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

The honourable member’s question goes to the motivation of people smugglers and whether people smuggling is driven by domestic or international factors, or a combination of the above. That is essentially the essence of the honourable member’s question. I say to the honourable member that the government’s border protection policy, which is hard line on people smugglers and humane in its dealings with asylum seekers, is precisely the policy we took to the last election, it is the policy we have implemented since the last election and it is the one we will adhere to in the future.

We are dealing with a range of push factors in Sri Lanka, which the foreign minister is acutely familiar with, having visited Sri Lanka I believe last week and spoken with the government about what is occurring there. What is occurring there is that we have something in the order of 260,000 displaced Tamils within the island because of the military actions and the civil war which occurred there earlier this year. What the foreign minister is seeking to do with the World Bank and others is to contribute to better humanitarian circumstances for those individual Tamils and their communities in Sri Lanka in a humanitarian fashion, to assist with their resettlement within the country. Secondly, on the operational push factors, I was recently in New Delhi and spoke with Prime Minister Singh about the 130,000 Tamils who have now gone from the island of Sri Lanka to India where they have temporary refuge. Thirdly, what the Indian Prime Minister and others have discussed with me is the fact that we have now had thousands upon thousands of Sri Lankan Tamils go to places like Germany, France, Canada and North America because we are dealing, as an international community, with a humanitarian crisis within Sri Lanka which has been occasioned by the civil war in that country.

On the operation of our policy in particular, the honourable member—for example, I do not recall in his recent press conferences—has not referred to the numbers of Sri Lankans who have, thus far, been sent back to Sri Lanka through the operation of our normal immigration policy. Once they have been through processing and it has been determined that individuals are not compatible with the criteria laid down by the refugee convention, we have done as we have said in policy we would do, which is to dispatch individual Sri Lankans back to that country. Most recently—in fact, I believe only several days ago—two-thirds of a group of 50 Sri Lankans who arrived in this country in April were returned to Sri Lanka, given that it has been determined that they were not refugees. In fact, a group of six men who were involved in protest action while in detention were removed from Christmas Island on Saturday and arrived safely in Colombo that night. Thirty others from that same boat have now returned to Sri Lanka voluntarily after their claims for protection were thoroughly assessed.

See this speech in context