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

I rise to speak on the Customs Legislation Amendment (Name Change) Bill 2009. In one of the shortest second reading speeches in the history of this House, in just 2½ minutes, the Attorney-General told us that there is to be a name change from the Australian Customs Service to the Australian Customs and Border Protection Service. This, we are told, will better reflect the agency’s new role as lead agent on maritime people-smuggling issues.

Quite obviously, people-smuggling is an extraordinarily serious issue. It is a case of international criminals making a lot of dangerous decisions, where some of the most vulnerable people, who have the cash and contacts and are prepared to pay upfront, are put into leaking vessels—in our case, typically pushed off the Indonesian shores. The impoverished and often ignorant Indonesian fishermen who man these vessels are not aware that they will be picked up and charged with the serious offence of people-smuggling. We just heard reference to a sentence that was delivered very recently in a Perth court—a six-year jail term for people-smuggling. People-smuggling is a very important matter.

While a name change is no doubt very exciting for the print industry, for those who design logos and paper, we want to see more than a name change. We on this side of the House had to deal with one of the biggest surges of people-smuggling, which occurred in the early part of the 21st century. We saw several thousand people coming via boats and we saw hundreds lost at sea. We took very stringent measures at the time—in 1999-2000—and were able over a period of two years to reduce those people-smuggling activities down to zero. While that meant that we, no doubt, saved lives, it also meant that we were in a position to look very carefully at such issues as our migration zones to make sure that our undefended coastline, which is one of the longest in the world, did not remain vulnerable to international criminals who saw a cash opportunity. In our time in government, we also worked very closely with the Indonesian government.

See this speech in context