Julian Burnside’s Giving A Brutally Honest Speech To The Labor Party On How They’re Failing Refugees

The Labor Party are gearing up for their National Conference this weekend — a three-day extravaganza of debate, policy making and mandatory standing ovations every time Bill Shorten says something like “the story of Labor is the story of Australia” or “Tony Abbott is the past; Labor is the future.” It’s gonna be stirring stuff.

The ALP holds one of these conferences every three years to thrash out its position on contemporary issues and see if its members want it to change course on anything. Everyone from the leader of the Parliamentary party to any old card-carrying member who paid to show up theoretically gets a say, and it can often be a pretty big deal; at the last one, party policy changed from opposing marriage equality to supporting it (albeit while still allowing a conscience vote). Bill Shorten’s already unveiled what he hopes will be the centrepiece of this year’s conference, and the next election: a commitment by Labor to source half of Australia’s energy production from renewables by 2030.

But an event as big as this is pretty difficult to stage-manage, especially when members are unhappy about the party’s direction. Plenty of Labor members have been extremely unhappy with the ALP’s position on asylum seekers for a long time, and groups like Labor for Refugees and Don’t Turn Back are hoping to use the conference to shake things up.

To that end, Labor members hoping to bring about change in the party’s refugee policy have invited human rights lawyer and prominent asylum seeker advocate Julian Burnside to address the conference. Burnside released the transcript of his prerecorded speech on his website last night, and the contents is going to make for one hell of an awkward room when it gets played to a room of senior Labor politicians on the weekend.

“I do not expect you to agree with me,” Burnside starts, which is probably fair enough, before declaring that although “the current Government is probably the worst in our history … we also have the least effective Opposition in living memory.”

It’s a short speech, but a pretty devastating one. Here are some of the highlights:

“There was a time when Labor stood for something. If it still stands for anything, it has been conspicuously quiet on the matter.

“To an outsider, the only difference between the two major parties is this: the Coalition mistreat boat people and boasts about it; Labor would mistreat boat people, but is ashamed of it.

“Do any of you have any idea how cruelly people are treated in offshore detention? If you understand how shocking things are on Manus and Nauru the answers to that voter’s letters might have been different. But how many Labor MPs have been to Manus or Nauru? When was the last time any Labor MP visited Manus or Nauru? 

“Either you have not bothered to find out the facts, or you know the facts and don’t care. Either way, Labor should be ashamed of itself.

“Viewed from outside, it looks as though Labor does not actually believe in its own rhetoric. In fact, it looks as though Labor does not believe in anything much at all. If that is where today’s Labor Party stands, it will not long survive.

“Labor today looks like a weak centre-right party which does not believe in itself. A party that believes in nothing except power will end up with nothing at all.”

Either most of Labor’s current leadership are going to be conspicuously absent from the room when that speech is broadcast, or there’s going to be an awful lot of squirming in chairs.

You can read the speech in full here.