ADJOURNMENT

Ms PAYNE (Canberra) (13:05): I rise today to speak about Australia's humanitarian and refugee intake and express my strong support for maintaining our current 20,000 visas annually, and I hope that this is something we will not only maintain but build on. We live in a dangerous and increasingly volatile world, with conflicts occurring in our region and well beyond it.

These are not abstract crises playing out on the other side of the globe. They have real and immediate consequences for millions of people forced from their homes through no fault of their own. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, there are almost 38 million refugees worldwide, a figure that continues to climb as new conflicts emerge and old ones remain unresolved.

In our region, this includes Afghans who have fled the horrors of Taliban rule, and Rohingya who have escaped civil war and persecution in Myanmar. In Afghanistan, the Taliban takeover five years ago has had a devastating impact on its people, particularly women and girls, who have seen decades of hard won rights and freedoms stripped away almost overnight. What exists in Afghanistan now has been described by the UN as gender apartheid, with women more or less completely removed from public life, barred from education beyond primary school, excluded from most forms of employment and denied basic freedom of movement without a male guardian.

In Myanmar, the Rohingya have been systematically brutalised by the government and its military forces since 2017 in what many international bodies, including the United Nations, have characterised as acts of genocide. More than 750,000 have fled to Bangladesh and exist in extraordinarily difficult conditions, crowded into some of the largest and most densely populated refugee camps in the world, with limited access to clean water, health care and education for their children.

In Africa and in the Middle East, intractable conflicts continue to displace millions of people, placing them in unimaginably desperate situations, often with no clear pathway home and no certainty about their future. This is occurring at a time when the United States has dramatically reduced its humanitarian intake to just 7,500 refugees in 2026, the lowest level in the 45-year history of the US Refugee Admissions Program.

That retreat leaves an even greater gap for countries like Australia to fill. Now is a time to uphold our role as a global citizen and be steadfast in the values that we hold as a nation. The UNHCR estimates that 2.5 million refugees are in urgent need of resettlement—people who cannot return home and cannot remain where they live.

I was very proud that at our recent national conference, the 50th Australian Labor Party conference, the national platform maintained its commitment to an immediate baseline intake of 20,000 humanitarian places per year while formally retaining the long-term policy aspiration to progressively increase the intake to 27,000 places per year. Obviously, there are some in the Australian political discourse who wish to besmirch refugees for political purposes, stoking racism and division.

The reality is that refugees must navigate the most scrutinised stream of the entire visa program. The UNHCR conducts biometric analysis and rigorous verification of family and refugee claims, quite aside from the additional Australian refugee assessment measures applied on top of the UNHCR process. Few people entering the country face a more thorough vetting process than refugees.

Refugees make Australia a better place to live. They contribute to our social fabric in so many ways and bring with them a deep sense of gratitude to our country for providing a safe place to call home. From businesses to sporting fields, academia to health care, refugees and their descendants make Australia a stronger, richer, more dynamic nation.

As we saw at the recent football world cup, the Socceroos squad reflected at least 15 cultural and ethnic backgrounds and included four former refugees. We celebrated their success and basked in the joy they brought to lounge rooms and watch parties around the country. Australia must maintain our refugee intake and, indeed, grow our intake over time.

Not only is it the right thing to do as a responsible and humane society and country but it also benefits all of us in so many ways.