Sharman Stone (Murray, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Immigration and Citizenship) Share this | Hansard source

I continue with the contribution I was making before question time. The Indonesian government has an enormous length of coastline to observe and police across its huge archipelago. We commend the Indonesian government for intercepting more than 20 boats heading for Australia since the new surge in people-smuggling began in August last year. There had been no people-smuggler boats since 21 November 2007, when 16 people were picked up from a sinking boat off the coast of Western Australia. We are very pleased that we were able to rescue those people. But some nine months later, after the Minister for Immigration and Citizenship, Senator Evans, announced what unfortunately can only be construed as a green light for people smugglers, Labor’s new look border control and asylum seeker response was made clear.

What was this response? Embedded in it was a reference to the two months stand-down of Army, Navy and Air Force over Christmas. The three forces were to have extended leave, and you can imagine the message that sent out to the people smugglers waiting in Indonesia with their customers, looking for the window of opportunity.

There was also reference to the fact that from August, and the commencement of the new Labor policy, it did not matter how you arrived in Australia in your bid to seek asylum. It did not matter whether you came via our carefully managed refugee and humanitarian program, with record-breaking numbers of people coming to this country—numbers that the coalition, from 1996, had built from a much smaller cohort of accepted arrivals needing asylum. The policy announced in August was that, if you came via boat because you had the cash and contacts to deal with international criminals, the people smugglers, you would have the same processing, outcomes and fast management of your needs that you would have through our lawful, legitimate pathways.

The tragedy is that across the globe we have increasing numbers of some of the most heartbreaking, difficult circumstances—whether it is in Africa, on the Myanmar border or in parts of the globe where the tragic circumstances are related to natural disasters—but every time someone with the cash and contacts arrives via people smugglers they unfortunately replace one of those on our humanitarian and refugee intake list. So the queue just gets longer for those in the Congo, Sierra Leone and on the Burmese border.

In Australia we have a long and proud record of looking after humanitarian and refugee new settlers. We have some of the world’s best new settler programs. They are some of the better resourced programs and are commended by UNHCR whenever they come and look closely at what we do. Under the coalition, I was very proud and pleased that we did not focus only on new housing and homes for new arrivals in the capital cities. We understood that a lot of our new settlers, particularly our torture/trauma refugees, had come from a rural background. They had never seen a developed city or lived in urban congestion, so for them the most comfortable, peaceful, secure place to be newly settled would be in a rural or regional part of Australia. In the Congolese new settler refugee program people were taken literally from the plane to the Goulburn Valley. That was hugely successful. It was a very proud moment for me when one of those Congolese refugees, now an Australian citizen, after only three years in Australia stood for local government at the last elections for the Greater Shepparton City Council. Another of those refugees, now a great Australian citizen, is in the process of becoming a justice of the peace.

Unfortunately, the Labor Party is not pursuing the settlement of refugees, torture or trauma victims or humanitarian settlers beyond the capital cities, because it is easy, of course, simply to look to the ‘same old, same old’ policies and strategies. Yes, I admit there are many more purpose-built migrant resource centres in the capital cities and that lots of the key NGOs have their bigger numbers in places like Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane, but we should look at the needs of our newly arrived settlers first, see what is most comfortable for them and embed them in communities where there may not be specialist services but where there are services which are mainstreamed and can help those settlers become part of the Australian economy and community much faster and much more comfortably.

We as a coalition moved a long way in doing what we know is right in Australia when looking after asylum seekers, those who have through no fault of their own experienced the most shocking of threats to life and family. But what we also did as a coalition was to understand that if you have absolutely uncontrolled borders—if your border security is so lax and weak that the people smugglers take heart—then you risk lives. I have to remind people who might have forgotten that in 2000-01 there were 54 boats and 4,137 arrivals. In 2001-02 there were 1,212 arrivals. But, as I mentioned in my remarks before question time, with our new coalition strategy of excising migration zones, having a set of offshore processing facilities and making sure that if you arrived as a boat person then you had a temporary protection visa in the first instance and waited several years before moving on to full citizenship, we ensured that those strategies turned off the tap of people-smuggling. So in 2002-03 there were no boats and no arrivals, there having been 1,212 arrivals the year before. We again had no boats and no arrivals in 2004-05. There were only four boats in the following year and three boats in 2007-08.

But, unfortunately, things have changed since the announcements of Minister Evans in August last year—where, I stress again, he perhaps did not understand what he was doing but announced loudly and proudly that this government was having a go-slow on border control over Christmas, was abolishing temporary protection visas and was introducing a ‘no difference at all’ processing strategy for those who arrived via the people smugglers. There was at that time absolutely no mention of Labor continuing mandatory detention or the Christmas Island detention as an offshore processing strategy. Certainly Labor did not mention that it was retaining the excised migration zones. So the message that went out to Indonesia, where the people smugglers had their queues, was, ‘Come on down.’

Tragically, the consequences have already been lives lost. There have been bodies found washed up on Indonesian shores from boats sunk on their way to Australia. We have already intercepted sinking boats in Australian waters, just a few months ago. On 13 August, police in Indonesia were able to intercept nine Afghani asylum seekers on the island of Flores; they were on their way to Australia in a fishing boat. That was a sign of things to come and the floodgates starting to open. On 30 September 2008 a vessel carrying 14 people was intercepted in the Ashmore Reef area; there were 11 men and one woman from Afghanistan in that particular boat. Then there were incidents on 6 October, 20 October, 3 November, 11 November, 20 November, 28 November and 3 December.

