While the Australian Labour government intends to extend the Gazan refugees' visas to stay in the country, the opposition calls to ban the continued issuance of visas to Palestinians who arrived in the country due to the war. On Thursday, Rep. Zali Steggall, who addressed the issue, called on the Conservative party to "Stop being racist."
The independent Representative Zali Steggall criticized the opposition on its stance on humanitarian aid. "These are normal families, these are families you are seeking to paint that somehow they are all terrorists, that they should all be mistrusted, and that they are not worthy of humanitarian aid. Stop being racist!"
'Stop being racist!'
(Video: Reuters)
Tensions flared in parliament again shortly afterward when the Green party's Senator Sarah Hanson-Young interrupted a media conference by opposition National Party parliamentarian David Littleproud in which he was defending Dutton's position on Gaza refugees to say: "Why don't you say something about the children being slaughtered."
Like many countries worldwide, Australia discussed the war in Gaza which provoked heated political debates. The left-wing Labor government repeatedly called for a cease-fire, but unlike other countries critical of Israel, such as Spain, Ireland, and Norway, it refused to recognize a Palestinian state. According to the Australian ABC network, so far the government there has granted approximately 3,000 visas to Palestinians who left the Gaza Strip or West Bank after October 7, although only about half of them actually arrived in Australia and another 7,000 applications were rejected.
The visas are temporary and after long months of war, they are about to expire. Therefore, the Australian government has stated that it is looking into ways to extend the Palestinian refugees' visas. "Certainly no country in the world would send people back to Gaza at the moment, no country in the world would do that; so we have to work through what happens as the visas that people are currently on expire," Australia's newly-appointed Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke told Sky News this month.
"We have people who experienced serious trauma, who experienced a terrible loss of family members and friends as a result of the carnage that is taking place there, and also houses that many of them lived in turned into ruins," he added.
The opposition claims that the Labour government did not conduct adequate background checks on the refugees, since they were admitted to the country using the same tourist visas. and in recent days the statement by the head of Australia's Internal Security Service that an expression of support for Hamas should not necessarily rule out the granting of a visa has attracted great attention for Palestinian refugees.
Hamas is a designated terrorist organization in Australia, but the head of the internal intelligence service, known as ASIO, said earlier this week that if someone from Gaza just gave "rhetorical support and they don’t have an ideology or support for a violent extremism ideology, then that’s not a problem." However, if they had given material aid, "that can be a problem." He added, "Obviously we take each case on its merits in the context of the information we have before us," the ASIO chief said.
Pro-Palestinians on the Canberra Parliament
(Video: Reuters)
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese accused Dutton of being "heartless". Dutton doubled down on his stance and said, "I'm sure the vast majority [of Palestinian refugees] are just innocent people fleeing a war zone, but our country is just safer when we have a proper process. If you bring in 100 people, let's say 99 are good, if one person comes in [who supports Hamas], how is that in our country's interests?"