The Greens today are launching an election commitment to end the offshore detention of people seeking asylum by sea and establish a Royal Commission into Australia's immigration detention regime.
The major parties have made Australia an international outlier, exiling people who come here seeking safety to detention centres in other countries.
There has been no justice for those abused under this system, and there are still people denied their basic rights, that needs to change.
More than a decade after the failed Manus Island prison experiment 40 people remain trapped in Papua New Guinea after having sought safety in Australia. They need urgent evacuation and a clear pathway to permanent resettlement.
Since 2013 both Labor and the Coalition have spent billions of dollars, not on making the immigration system fairer, not on strengthening the community, but on creating offshore hellholes to torture refugees.
To make Australia's immigration system faster and fairer, the Greens will also increase our humanitarian intake, provide a pathway for permanency for all refugees on shore, introduce a new emergency humanitarian visa, cap family visa wait times at 12 months, restore legal funding for humanitarian cases and end the Department of Home Affairs and return functions and responsibilities to the departments that previously held them.
Senator David Shoebridge, Greens Spokesperson on Immigration, said: "The Albanese Government have decided to join with the Coalition and punch down on refugees, we take a different path, of pushing back against deliberate cruelty.
"Labor started this latest round of offshore detention and deportations and communities around the country are right to be demanding accountability for their actions.
"When politicians choose to do the wrong thing, harm people for political gain, and compete over who can be meaner, it infects the rest of society. Over the past 10 years, cruelty has become one of Australia's main exports, courtesy of Labor and the Coalition.
"The rise of the far right worldwide, with their aggressively anti-migrant policies, has been given fuel by policies delivered by Liberal and Labor Governments here.
"What the major parties have done to our immigration system is reprehensible.
"People who have fled the most appalling violence are left waiting in Australia for a decade or more just to get their application processed.
"Adult children trying to get a visa for their sick mum are being made to pay $40,000 and then wait 30 years on average, with family members literally dying on hold.
"Australia is a proud multicultural country where people from all around the world come to build a better community and successful lives. We need to be celebrating this, not sabotaging it.
"The major parties have ignored the need for a fairer and faster immigration system, and instead are pulling apart Australia's multicultural threads by denying people dignity and respect.
"If we want a fairer and more equal world, Australia can do its part by repairing the damage we have done."