I mentioned 3 December. It was interesting that on 1 December I put a question to the Prime Minister in this place during question time. I have just listed to you the numbers of boats coming down since August, some intercepted by the Indonesians on our behalf and the others intercepted by our own defence forces, usually the Navy. I asked the Prime Minister whether he was concerned about the stand-down of half of Australia’s patrol boats for two months over Christmas, leaving only 320 naval personnel on active duty in Australian waters over that period, and whether in fact this was a case of giving the people smugglers a green light. His response was mock outrage—how dare I imply that people smugglers were back in business in bringing people down to Australia? There was no careful response—‘Look, we’re concerned about people-smuggling resurging.’ There was a denial that this was in fact resurging. This was followed by the chairman of the Joint Standing Committee on Migration standing in this place within 24 hours of the Prime Minister denying that there was a new problem and also saying that what I had said was wrong; there was no re-emergence of this difficulty and problem. So today I am very pleased that there is at least an acknowledgement that people-smuggling is a heinous crime.

The victims are not just those who pay the cash and have the contacts to come down by leaking boats which may not get to our shores at all. The other victims are the Indonesian fishermen who, maybe, imagine that it is not going to be much more serious than being caught for illegal fishing when they deliver their human cargo into the hands of the naval patrol boats. In fact, of course, those Indonesian fishers, when charged with people-smuggling, face a much more serious sanction: 20 years in prison is the maximum penalty, as well as very hefty fines. So I see those Indonesian fishermen, with impoverished families in coastal villages, also as victims of the people smugglers.

I am concerned, I have to say, if this bill is only about a name change from ‘Australian Customs Service’ to ‘Australian Customs and Border Protection Service’. There has to be more. You cannot just change a name, stand back and say, ‘The job’s right; the longer nameplate will scare off the illegals and the international criminals whose profit is in bringing boatloads down.’ We have to look at what resources are being committed to this newly rebadged agency or entity. We have already seen the consequences of squeezed resources for the Department of Immigration and Citizenship. We are already aware of the squeezed resources for Customs that our shadow minister referred to in her speech. In the case of the Department of Immigration and Citizenship, some 200 officials have been taken out of the service.

Whenever you start to rely more on home country immigration-processing officials—locals employed in our high commissions and embassies offshore—you invite a great deal of difficulty due to the fact that those locally employed officials bring to the jobs their own cultural biases and their own sense of who is worthy to be at the head of a queue in applying for visas. You start to have allegations of corruption. People applying for visas to come to Australia, if they are part of a minority group in that country, find themselves at the back of the queue. Money starts changing hands. It is a serious problem when Australia can no longer afford to have its own Australian citizens offshore working in those most sensitive and important posts.

We have heard of the problems in Afghanistan where, via the Indonesian embassy, there was a racket selling visas for Afghanis to go to Australia via Indonesia. It took the media to mention that problem before there was real action from the Department of Immigration and Citizenship, it would seem. We are also alarmed about the two boats that have recently come to Australia. The most recent one came several days ago with 54 on board. Children standing on the beach were the ones who saw that boat coming and reported that to a ranger. As we know, a boat of Sri Lankans came onto the coast of Western Australia, and local tourists saw, to their astonishment, a couple swimming ashore.

What is it that we have to do to make sure that this government pays serious attention to the resources needed for our border security and the protection of asylum seekers who are in the hands of these international criminals? We have to be serious about the longer queues in our offshore places like our high commissions and embassies. People become frustrated when they are told that it will perhaps take years for their visa applications to be properly considered. Yes, some will turn to people smugglers. When you have queues back in Indonesia waiting to see if it is worth the risk to push off in those leaking vessels—to literally put their lives in the hands of people smugglers who have taken the cash upfront—it is not helpful to hear on the news triumphal announcements that it has taken the shortest possible time to process the last lot of people smuggled into Australia and they are now enjoying a good life on the Australian mainland.

These are serious problems, and we have to wonder what will come next from the Labor Party. Will there be additional resources? The budget will tell us, but we are not holding our breath. We have already seen this Labor government commit, campaign after campaign, to a coastwatch. We were told a US style coastwatch was the way to go. Well, that has been thrown out the window. We were also told that there would be a mega department of home security and this department of home security—this great monolithic entity—would look after our coastline and make sure that no-one died in their run to the country in the hands of criminals. Well, the department of home security vanished as well. Now we have the Australian Customs Service renamed as the Australian Customs and Border Protection Service. We in the coalition really do wish this service well. It needs to succeed. The safety of this nation and the safety of very vulnerable people depend on this service succeeding. But we are very, very worried. This government has already got the nation heavily into debt. There are no surplus funds anywhere in sight. We have heard about the $2 billion per week being borrowed. So will this service be properly resourced? It must be, but I am very afraid that the Australian nation will be more vulnerable because, quite simply, this economy is not being properly managed so that important aspects of the nation’s safety can be properly looked after in the future.

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