Kerry Nettle (NSW, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Last weekend, the government flew 82 Sri Lankan asylum seekers to Nauru. These young men were found in a leaky boat by Australian Navy crew a month ago and then locked up by the Australian government behind razor wire in the detention centre on remote Christmas Island. The young men have been asking to talk to lawyers, but they have not been granted this most simple request by the Australian government. It is a cruel and heartless country that this government is trying to turn us into through these policies.

Young men do not hand over their families’ hard-earned cash, pack themselves into leaking boats and set sail to the other side of the globe unless their lives are in danger. These young men, including a 17-year-old, are from Sri Lanka—reportedly the north of Sri Lanka, where we hear about young men being press-ganged into the military and militias. It is a part of the world that has a sad and sorry history of child soldiers. Just last weekend there was a large story in one of the weekend Sydney newspapers about this ongoing practice.

The government’s response to the plight of these young men has been appalling. The government has not even started to address their claims for asylum. The men have been asking for lawyers, and the government has not only denied them this but, according to reports, actively prevented them meeting. Just this weekend—after having been locked up behind razor wire on Christmas Island for a month—the government sent them to Nauru. Shipping them to Nauru was a cruel and cynical attempt to get these young men and their horrendous stories about the torture they experienced in Sri Lanka at the hands of the authorities out of sight and out of the minds of the Australian public. The government knows that the Australian public—and, indeed, the Australian parliament—will not stand for the mistreatment of young asylum seekers who have fled from civil unrest in a country like Sri Lanka. That is precisely why the government has put so much effort into shutting these young men away, keeping them away from lawyers, from media contact and from people in the Australian community who would like to assist them—Australians who have got big, open hearts and minds.

Last year the public and this Senate chamber made it very clear that we do not want asylum seekers shipped off to Nauru, out of sight, out of mind, away from care and away from assistance. The principal reason why the Prime Minister withdrew the piece of legislation that sought to send all asylum seekers to Nauru was that asylum seekers do not have the same rights—especially legal rights—in Nauru as they do in Australia. Coalition backbenchers were very well aware of that during the debate of that legislation. Another significant issue of concern was that they did not want to see unaccompanied children sent to Nauru. That is what happened on the weekend. A 17-year-old man from Sri Lanka, who, by all reports, has experienced detention at the hands of the authorities—some of the young experienced torture—was sent by this government to Nauru.

At the time that the public debate was going on, government members made it clear that they would not support sending asylum seekers to Nauru because they were concerned that Australia could not guarantee that asylum seekers in Nauru would have their cases processed in a timely manner, that they would have access to lawyers, or that children would not be locked up. All those concerns that government backbenchers expressed at the time of the government proposal last year to send asylum seekers to Nauru have come to fruition this weekend. We have seen an unaccompanied minor, a 17-year-old boy, being sent to Nauru.

At the time of the debate of the legislation last year, because government backbenchers pointed out that people in Nauru do not have the same legal rights—the same access to lawyers and support—as they do in Australia, the government proposed to bring in a new system whereby there would be legal support provided for asylum seekers in Nauru. My recollection is that it was similar to the system that exists in Australia, whereby the government makes money available to ensure that asylum seekers can have access to lawyers. During the debate last year, the government was trying to address the concerns of its own backbenchers about asylum seekers not having legal support. The government proposed bringing in a system under which people in Nauru would have access to lawyers, funded by the Australian government.

When the Senate indicated that the legislation was not going to pass—government backbenchers in particular made the numbers work that way—the government withdrew the proposal to ensure that asylum seekers in Nauru would get appropriate legal assistance and support. It was almost a petulant, cynical move to offer access to lawyers; the government recognised that government backbenchers thought this was a fundamental issue. But when the parliament made it clear that they were not going to agree to sending asylum seekers to Nauru, the government withdrew the offer of ensuring that asylum seekers would have access to lawyers.

I want to read a comment that was made by the Hon. John von Doussa QC, President of the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission. In a speech in September two years ago, he said:

One of the main roles of a lawyer is to facilitate access to the justice system. In most cases, access to legal assistance is vital, and without it there is a high risk that justice will not be done.

