Fox Marama: General DebateText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeFox Marama: General Debate[Sitting date: 04 November 2015. Volume:709;Page:7709. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]MARAMA FOX (Co-Leader—Māori Party): Kia ora Mr Speaker. Nei te mihi ki a koe. Last week during the adjournment I was invited to deliver the keynote address to the National Congress of Australia’s First Peoples in Sydney. While I was there I took the opportunity to meet with groups that are providing services to those people who are disparaged those people who find themselves homeless those people who need assistance. And when I spoke with the community groups that are delivering those services they told me that of the 500 meals that they deliver on the streets of Sydney in one evening 40 percent of those people who are lining up for meals are Kiwis.In Queensland the highest rates of suicide are committed by Māori. They tell me that students in high schools across Australia who are coming to the end of the year who are sitting their exams are deciding whether or not they should bother because until Malcolm Turnbull had made his decision after 14 years of waiting to allow Kiwi students—young people who have grown up and lived their lives in Australia—to gain tertiary qualifications by getting a student loan as of 1 January next year those students would turn up at school and say: “What’s the point?”.Kiwis are being treated as less than second-class citizens. In fact under the new legislation last year and in 2001—the immigration policy—Kiwis now have fewer rights in Australia than an American tourist. That is right and it is a shock to people. When I go to Australia and talk to “Joe Ordinary Aussie” they do not know—they do not know what is happening in the detention centres. It is not being broadcast and if it is it is being broadcast as the “killer Kiwis”. A 12-month sentence in Australia could see you thrown into jail for traffic violations for shoplifting—and for that these Kiwis who may serve only 8 months of that sentence are being thrown into a detention centre some of them offshore as Mr Davis has pointed out. Those people have been removed from their families having already served their sentence and having already been deemed by a judge in a court to have committed a crime and been given a sentence that they have finished.Some of them are released on parole conditions and if they were released to their homes to await a decision about deportation they would be walking into a job tomorrow. If they were released to their homes they would be paying taxes in Australia tomorrow. But wait it gets worse because under that section 501 paragraph (d) you can be deported from Australia because of questionable character. Already we have a 60-year-old gentleman in Taumarunui who is there now because when he came home for an unveiling and tried to get back into Australia he was held up at immigration and despite having no criminal conviction in Australia despite having lived there for 36 years and having paid taxes for 34 of those years until he became seriously ill 2 years ago—despite all of those things because of a petty crime he committed in New Zealand when he was 20 he was denied access back into Australia back to his family back to his wife who had been caring for him because he is seriously ill.This is abhorrent and our Government needs to speak up about it. We need to be doing more than we are doing. And I have to commend Amy Adams actually because she has rung—herself personally—the people who have been advocating for those people in the detention centres and given them advice on how they can seek help by sending them to the New Zealand consulate there in Australia. Well one of those people did turn up at the New Zealand consulate and was turned away. They did not know what to do. This is not good enough.On Monday 9 November Australia will sit in the UN in front of the Universal Periodic Review and we will have the ability—this Government for 3 minutes—to put those questions to the Australian Parliament and demand answers. Lastly we have the opportunity to oppose its bid to be sitting on the Human Rights Council and we should be taking that opportunity to oppose it based on Australia’s appalling history of human rights abuse.