Nick McKim (Tasmania, Australian Greens) | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answer given by the Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry (Senator Watt) to a question without notice I asked today relating to offshore detention of asylum seekers.

Senator Watt has been very clear with the Senate that the government has announced a former spook, Mr Dennis Richardson, to conduct some kind of a review into matters associated with the allegations that have been made public recently, very credible and very serious allegations about corruption in regard to Australia's offshore detention regime. That corruption is alleged to have occurred both in Papua New Guinea and on Nauru. Anyone who has watched Papua New Guinea or Nauru over the last few decades would be completely unsurprised that there are now credible allegations that corruption occurred around the billions of dollars of Australian government money that flowed into those two places as a result of a decision by a Labor government in Australia to reopen the offshore detention regime.

Any time we speak about offshore detention, we should reflect on the human cost, the massive human cost, of this cruel, punitive, disgusting regime of torture of innocent people—the death, the murders, the armed assaults, the rapes, the child abuse, the child sexual abuse, the deliberate harming of innocent people. The cruelty was not a bug of the system; it was a feature of the system. Offshore detention was deliberately designed to make people's lives so unbearable and to harm them so grievously that they would choose to go back to the countries that they fled from in the first place, to go back into the dangers that caused them to leave their homes in the first place. That is what offshore detention was all about. The cruelty, the brutality, the dehumanisation—they were design elements of the system. They didn't happen by accident and they weren't unintended consequences; they were actually the whole point of offshore detention—to coerce an outcome out of desperate, vulnerable people who reached out a hand and asked our country for help, and to coerce an outcome out of other desperate and vulnerable people who were thinking about coming to Australia and asking us for help because we signed up to the refugee convention back in 1951. These are design elements of offshore detention.

We had a system deliberately designed to harm innocent people, including children—a system which relied on rampant and systemic corruption to deliver it—and we're not going to get a royal commission into it from this government. If those matters aren't worth a royal commission, there's very little that is. It is extraordinary that this government is doing its best to put in place a narrowly scoped inquiry that won't have all the powers it needs, that will conduct its business behind closed doors and that is effectively designed not to answer the serious questions that need answering, which are: How can a country like Australia, in the 21st century, end up with a bipartisan political agreement between the two major parties to torture innocent people to try and coerce an outcome out of them and out of other innocent people? How can we have designed a system that was deliberately created to harm children? Those are the questions that we should be answering. Offshore detention is one of the darkest, bloodiest and most brutal chapters in our national story, and we're never going to write the concluding paragraphs unless we have a royal commission that holds people to account and makes sure it never happens again.

Question agreed to.