Simon Crean (Hotham, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Regional Development) Share this | Hansard source

I rise also to oppose the Migration Amendment (Designated Unauthorised Arrivals) Bill 2006. Labor opposes it outright. There is nothing you can do to this excision bill that will fix it. We do not seek to amend it; we will oppose it in its entirety. The bill is shameful and xenophobic. It is cast in denial and reeks of appeasement of the Indonesian government. It is also another broken promise by the Prime Minister of this country—this time to his party colleagues, none of whom are sitting in here at the moment. We have seen some of them with the courage to come into this place and say they oppose it, but we now have a government that is gagging debate. So embarrassed is the government of this debate that it wants to stop it. John Howard ditched commitments he made to his own colleagues last year to make the immigration laws more compassionate. If he cannot be trusted by his own colleagues, he cannot be trusted by the Australian people.

I congratulate those members on the other side who have shown courage in this debate—the members for Kooyong, McMillan, Pearce and Cook—and Senator Troeth for the way in which she is still standing firm against pressure. These people are not rebels. They only want the Prime Minister to honour his promise to them last year. What is wrong with that? Why should people be accused of rebellion simply for insisting on a man honouring his word? He is not any ordinary man; he is the Prime Minister of the country. Peter Costello knows that the Prime Minister breaks his word. We now know that the Prime Minister breaks it in a serial way to his colleagues, just as he has betrayed the trust of Australian people so many times over the years.

In the past, Labor have opposed excision as a solution to our immigration issues. We opposed it as part of the so-called Pacific solution back in 2002. That Pacific solution has been shown to be a costly and ineffective failure. This legislation, in response to the West Papuan refugee issue, will perpetuate that failure of policy. The bill in effect surrenders our borders in the name of protecting them. It is a ludicrous proposition. It says that we defend ourselves by shrinking ourselves. The original excision bill, introduced by the then Minister for Immigration and Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs, Mr Ruddock, sought to excise all of Australia’s outlying islands—if you like, the islands beyond the mainland. When it was introduced in June 2002, both the minister for immigration and the Minister for Foreign Affairs refused to rule out excision of parts of the mainland from the migration zone, because we said that it was possible to do that. At the time, the minister for immigration took umbrage at our suggestions that you could excise Tasmania, for example. The Prime Minister of the day in fact said that that was a ludicrous proposition.

I remember, in this House, on 17 June, asking the Prime Minister whether he would rule out excising parts of the mainland. This is what the Prime Minister said then:

I want to make it clear that there is no intention—and there never has been—to excise any part of the Australian mainland. That is an absolutely ludicrous proposition.

That is what the Prime Minister said on 17 June 2002. It was ludicrous then and it is ludicrous now. But this bill legislates for the ludicrous. It excises the Australian mainland, the big island, and Tasmania, the little island. The only thing left after this bill is Macquarie Island.

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