Julia Gillard (Lalor, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

I know that as soon as I say the word ‘fact’ someone from the opposition—Pavlov’s dog style—needs to move a point of order because they do not want people to know the facts of this debate. The UNHCR facts are as follows: asylum seeker applications have increased by 28 per cent and the number of refugees returning home voluntarily decreased by 17 per cent compared to the previous year. Clearly, from those UNHCR statistics push factors are on the rise. On the question of assessing domestic policy settings and the implications of those domestic policy settings on the number of arrivals, I refer her to the analysis of her own colleague the member for Kooyong. Maybe when question time is at its conclusion she can go and have a cup of tea with him and talk this through with him in detail. But I think the shadow minister would have to acknowledge, in the words of the member for Kooyong:

In the five years before the introduction of temporary protection visas, there were 3,103 boat arrivals. In the five years after, boat arrivals increased to more than 11,000.

How does the shadow minister put the case that this government’s moving away from the TPV system has made a difference to boat arrivals when those statistics tell a story that is the complete reverse. What I would like the shadow minister to acknowledge—what her colleague the member for Kooyong acknowledges and what the UNHCR is chronicling for us—is that there are factors that get people on the move. The significant factor in our region at the moment is the aftermath of the civil war in Sri Lanka and no amount of manipulation of the truth by the shadow minister or the Leader of the Opposition is going to wish that fact away.

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