Sarah Hanson-Young (SA, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answer given by the Minister for Employment (Senator Abetz) to a question without notice asked by Senator Hanson-Young today relating to a visit by the Prime Minister to Papua New Guinea.

Firstly, I think it is extraordinary that despite the national shame of what happened inside the Manus Island detention camp only last month, the Prime Minister went all the way to Papua New Guinea but could not be bothered setting foot inside the Manus Island detention camp. This is a Prime Minister who said publicly he does not want a wimp for a minister. He does not want ministers as wimps but he did not have the guts to visit Manus Island to speak to the locals there, to speak to the asylum seekers inside or to even show concern for the Australian staff who work inside the centre and experienced, alongside the asylum seekers, the violence and brutal attacks that happened inside the detention centre back in February.

The Prime Minister has tried to put as much spin as he possibly could on his visit to Papua New Guinea. It is somewhat surreal. Everybody can see that the Papua New Guinea deal is unravelling. It is no solution; it is a shemozzle. The PNG solution has become the PNG shemozzle. It is shambolic. Despite everybody else being able to see what a mess the whole thing has become, we have the Prime Minister saying, 'Everything is fine and okay. Everybody look over here and do not look at what is really going on.' Well it is not fine. It is a human rights disaster.

We now have a situation in Papua New Guinea where even the court and the judicial wing of the Papua New Guinea government want to be able to inquire into the abhorrent standard of treatment inside the Manus Island detention centre. We see the Papua New Guinea Prime Minister alongside our own Prime Minister, Mr Abbott, saying, 'No inquiry, we will shut that down.' Who knows what they may find inside? It does seem strange, doesn't it, that the move to shut down and quash the inquiry happened only hours after the media were allowed into that detention camp for the first time? What they saw inside that camp was horrendous. We know the conditions are terrible. The United Nations told us that and so did Amnesty International.

When I was there a year ago the conditions were terrible and it seems they have not gotten any better. We have human rights abuses happening in our name and with our money over in Papua New Guinea, and the Australian Prime Minister, Mr Abbott, wants to say everything is fine and everything is on track. Of course he is scrambling around, scouring the rest of the Pacific to find the next new Island Pacific nation that he is going to start dumping Australia's problems on.

What gall does our Prime Minister have to go to Papua New Guinea and say that everybody else should carry the burden of asylum seekers and refugees coming to Australia but Australia itself. If we pay enough money, it seems as though someone else can clean up the mess. These are human lives we are talking about. They are not expendable. They are people who have fled war, torture, persecution and brutality. They come to our country asking and begging for help. Not only do we have a moral responsibility to help them but we have a legal responsibility as well. Yet our Prime Minister wants to push everybody out of sight, out of mind onto the next poorest nation we can find and say it should be their problem and they should carry the burden. What a cover-up we have right here.

The PNG solution has become the PNG shemozzle. It is a human rights disaster. It is a shame on Australia. Thank God that there are so many concerned Australians out there who were saying, 'You know what? We do not want this cruelty in our name.' We are not going to put up with it. Tony Abbott can bleat as much as he wants about how okay and how fine everything is but no-one is believing him. Not only is he delusional but he is also a wimp.

Question agreed to.