Sabin Mike: Immigration Amendment Bill — Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeSabin Mike: Immigration Amendment Bill — Third Reading[Sitting date: 13 June 2013. Volume:691;Page:11158. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]We have had a chance to reflect on what it means to participate in this world and be a responsible global citizen. Ever since that time we have been a strong advocate for the refugee convention and have supported it in this country. Yet sadly through the process of this debate the Government members and others in this House have started using provocative language such as economic opportunists queue-jumpers and illegal refugees in reference to this bill and the people whom it refers to. I want it on record in this House that those terms have no place in a compassionate or indeed an informed society.Mike Sabin: They have a place in the real world. That happens.JAN LOGIE: That is not what this bill is referring to and a common misperception that my colleague possibly believes in about refugee protection is that applying for resettlement overseas is the proper channel for seeking protection. In fact the resettlement of refugees in third countries is the exception rather than the rule. In general resettlement is used as a solution for refugees only in cases where it is not possible for them to return home or establish permanent residence where they have found asylum. In 2009 as an example less than 1 percent of the world’s refugees were resettled through that process. That is not the norm. Refugee flows are primarily effected by war unrest violence and human rights abuses. Most people do not wish to leave their homes families friends and everything they know and hold dear. They do so as a last resort to escape persecution and find safety and security for themselves and their families.For many refugees the search for protection does not end once they have escaped their country of origin and that is particularly true in this area of the world that we live in. Most countries in the Asia and Pacific region are not signatories to the refugee convention and when people leave their country to go into those countries they are often treated in the same way as illegal migrants. That means that they are typically unable to work own or rent property access health care or send their children to school; they frequently face violence harassment exploitation and abuse; and they are at risk of being detained and forcibly returned to their country of origin. These conditions are what drive asylum seekers and refugees to seek protection elsewhere. That is the source of people seeking asylum in this country.I really want to remind this House again that we are not doing our fair share globally. We get about 300 asylum seekers a year. We need to put that in the global context. Pakistan and Iran hardly rich countries in 2010 took in 2.7 million asylum seekers. Three hundred asylum seekers is how many we take and we are looking at putting on limitations and saying that we could not possibly cope that our systems could not cope with 30-plus people—in the original description of this bill it was 10—and that somehow we would have to send them to a camp put them into mass detention and limit their rights because as a country as an advanced country we could not cope with processing 30 people. That is plainly ridiculous.Until now we have had political consensus in this country on the importance of the convention. Until now we have committed to doing our bit in the world recognising how lucky we are in this country and recognising that really we cannot take in our fair share of people so we will take an active role internationally in advocating for the convention and advocating against those who breach it. We have prided ourselves as a country and as a Parliament on being different from Australia. We have challenged Australia on its breaches of the convention. Everyone I know has looked at what has been happening in Australia with its mass hysteria around boat people the awful suicides and the conditions in the detention camps let alone the dodgy offshore processing tent camps in malaria zones. In the words of Tracey Barnett they and I have thought “We are better than that.” and I still resolutely believe we are better than that. But this Government has stopped criticising the Australian Government for its breaches of the convention. This Government has undermined our commitment to the convention and has aligned us with those whom we have long and for good reason critiqued. John Key has said that we will take people from their camps out of our refugee quota and has even suggested that in return we might send people to those camps if we had a mass arrival here. Gone is the critique. Gone is the sense that we are better than that.We have been told that this bill will improve efficiency and act as a deterrent against people-smuggling. Well tell me truthfully how enabling courts to detain groups of 30 or more people adding another layer of bureaucracy by reviewing refugee status decisions after 3 years and limiting family reunification to immediate families for those claiming refugee status after a mass arrival suspending the processing of all refugee and protection claims by regulation without parliamentary oversight and removing rights for claims to be heard at the Immigration and Protection Tribunal will improve the efficiency of our system or do anything to protect or stop people-smuggling.We believe that this bill is unnecessary that it will not achieve its stated purposes and that it will breach human rights obligations. It jeopardises our international reputation as a world leader in this area and hinders progress towards a genuine regional solution. But the saddest thing for me about this bill is that it breaks our political consensus on the convention. It undermines the safety and security of people with a refugee background in this country who now feel judged. It tarnishes our globalreputation and will certainly compromise our long-held role of being a bridge between developed countries and developing countries at international meetings. But fundamentally it shows a lack of empathy and humanity. That makes me despair because I know we are better than this.