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Legislative Council - Fifty-Third Parliament, First Session (53-1)
2014-06-18 Daily Xml
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Refugee Week

The Hon. T.A. FRANKS (15:31): I rise today to alert the council to the fact that this week is Refugee Week; indeed, this is held every year across the world in the week surrounding 20 June, which is World Refugee Day. The theme for this Refugee Week is 'restoring hope', and I have to say that it is a well-chosen theme because never have we needed more hope in the areas of our policy on and treatment of asylum seekers and refugees.

From the introduction of mandatory detention under the Bolkus ministry in the Hawke/Keating era, through the years of Howard and the post-September 11 environment, where asylum seekers were considered to be terrorists (even though there was no proof of such things), through to policies under Rudd and Gillard, which claimed that no advantage would be given to those seeking our help, and now with the offshore detention and horrific stories we are hearing from Manus Island and Nauru under this Abbott government, which has continued the policies of cruel and inhumane—and indeed illegal—treatment of asylum seekers and refugees, I have to say that this is a time where we do need hope.

People seeking asylum have been used as political, pointscoring fodder by various governments. It is popular to kick asylum seekers, to demonise asylum seekers, and to cast refugees as somehow having broken a law; indeed, many Australians would assume that because we do lock up these people they must have done something wrong. Well, under international law they have not done anything wrong, and that is why I commend those members of the Labor caucus who yesterday put a change of policy proposal to a vote of their colleagues in the Labor caucus. It is sad that it did not get taken up, but I commend them, particularly those women in the Labor Party who have shown leadership on this issue in past days.

The Australian government is not currently meeting its obligations under the 1951 Refugee Convention, and it is a sad day indeed when it is popular to treat people, in their absolute time of need, people who are fleeing persecution and who need our help, so cruelly.

What I would point to is that governments have found it of political benefit to dehumanise refugees, whether that was under Howard and the restriction of media access to asylum seekers, the allocation of numbers to people rather than using their real names, and certainly not allowing them to have any ability to tell their story not only to the media but of course to the Australian community. These have been tactics used by various Labor and Liberal governments to the detriment, I think, of all of us who would consider ourselves champions of human rights.

The words 'transferees', 'detainees', 'unlawful' and 'illegal' are all inappropriate words but they are all words that have been politically powerful. The term 'queue-jumper' has risen in currency but the truth is: there is no queue for many of these people.

Australia has more than enough capacity to welcome asylum seekers and refugees. A refugee is somebody who has actually been found to have a well-founded fear of persecution. They have been found through due process to need our help.

Given the government's lack of leadership, I just want to take some time today to pause and reflect on the great community leadership we are seeing in this area. Many who have walked the streets of Adelaide in the past week would have seen the street art and the paste-ups of Peter Drew and the words of those who have written from inside detention centres and indeed the beautiful drawings of a young man who is a refugee. Those words and those drawings that have appeared on Adelaide streets over the past week have shown that there is hope that the community is standing up.

In the past week we have seen, we believe—although it has been done under the cover of darkness—children and their families removed from Inverbrackie. That is no way to treat people who have lived in our community, who were welcomed by that Hills community, who will be lost from those schools, and those schoolchildren who will miss the friends they have made in those schools. We must do better. We can do better. The community is showing us how to do better. It is time our parliament listened.

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