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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2003 Week 4 Hansard (2 April) . . Page.. 1282 ..

MS DUNDAS (continuing):

when deportation was last mooted for the East Timorese, the Howard government suspended moves to remove the refugees probably because deportations would have undercut Mr Howard's claim to have sent in troops for humanitarian reasons.

Successive Australian governments have expressed concern for the East Timorese, but there has been much hypocrisy involved. Even at the height of the pro-Indonesian rampages, the government allowed only about 200 Timorese UN staff and their immediate families to flee to nearby Darwin on a three-month safe haven visa. When these visas expired, they were forced to return to the war-torn island.

Now, three years later, John Howard has determined that sufficient time has elapsed to allow the government to ignore humanitarian considerations altogether and push for the immediate departure of long-term asylum seekers. Last month 84 Timorese living in Darwin received immigration department letters formally rejecting their refugee claims and giving them 28 days to leave Australia or appeal to the Refugee Review Tribunal. Since September, the department has processed 564 applications, rejecting them all, with another 1,070 people awaiting decisions.

If the review tribunal applications fail, these people will face fees of $1,000 each. Under new laws introduced last year following the Tampa crisis, no appeal can be made to the courts. Asylum seekers can make pleas to immigration minister, Minister Philip Ruddock, for compassionate consideration, but in the meantime they lose their right to work and to all social entitlements, including Medicare health coverage. These are people who have been living in this country for over a decade.

Many of them currently live in Darwin, but hundreds have moved to other cities, including Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide. All have chosen to remain permanently. Most of their children cannot speak Portuguese, the official language adopted by East Timor, or even the more commonly used languages in Timor of Tetum and Indonesian.

Many of these East Timorese fled their homeland in the wake of the 1991 Dili massacre, when Indonesian troops killed more than 200 people after opening fire on a funeral procession for a pro-independence demonstrator. The Keating government prevented them from gaining protection visas, beginning a series of legal manoeuvres against the families, which has now been continued by the Howard government.

Having deliberately stalled the refugees' application since 1996, the Howard government now claims it is safe for these people to return, give up their lives of the last 10 years and go back to East Timor. This assessment flies in the face of all available evidence. East Timor is the poorest country in Asia, with unemployment estimated to be at around 80 to 90 per cent. Health and education facilities are minimal, and diseases such as malaria, dengue fever and tuberculosis are common. Forty per cent of people live below the poverty line of US55c per day, 50 per cent are illiterate and the average life expectancy is only 56 years. These conditions are creating enormous social tensions, giving rise to severe unrest and disturbances, including last week's clashes with police and UN troops-last week, not last year.

The situation facing the Timorese highlights the duplicity and hypocrisy that have driven Australian policy in relation to the island for the last three decades. Suharto's regime invaded East Timor in 1975 with the backing of the United States and Australia-a

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