AJA presentation to Senate Inquiry - DUA Bill

Good morning Senators. Thank you for the opportunity to present evidence today on the proposed Designated Unauthorised Arrivals bill and to discuss issues raised in A Just Australia?s written submission.

Frankly I have better things to do than spend several hours researching for a submission that will be ignored by the Government.

We all know the outcome of this inquiry. The report will find that international law will be breached, that children will be detained, that conditions on Nauru will be inadequate to the point of appalling, that there will be no oversight of government actions, no appeals processes protecting rights, that resettlement options will not be found leading to the detention of proven refugees.

The report may further restate the evidence put forward that as a diplomatic solution, this proposal will do nothing to halt any further embarrassing protection decisions that point out human rights abuses by Indonesia, since government officials will still be making the decisions, be they made on Nauru, the Australian mainland or even the Australian Antarctic territory should they decide to send asylum seekers there. This proposal will do nothing to halt the human rights abuses in West Papua, and will in fact exacerbate the suffering inflicted by those abuses.

There will be a dissenting report from the Government Senators in defence of this bill, stating that these issues have been exaggerated, that we will still be adhering to the Refugees convention, that for national interests and regional security we must assist the Indonesians in repressing a democratic movement by a people who have every right to be listened to when it comes to deciding the political system in their own country, which is after all what democracy is all about.

So while we appreciate the opportunity to put forward our evidence on behalf of our 13,000 Australian supporters, the outcomes are already determined. The one benefit from this hearing is that evidence will once more be put into the pages of history, so our grandchildren will know that there was a part of the Australian community who did not forget the basic Australian values of a fair go, compassion and integrity.

A Just Australia?s submission took a slightly different perspective to most others. We particularly focused on key domestic policy and principals and looked at how those principals could be applied in an offshore setting. Although we believe that this policy should not go ahead for a multitude of reasons, we came up with a key list of recommendations of how to mitigate the damage this law will inflict.

We looked at the recent reforms made by the Government regarding onshore detention conditions and the very important new role for the Ombudsman to oversee both detention conditions and long-term detention visa cases. These are important principals that the government has accepted ? that children should not be detained, that detention should be humane, that indefinite detention can be rectified with community release, and that most importantly, the people have a basic right to know what our government is doing in our name. To guarantee this right for Australian citizens, bodies such as the Commonwealth Ombudsman and the Human Rights Commissioner have powers to oversee detention conditions and duration.

Our submission shows that these basic principals would be difficult to meet on Christmas island, and will be impossible to meet on Nauru.

• Semantics aside, Children will be detained.

• Conditions of detention will not meet acceptable Australian standards

• Resettlement options will not be found elsewhere, leading to the indefinite detention of proven refugees

• Australia will be engaging in enforced secondary movement of asylum seekers

• There will be no oversight of government actions, a fundamental principal in a democracy.

• International human rights laws WILL be broken.

This law goes so far that it will make us look back with nostalgia on the good old days when we detained children on the Australian mainland.

In our submission we also looked at the values of our community and applied those to this law. In particular we looked at the values for Australian Schooling which were developed by this same government. Values were listed such as Care and Compassion, Integrity, Respect, Fair Go and Responsibility.

We challenge each of you, our elected representatives, and particularly the ones who will write a dissenting report in support of this bill, to explain in your report how this law supports the values by which this government wants all Australian to live. The simple fact is that you cannot. This law offends basic Australian values and will leave those who support it with no claim to integrity. It will render Australian values empty, and will leave our Parliament and our nation diminished.?