Blessed with a gorgeous Melbourne early spring day, this commemoration included a colourful, musical procession along the banks of the Yarra, followed by an indigenous welcome and speeches from Julian Burnside QC, asylum seekers, and story telling from writer Arnold Zable and singer Kavisha Mazzella.

Former Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser could not attend, but his speech (below) was read by Julian Burnside.

On 26 August 26 2001, six years ago, the Norwegian cargo container MV Tampa rescued 433 men, women and children from a sinking Indonesian fishing vessel. In violation of our most fundamental human rights obligations, Prime Minister John Howard declared that the asylum seekers would never set foot on Australian soil.

Howard ruthlessly denied those in need of our help in order to exploit community fears, and so laid the ground for a decisive victory at the polls later that year. And yet, after having spent two wasted years on Nauru, many of those 433 Tampa asylum seekers were accepted into the Australian community.

Things have changed since 2001. Since Tampa, tens of thousands of Australians have become committed to the cause of refugee rights. The community no longer believes that mandatory detention is acceptable, that the Pacific Solution is a fair or sensible policy, or that those determined to be refugees should be forced to live a second class existence on temporary protection visas.

Australians have opened their hearts to refugees. Our political leaders, on both sides of the fence, need to do the same.

I am sorry I can't be with you today. It is important that Australians remember the turn taken when the government put heavily armed, special forces troops onto the Tampa. Since then, we have seen a steady and significant erosion of basic rights in Australia.

Tampa and children overboard were the pointer that made us realise those in power cared little for basic right or for international obligations for those seeking help. Since then, there has been a long history of unhappy events involving the excision of territory from Australia to make asylum harder to obtain, incident after incident of abuse of asylum seekers and refugees.

We have seen the regime in migration detention centres and in offshore island jails sharpened and made more inhumane.

We have seen the careless manner in which David Hicks was robbed of his rights, abused in Guantanamo Bay and forced to go through a show tribunal that would have done justice to any dictatorship.

We have seen the abuse of due process and procedure in relation to Mohamed Haneef. We have seen the claim that the police and authorities abused their power, followed by a statement that the authorities would be given even more power to handle such cases.

We have since seen, on another level, a major attack on the constitutional structures of Australia. The Commonwealth now asserts for itself the right to do anything which, in its judgment it wants to do. In other words, we have seen in a short space of weeks a situation in which the Commonwealth has asserted total power.

We have seen the arbitrary intervention of Aboriginal affairs in the Northern Territory, in an apparent plan without a plan, where adequate health care, education and housing of Aboriginal people have not yet taken centre stage.

If these schemes are endorsed in any way by the people of Australia, we should realise that that endorsement will tear up the separation of power between Commonwealth and States. This will place all power in Canberra. We should really hesitate in taking such a step. The founders of the Constitution, wisely and deliberately and in line also with experience in the United States, had determined that there should be a separation of powers within the Commonwealth of Australia. They did not want any one person or group to have total power. You might like what one person says he will do with total power but what of the next and of the next and of the next? In this instance the institutions which maintain the separation of power are vital to a vigorous democracy. An Australia in which nobody could challenge Canberra's authority would be a dangerous Australia. The history of countries where such power has resided in a central location should concern us, even frighten us.

In more normal times, many of these issues would have led to major debate between government and opposition. That such issues can slip by without such debate, without an opposition testing the government at every point, should perhaps concern us as much as the actions of the government itself.

Malcolm Fraser

(Malcom Fraser was Prime Minister of Australia from 1975 to 1983)