This is why Australia and so many comparable countries have a legal system that provides lawyers to support vulnerable people who are making claims about their need for protection. Anybody who has been involved in the area of immigration law knows how extraordinarily complicated it is. Getting your head around it is really difficult for people who are involved in it. To expect an asylum seeker—who may be a child; who may not have any English at all; who may have been detained and tortured by authorities; who has just come on a leaky boat; who is from a family fleeing persecution—to understand Australia’s entire immigration legal system is just not plausible. The Australian government has had to recognise that and ensure that there are lawyers who are funded to assist asylum seekers to work their way through the maze of immigration law. We all accept that—that is why it occurs in Australia—yet the response of the Australian government, when people who are fleeing persecution come to Australia, is to send them off to Nauru where they will not have that access. That is a cruel move by the government.

There are no lawyers in Nauru who can help people to navigate their way through the legal system. As it happens, the 90 people who are currently on Nauru have managed to get a lawyer to represent them, but not because the Australian government assisted. In fact, we have heard reports that the Australian government actively sought to prevent these asylum seekers from getting access to a lawyer, although they did manage to get access and they now have a lawyer to represent them.

The challenges facing lawyers in representing an asylum seeker in Nauru are extraordinary. For a lawyer to even get to Nauru is a challenge. Julian Burnside found that out in recent years, when he was denied access to Nauru to meet with a client. I have twice tried to get to Nauru and not been granted a visa. I am a member of parliament. These people have been sent there by the Australian government, but I cannot go and see them. This is the same challenge that lawyers face when trying to get this access. I am not blaming the Nauruan government for this; I am blaming the Australian government. They sent those asylum seekers there in the first place. So the limited capacity for lawyers to assist those people is extraordinary. Julian Burnside said on ABC Radio on Monday:

... getting to Nauru is incredibly expensive and it takes a long time. And frankly there’s not many pro bono lawyers who are prepared to spend that sort of money or able to spend that sort of money in order to offer their services free of charge. Now that’s just the reality of it.

He is talking about these asylum seekers. He continued:

They’ve been taken to Nauru at great expense on the taxpayer in order to prevent them from having the benefit of legal help.

From reports, there has been comment that these vulnerable people had UNHCR documents, some of which indicated they were asylum seekers—that they were refugees. In December last year, the UNHCR put out a report in which they said that the cases of people who are from the north of Sri Lanka and who are fleeing persecution should be looked on favourably—that they are refugees. That is an extraordinary statement for the UNHCR to make. They understand the system of refugee processing, where you need to determine whether people are asylum seekers. They made this statement to say that these people need to be looked at favourably because they are refugees as a result of the situation in Sri Lanka, in the north of Sri Lanka in particular, yet these people have been taken away to a place where they cannot have access to lawyers and support to enable them to proceed with their protection claims.

The Nauruan government has set a time limit of six months for these people to be processed and off Nauru. There are eight Rohingyas on Nauru. They are from Burma. They were in the custody of Australia and then put onto Nauru—but they are Australia’s responsibility—for six months. According to their lawyer, they have not even started processing their asylum claims. If the Nauruan government is saying to Australia, ‘In six months you have to take these 82 Sri Lankans, process their claims and find a third country to send them to,’ it just will not happen. It will not happen for the current eight asylum seekers on Nauru.

The record of the Australian government in trying to find third countries—because this is what the government says that it wants to do—is woeful. There were 1,547 asylum seekers taken to Nauru, and three per cent were accepted for resettlement in other countries. They are Australia’s responsibility; we put them on Nauru. It is therefore unsurprising that the international community has said, ‘We are not going to take them.’ The Australian government will not be able to comply with the deadlines set by the Nauruan government that these people need to be processed and off the island in six months time. The Australian government will not be able to do it, so these people will have to come to Australia. Let’s bring them to Australia now so that they can get that legal support, so that they can be assisted whilst their claims for asylum are assessed. Let’s bring them to Australia now.

Before the time allotted to me in this debate ends, I want to speak about another issue. I want to tell the Senate about an inspiring young woman that I met last year. I was at the Newtown festival, and I met a young woman by the name of Ariana Ladopoulos. She was walking around the festival with a clipboard, asking people to sign a petition she had written about global warming. Her petition called on the government to ratify the Kyoto protocol immediately and to take steps to ensure that Australia’s emission of greenhouse gases is reduced significantly. Ariana is 13 years old. She gets the significance of the issue of global warming and the need for the government to do something about it. She has been gathering signatures since November last year. Her parents told me that, even when they went away on holidays, Ariana was there with her clipboard on the beach getting people to sign her petition about global warming. She went to a public meeting in my local area of Marrickville, where Senator Bob Brown was speaking about coal, and she got him to sign her global warming petition as well. Ariana presented this petition to me last week for me to table in the parliament. I seek leave to table Ariana’s global warming petition, which has been signed by 1,455 people. I congratulate her on that.

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