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

It's going on 10 years since the Australian Labor Party began a program of systemic exile of forced deportation which saw thousands of people detained on Manus Island and Nauru for nothing more than seeking asylum in Australia. We've heard recently that the last of these people will finally leave Nauru by the end of June. Of course, that is a good thing for those people, but we need to be clear that this is by no means the end of the sorry chapter of offshore detention. This dark and bloody chapter in our country's history has not yet had its conclusion written. There are still 82 people in Papua New Guinea who were sent to Manus Island a decade ago. These people witnessed murder and assault. They were dehumanised and brutalised for a decade, and Labor has now adopted the Liberal policy of abrogating all responsibility for these people.

Well, let's be very clear about this. It was the Labor Party that sent them to Manus Island to be illegally imprisoned in the first place, and those people remain the responsibility of the Labor Party today. There are hundreds in Australia who were exiled either to Manus Island or Nauru, who are still here in this country, who have no pathway to resettlement in another country, who have no right to permanently stay here and who are still denied that most basic of human rights—a safe place to make a home. Offshore detention will not be over until every single person who was sent to Manus Island or to Nauru gets the freedom, the safety and the durable solution that they deserve and that Australia agreed to provide them when it signed the Refugee Convention.