AJA Statement to Senate Inquiry into Migration Act

Statement to Senate Inquiry into the Migration Act

by Kate Gauthier, A Just Australia National Coordinator

Click here to find the inquiry's webpage

Good afternoon Senators.

I would like to start off with a question for the committee. Are there any of you, faced with threats to your safety, dangers to the safety of your family, your children, with no queues to join in your country to seek protection, would you let a visa ? a little piece of paper stand in the way of you and the safety of your children? There is not one person among us who would not think of the safety of their family first and foremost. We would all save ourselves no matter what we had to do.

Asylum seekers are people who tragically had to face that situation. And most of them do eventually get refugee status, so we know that the clear majority are genuine, have not lied and have simply exercised their rights under human rights conventions that Australia has signed up to.??

We have all heard the following statement a number of times:

We decide who comes here and the manner in which they come.?

By signing the refugee convention we DID decide who could come and how they could come. We said if you are in danger we will help you. If you make it here we have boundless plains to share.

The immigration department?s own statistics show that most of the people who came here by boat did exactly what we would do ? they fled to safety. So when thinking about the application of the migration act, don?t think about it in terms of asylum seekers who seek to exploit our generosity. Think about it in terms of people who did exactly what you would do faced with the same choices.?

I speak to you today with two voices. The voice of the refugee sector ? experts from welfare agencies, NGOs and lobby groups, of which A Just Australia is a part. But just as importantly I also speak with the voice of the 12 000 ordinary Australian men and women who support our organization in our campaign for a more just Australia. People who have said that this is not good enough. People who have said, like me, that these policies are not just wrong, they are offensive. They offend the Australian sense of decency and fair play. They offend the history of this country in defending human rights, and they offend our hopes for the kind of community we hope to pass on to our children.

Detention is an important issue, when the conditions we keep people in are quite clearly inhumane and have been documented as breaking international rights standards. But of equal importance is the determination process for refugee visas. That?s the permanent outcome for asylum seekers ? do they get a visa or do they get sent back home. And if we get it wrong, they get sent back to persecution, imprisonment and in some cases disappearing, possibly killed. So while it is important to monitor the conditions of how we treat people during the process, do not get sidetracked or distracted by the issue of to detain or not detain. The visa issue is more complex and more difficult to solve. And that is because of the very structure, the very culture of the department who determines refugee status.

And there is overwhelming evidence that the processing of refugee related visas is so fatally flawed as to be entirely untrustworthy.

There is evidence that the department has taken an adversarial stance against asylum seekers and applied the Migration Act in view of that negative stance, instead of fairly and without prejudice. No case shows this quite as clearly as the case of the 7year old girl who was deported away from her father, an act that had no basis in international law, and with no application to the family court of Australia. Are you comfortable with a department that, with no lawful basis, takes a little girl away from her father without a chance to say goodbye, probably never to see him again???

I would like to thank you for asking A Just Australia to appear before the committee to give our views. I would also like to thank the senate for conducting this inquiry in the first place. The migration act and the way in which it is administered is a contentious issue of great importance to the debate on human rights and community values in Australia.

However I remain unsure as to what the outcomes of this inquiry will be. Evidence has been presented for a number of years that asylum seeker policies ? a particular focus of this inquiry ? has failed in a number of areas. How many more such inquiries and hearings do we have to sit through before real changes are implemented? Changes more significant than giving an ambassadorship as a reward to the person who oversaw the department throughout this period of incredible failure.?

Much of the Migration Act is not just ineffective legislation or inadvertent policy failure, it is about how we as a nation legally responded to vulnerable people who came to use seeking help. And that response is at best inadequate, at worst inhumane.

Its time to stop trawling through this period of bad history, finding sticks with which to beat our political opponents. Its time to start fixing things. The solutions have already been proposed, and can put into place right now. All it takes is the political will to do it. This committee can be a part of that force for positive change. Focus on finding solutions, on moving forward, on finding better ways of doing things, so the crimes of locking up children, of separating families, of sending people crazy with despair, never happens again.