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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2003 Week 7 Hansard (25 June) . . Page.. 2462 ..

MS TUCKER (continuing):

relatives in Australia which are now seeking support here from the federal government. This motion is designed to send a clear message to the federal government that we think that these people should be accommodated in Australia.

I find the Liberals' amendment to be quite duplicitous in a way. Maybe it isn't; maybe that is unfair. Maybe they do not understand where we are up to with this matter. To change "grant"to "process"is not to acknowledge that the processes have happened. Ruddock has said no, basically. In February 2003, as I understand it, he said, "No, we have done enough for these people."That is my understanding of what has happened so far. It is a fact that that process led to that conclusion by the federal government. That is the reason we are having this debate today. While Mr Smyth can speak compassionately about the plight of these families, he cannot at the same time weaken this motion to that degree without looking quite inconsistent.

MR PRATT

(12.17): Mr Speaker, I rise to support this motion in principle, as did Mr Smyth earlier. I wish to point to some of the issues that govern the management of refugees and stateless people. Of course we support and sympathise with the stateless Vietnamese community in the Philippines. They have been caught between a rock and a hard place. This is a classic example of a case load of people falling between the cracks. It is just a terrible accident of history that they have found themselves, under the CPA definition, stateless people and not UNHCR refugees.

These people have had a genuine history of struggle against a tyrannical communist state, so they certainly qualify as what I would call refugees. From reading some of the background material and putting together a number of factors, it would seem to me that many of the people in this case load are descendants of the political and war refugees who were driven south by the then communist regime in the north in the mid to late 1950s, so they are indeed descendants of quite horrific acts of barbarity and political persecution that occurred a long time before the Vietnam War became a media icon, before it became a cause celebre.

These people are descendants of case loads of people who have had a pretty rough trot over the last 50-odd years and I think that they deserve special consideration. They are also unlikely to be able to be reintegrated into or returned to their country of origin and they are unlikely to be integrated into the Philippines, so they are caught classically in the middle, like so many refugee case loads that we can observe round the world.

We should also be fair and say that we sympathise also with the Philippines. The authorities there are doing their best to look after these people. They simply cannot afford necessarily to integrate and settle stateless people. They have their own problems. Their own economy is not necessarily capable of being able to take in additional case loads of people.

That is a tragic reality round the world wherever there are refugee case loads or internally displaced peoples. It is often the case that the communities that they are temporarily with are simply in no position to go that extra compassionate mile and offer up local residency. They simply cannot do so because of the lack of infrastructures and political uncertainties in their own countries. Between 10 and 15 million refugees in this world have been stuck in that sort of twilight zone, in many

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