Democrats Deputy Leader, Andrew Bartlett, says the fourth anniversary of the rescue of 433 asylum seekers by the MV Tampa is a reminder that major damage is still being caused as a result of the Governments response to the incident.
Senator Bartlett, who was the first person to raise concerns in the Senate about the Tampa incident, said there is a direct link between the brutal and irrational way the Howard Government reacted to the Tampa and the current enormous mess in the administration of our Immigration Department.
The legacy of the Tampa is far more than just unnecessary suffering caused to hundreds of refugees, many of whom are still waiting to be reunited with their spouses and children.
The Tampa incident led to actions that perverted the law, wasted billions of dollars, destroyed families and lives, corrupted our foreign policy in the Pacific and entrenched the incompetent and uncaring culture in the Immigration Department which the Government is now pretending to fix.
The Tampa incident was used to manufacture the political grounds for gaining the Labor Partys support for forcing a package of six pieces of legislation though the Senate which dramatically amended the entire Migration Act, giving immense power to bureaucrats, further restricted judicial and independent oversight and in many cases enabled Commonwealth officers to act completely outside any legal constraints.
Until the Migration Act is reformed and the Government adopts a policy based on reality rather than myth-making and lies, the operation and administration of our countrys migration system will remain severely dysfunctional. You cannot change the culture of the Department whilst the law and policy remains the same. An essential part of repairing the culture is to restore the checks and balances taken out of the law by the Liberal and Labor parties in 2001.
The Tampa incident also gave birth to the so-called Pacific Solution, which has been shown to be grotesquely unjust, financially extravagant and continues to inflict mental torture on twenty-eight asylum seekers still imprisoned on Nauru. The current Minister continues to turn her face away from the massive suffering she is responsible for, never even bothering to visit Nauru and continuing to maintain the fiction that it has nothing to do with Australia.
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