David Shoebridge (NSW, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of answers given by the Minister for the Environment and Water (Senator Watt) to questions without notice I asked today relating to immigration.

That was a pretty remarkable effort from Labor. They were given a chance in question time to respond to the criticism that the Human Rights Law Centre, National Legal Aid, Democracy in Colour, the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre, Amnesty International and many more made of Labor's previous tranche of anti-asylum-seeker, antirefugee and antimigration laws that they rammed through, with the help of Peter Dutton, in the dying days of the last parliament.

Each of those groups said that those laws that Labor was the author of and drove through this parliament would fuel racism. They said, 'Don't pass these laws, and don't engage in the kind of debate that the coalition invites you to do all the time, which is to classify, as a criminal, everyone seeking asylum and to paint, as criminals, people who are in immigration detention because of their visa status, because that is false.' It is so obscenely false that those in the sector are tearing their hair out and saying, 'Why do we have a Labor government that keeps making these false claims against people who are seeking asylum?' What did the government do? It ignored those calls to not fuel hateful right-wing, anti-immigration sentiment, and it joined with Peter Dutton to pass those hateful laws. Shame on the Labor government. Then, when their ministers are given a chance in this place to respond to that criticism, they deflect, they dissemble, they defer, they avoid and they turn it into a parallel political attack.

This government needs to take responsibility for what it has done. Do you know what? Labor needs to take responsibility for, now, decades and decades of this. It was Labor which first passed mandatory detention laws against people seeking asylum by boat. It was Labor which cheered the coalition when it put through a ban on people who'd sought asylum in Indonesia being able to come to Australia, and it's Labor which keeps that ban in place. It's Labor which refuses to provide a fair pathway to justice for the thousands and thousands of people rejected by the coalition's unfair fast-track process and instead keeps these people in endless limbo and uses them as political attacks. It was Labor, just last week while those far-right rallies were building up steam, which brought another piece of hateful legislation into this parliament, to take away the rights of natural justice from people seeking asylum. It's Labor which refuses to admit that the laws they are passing affect over 100,000 people and families in this country. Labor, own up to what you have done. (Time expired)