Children are affected by these laws at a number of different levels. In my opening statement I mentioned very briefly that if you introduce temporary protection visas, the usual modalities for the movement of asylum seekers are altered.
By this I mean that the usual pattern of refugee migration is that the fathers or the oldest sons are often the ones who take to the air or sea fleeing persecution from their country. They do that first of all because they tend to be targeted first, and secondly because very often they want to go to find a safe haven for their family in a third country.
If they are able to do that by themselves and then bring their families out by lawful means—through family reunification—then the process is one that benefits the children and families directly. If you introduce temporary protection visas, what happens is that the adult males or oldest sons continue to be the ones who leave first, but they are not able to be joined by their families. It forces those people to put their children and their wives under immediate threat of irregular migration—particularly irregular maritime migration, which is probably the most perilous way to get into a country. That's at the most basic, gross level.
We found in Australia that within about six to eight weeks, the number of children on board the irregular maritime vessels jumped from 5% to as much as 60% or 70%. It was an absolute disaster. You then end up with children who, in our case, were placed in detention. Up until 2005, our mandatory detention laws didn't make a distinction between men, women, and children in terms of age at all.
I can see that your laws will. Even so, if you are dealing with very young children who have been put into that situation and you make no provision for allowing them to properly be cared for by their parents, then you are just creating enormous problems for the country in terms of the care of these kids—who will be put on the boats. I can promise you that it will happen; there's no doubt about that.
When you introduce punitive laws like these, they also place enormous pressures on the people who are having to do the asylum determinations.
I'm known as a refugee advocate, but I have worked for many years. I set up one of the first organizations in Australia to actually help people with their asylum claims and their immigration cases more generally. I have worked in practice, I remain a practitioner, and I still drag my students into the practice of.... I'm conscious of how difficult it is for the decision-makers, for the officers who have to do this work.
Let me say that laws like these have an enormous impact at every level. They impact upon the people who have to detain these individuals, who are faced with the daily stresses that this type of mandatory detention places on people. They do nothing to make processing fairer or faster, in my view.