Human rights commission president says increase in visa cancellations and program’s changes seem to be made on ‘racist grounds’

Gillian Triggs has said cuts to the 457 visa program and an increase in visa cancellations were being carried out “on what look to be racist grounds”.

Triggs, the president of the Australian human rights commission, made the comments while addressing doctors at the Royal Australasian College of Physicians congress in Melbourne on Tuesday, where she was speaking about the moral and ethical obligations of physicians in the current political environment.

Anthony Albanese labels Labor's Australians First ad a 'shocker' Read more

“While asylum seekers have been declining in numbers, the number of those visa cancellations on character grounds are going up,” Triggs said.

She said Australian-based detention centres like Western Australia’s Yongah Hill and Villawood in New South Wales were largely “out of sight and mind” for the public.

“But they are filling up with visa cancellations,” she said, adding that she was concerned about a general “environment of nationalism, jingoism and populism being played out in a way that is racist and one that, in our experience in the Human Rights Commission, is increasingly based on some form of Islamic fear”.

She added that she was pleased that the opposition leader, Bill Shorten, had pulled a Labor party advertisement called “Employ Australians First”, which used a group of predominately white Australians to promote the message “build Australian first, buy Australian first and employ Australians first”.

“He has moved quickly to pull the ad but it’s extremely worrying [that it was created],” she said.

Triggs used her presentation to praise the work of medical professionals who had spoken up about the situation for asylum seekers and the woeful medical care they received in offshore processing centres. As an example she mentioned the Brisbane doctors who refused to discharge a baby known as Asha who was being treated for burns sustained at the Nauru offshore processing centre, because they did not believe Nauru was a safe environment for her.

Their actions sparked protests from health professionals around the country in solidarity with their Brisbane peers.

Outgoing human rights commissioner Gillian Triggs wins freedom of speech award Read more

She added that medical professionals brought credibility to debates around asylum seekers because of their reliance on evidence and because they held a position of great trust in their communities. She praised them for speaking out about abuses of justice and human rights, despite doing so sometimes attracting the ire of politicians and workplaces.

“When you study a law degree, as I did, you know law is always going to be a profession where where you are going to be required to stand up,” Triggs said. “But I think, for the medical profession, that’s not really been an underlying purpose. You study science and medicine with a humanitarian objective and don’t see yourselves as people who will be standing up in the media to draw attention to major social issues.”

But she also expressed sympathy for other professions working with refugees in offshore processing centres such as teachers and social workers who were not afforded immunity from whistleblower laws for speaking up about what they had seen.

Those laws had a “chilling effect” on those who were witnessing human rights abuses but risked their livelihoods by going public with them, she said.