister representing the Minister for Home Affairs (Senator Watt) to questions without notice asked today by Senator Cox, relating to the Middle Arm Sustainable Development Precinct, and me, relating to asylum seekers.

It's been almost a decade since people were first exiled to Manus Island and Nauru, and we should never forget that they were exiled there by a Labor government. Now, nearly a decade later, Labor is back in power, but what is Labor actually doing to address the crisis and the human rights' calamity of the humanitarian nightmare that it actually started nearly a decade ago? You know what the answer is to that? Nothing; Labor is doing nothing to address it. It's been a decade of murder, rape, child sex abuse, armed assault, the deliberate destruction of countless lives and the deliberate denial of the necessities of life—food, drinking water, electricity, medical support. This has been a foul chapter in our country's story—a dark chapter, a bloody chapter, in our country's story—and it's time we wrote the ending to that chapter. But this is a bipartisan policy of cruelty.

The people left in Papua New Guinea and Nauru are like the corpses that used to be impaled on the walls of medieval cities to send a message to other desperate people that they should not try to enter. They are human billboards, exploited by the Labor and Liberal parties. What is the Labor Party, the government of the day, doing about this? Absolutely nothing except continuing the cruelty. They continue to wash their hands of the people who are in Papua New Guinea, and they continue to abandon the people of Nauru. It's not good enough. This country is a better country than this, and the government must do better.