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

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answer given by the Attorney-General (Senator Cash) to a question without notice asked by Senator McKim relating to asylum seekers.

Well, here we are again. There's a sickening case before us today that has appalled so many people in Australia—the Murugappan family, Priya, Nades and their two little girls, originally from Sri Lanka and more recently from Biloela. They are a family that has been deliberately mistreated because it suits this government's political ends to do so. This family has now finally been let off Christmas Island, and the Australian Greens are very pleased that they will no longer be detained in inhumane and unsafe conditions on Christmas Island. But for them to simply be placed into community detention in Perth is not good enough. They should be released not just into community detention in Perth but, in fact, back to their home, to the community in Biloela that wants them returned there and will support them when that happens. Biloela is the place where they were building a life and where they were welcomed and loved by the local community.

The developments of the last week—but really over the entire life of this government—show that the mistreatment and cruelty that has been doled out to this family is not some by-product or some accident. It's not a bug; it's a feature of the government's policy. It's a deliberate choice by a government that choose to build in torture as a cornerstone of their immigration policy. They've militarised our borders. They've advertised their cruelty for the world to see, with slogans that have been in aped by far-Right nationalists in Europe. They've turned around people fleeing persecution and, in some cases, turned them straight back into the hands of the regimes and the persecution they were fleeing. They have destroyed thousands of lives in offshore detention, an appalling, bloody policy that has the full support of both major parties in this place. It is a brutal policy with brutal, human consequences.

Make no mistake: the cornerstone of Australia's immigration detention system—both offshore and here onshore in Australia—is to make people's lives so miserable, to harm people so grievously, that they decide that going back to the persecution in the places they fled from is the lesser of two evils. It has been designed to break people, and break people it has. It has the express and admitted intent of deterring other people from seeking asylum. It's like the old medieval practice of impaling corpses on the walls of cities to dissuade other desperates from trying to enter. Here we are, in the early to middle 21st century, engaged in that kind of medieval barbarism.

Those millions of Australians who know this is wrong, who believe we are a better country than this, know all too well how hard it's been to achieve even a glimpse of humanity and compassion. They're fighting against billions of dollars, a paramilitary campaign supported by the two major parties. They're fighting against racist, baying elements in the media and the two major parties, who wear their cruelty as a badge of honour. But, in the face of all that, the Australian Greens and the millions of Australians who want to see a more compassionate approach will never stop fighting so that families like the Murugappans are given the freedom and safety in this country they so richly deserve. When they win their freedom on a permanent basis—and I genuinely believe they will—we'll continue to fight for those others who need it, for those people who were medevaced here and still languish in hotel prisons, for the people still stuck in Papua New Guinea or Nauru. And let's not forget, with regard to this Sri Lankan family, if they were to arrive tomorrow in Australia by boat to claim asylum in this country, under the policies of both major parties they would be immediately exiled, kids and all, to a prison camp on Nauru. Shame on the bloody lot of you! (Time expired)

Question agreed to.