Thank you very much for the opportunity to speak to you.
I have spent some time in Canada. In fact, I was in Canada during the period of September 11, 2001, when Australia took the opportunity to change its laws quite dramatically so as to become much more punitive towards people arriving by boat.
I would like to address, in particular, in my opening remarks, the changes proposed in Bill C-31, which involve the treatment of irregular arrivals through the introduction of mandatory detention of one year and the introduction of temporary protection visas.
It is our view that the amendments place Canada at risk of breaching obligations it has assumed under international law. I see that you have already had a number of people address you on this issue.
I would also, however, like to talk to you about Australia's experience and the extent to which the laws you are now envisaging for Canada have had very detrimental effects in Australia. I will leave my Canadian colleagues to spell out how I think the proposed laws would be in breach of Canada's Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
I'm sure you've had many people expressing their disappointment that Canada appears now to be engaging in something of a race to the bottom in terms of its standing as a humanitarian country. Not only, I think, is it abandoning ostentatiously the role it has played in modelling international legal best practice in human rights, but it appears to me to be going out of its way to cherry-pick all the elements of regressive bad practice that have been devised by its two main comparative countries, Australia and the United States.
The sadness for me, I think, is that in doing this, Canada is setting itself on a slippery slope from which it will be very difficult to return. This has been Australia's experience. Put simply, in practical terms, I do not think the measures you are proposing to introduce will act as effective deterrents to irregular migrants. They are likely to have huge financial, and more importantly huge social, costs.
I do acknowledge, however, that the measures you are looking to introduce are powerful electoral tools. They work, in fact, to foment and focus unease with persons of visible difference in society. For this reason, in societies like ours that are heavily multicultural, they can be socially very damaging. In this respect, in fact, the laws represent some of the most cynical initiatives governments can take to play to what we might call the redneck elements of society.
Our former Prime Minister, Paul Keating, in fact, referred to Australia's version of these laws as “lifting the rock”. He could have added, “stirring the scorpions”, un véritable noeud de vipères.
If I may, I'll just briefly talk to the two measures we want to focus on. First is the introduction of one-year mandatory detention. Australia's mandatory detention laws, you may be interested to know, began as laws that, in fact, mandated detention for nine months. In fact, they specified 273 days and were put in place for a group of about 400 asylum seekers from Cambodia, who were also, interestingly, styled “designated persons”. I should tell you that they in fact remained in detention for four years before they were ultimately sent back to Cambodia and then brought back to Australia, where they were all given permanent residence.
I think the changes you are proposing are of quite critical significance, because as I say, they are, for me, the thin edge of the wedge that is likely to see Canada introduce increasingly draconian legislation that will be increasingly abusive of human rights. I share the previous interlocutors' concerns about the terms of the legislation and the fact that the mere suspicion of a person's status as an irregular arrival would be enough to mandate detention.
I'm less concerned about release after somebody has been recognized as a refugee. My concern is that once you introduce mandatory detention, the prospect of processing times stretching out actually increases; it doesn't diminish.
One of my concerns about the legislation and about giving the power to an official to mandatorily detain somebody is the removal of judicial oversight of that process—the fact that somebody must be detained for one year and that judicial oversight will only occur every six months.
When we did this in Australia, we used very similar language. In fact, there appears to be quite a degree of legal borrowing happening in this space. One of the effects of this was that we ultimately saw a great number of legal permanent residents, and indeed even a citizen, being arrested and removed from the country without the oversight of the judiciary because our laws talked about mandatory detention. In fact, our laws talked about the “reasonable grounds to believe”, but even so, without judicial oversight of the process, people were wrongfully detained.
We are able to supply for you the financial costs that mandatory detention has brought for Australia. Over the years, the cost has grown exponentially. In the 2011-12 budget, we spent more than $700 million running our detention centres offshore, and our detention centres onshore cost us nearly $100 million. These are not small amounts of money, and they have grown exponentially over the years. You will find yourself spending huge amounts on building more and more detention centres as these come. The amounts we have paid out to people who were wrongfully detained because of the laws we put in place.... A report in recent years in 2011 suggested that the Australian government has paid out more than $16 million in compensation to asylum seekers and detainees who were wrongfully detained.
I would also invite you, however, to have a look at the social cost of these measures. We have found in Australia that mandatory detention has never deterred a single asylum seeker. Unfortunately, countries like ours tend to attract genuine asylum seekers. I know that there is also a concern with people who are not launching genuine claims, but in fact in world terms, our countries attract people who have genuine refugee claims. The result is that when you introduce punitive laws like these, they can affect the whole fabric of society.
I will just say in closing that the measures to introduce temporary protection visas are also extremely regressive. In Australia, not only did they not deter anybody; they in fact changed the composition of the asylum-seeker population coming to Australia, because instead of being able to bring families in using legal methods, people were forced to use irregular migration to get their families to join them. For that reason, we saw within a very short space of time an enormous increase in the number of unaccompanied children and women who were coming out as irregular maritime arrivals.
These are very complex matters. We live in western democracies that are attractive to people who have been persecuted around the world. We also live in democracies that have been built on systems of justice and equality that should be the envy of those of us who are citizens of this society. To introduce laws that threaten that fabric, that encourage these events is very regressive.
