Kevin Rudd (Griffith, Australian Labor Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

We are left with a crude exercise in rank politics on the part of those opposite. I always enjoy it when the principled members for Berowra and Menzies choose to make principled interjections in this debate—because they know a lot about principle!

Can I also say that, when it goes to this debate about numbers, those opposite were referring to arrivals here since this government has come into office. Can I just ask: in the 12 years that the Howard government was in office, how many boats arrived on our shores? Almost 250. How many individuals came with those boats? Almost 15,000. In the period that we have been in office, which is now nearly two years, how many boats have come? Based on our calculation, there have been 38 or 39. And the number of arrivals is around about 1,700. Across the spread of time, the average over the last 14 years has been in the vicinity of 20 boats per year. That will go up and down as the global factors change. But that is the numerical context in which this debate is being conducted. So there collapses the fourth argument advanced by those opposite in terms of the validity of their position on people smugglers.

But at its core this is actually a debate about leadership, character and what you stand for. What we are seeing today on the part of this collapsing moral authority of the Leader of the Opposition is a Leader of the Opposition flailing in the breeze, willing to lurch to the right on these questions in the hope of garnering support within the party room to stagger through until Christmas and, at the same time, engender a debate in this nation which is about asylum seekers as the necessary price to pay to try and preserve one man’s job, and parallel with the tactics employed by the members for Murray and Curtin in a vain attempt to preserve their jobs as well. Why is it that the member for Wentworth, given his historical position on asylum seekers and people smugglers, when he has publicly embraced the position adopted by the member for Kooyong, has turned 180 degrees? It has nothing to do with principle; it has everything to do with expediency. Malcolm Turnbull has the business cards of the leader of a political party but none of its moral authority. That has been on rancid display in this place this week.

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