Malcolm Turnbull (Wentworth, Liberal Party, Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

It is his forte, indeed. I thank my honourable friend for the assistance there. The Prime Minister has boasted that you could weaken the policies of the previous government without sending a signal to the people smugglers that Australia was a softer target. He has been proved manifestly wrong. The facts speak for themselves: 53 boat arrivals, carrying more than 2,300 people, since August last year. The Prime Minister cannot say he was not warned. He was warned by the Australian Federal Police, by the International Organisation for Migration and by senior Indonesian officials, all sounding the alert that the changes introduced by his government would deliver a powerful marketing tool to the racketeers and criminals charging vulnerable people $10,000—and more—for a seat on an all too often unseaworthy vessel bound for Australian waters. Those warnings have been proved right, just as the Prime Minister has been proved wrong. Yet he remains in complete denial. Now, as the boats keep coming—no less than a boat a day, for the last four days—he wants to shirk and shrug off responsibility for this colossal policy failure.

He refuses stubbornly to acknowledge what everyone else knows to be true: that is, through his misguided and naive policy blunders he has laid out the welcome mat, rolled out the Rudd carpet, indeed, to the people smugglers and their customers. Faced with this chaotic saga surrounding the Oceanic Viking, the Prime Minister and his ministers announced with much fanfare a special arrangement reached with the government of Indonesia to disembark the 78 asylum seekers in an Indonesian port. The Prime Minister stood here in this parliament on 21 October and made the following claim:

The President of Indonesia and I have made no secret of the fact that we intend to continue to develop a framework for further cooperation on people smuggling. This is what we intend to do. That will mean providing additional assistance to our friends in Indonesia to help with the resettlement task and to help with all the associated functions which they might undertake in the future to assist Australia and other countries in dealing with this regional problem. There is nothing remarkable in that. It is the right thing for Australia to do.

So spoke the Prime Minister. The headlines were big and bold and spoke of his Indonesian solution. We now know this was to prove to be yet another Rudd mirage—nothing more than a hollow sound bite created to cushion the Prime Minister through the next day’s media cycle. And, now, another bout of weasel words and obfuscation, misleading claims and misleading explanations; never giving a straight answer to a clear question.

A month after the Oceanic Viking picked up the 78 asylum seekers in the Indonesian search and rescue zone, we have the farce of this Prime Minister denying point blank that there has been a special deal, a special offer, to persuade these asylum seekers to leave the boat. He comes into this parliament and makes this ludicrous assertion of ‘no special deal’ despite the existence of incontrovertible documentary evidence in the form of a written offer by the Australian government to the people on board the Oceanic Viking. The letter not only proves that a special deal exists; it specifies in detail the generous and unusual—unique, I would say—terms for resettlement in Australia which have been offered to not one other refugee in one other Indonesian detention centre. Yesterday in parliament the Prime Minister said:

These are not preferential arrangements. They are consistent with normal processes. There is nothing remarkable about the timeframes.

Well, let us go through some of the details of the offer. I quote from the offer document itself:

The Australian government guarantees that mandated refugees will be resettled. If the UNHCR has found you to be a refugee—Australian officials will assist you to be resettled within four to six weeks from the time you disembarked the vessel.

If you have already registered with the UNHCR—Australian officials will assist with your UNHCR processing. If you are found to be a refugee, you will be resettled within 12 weeks from the time you disembark this vessel.

If you have not yet registered with UNHCR—Australian officials will assist you with your UNHCR processing. If you are found to be a refugee, you will be resettled within 12 weeks from the time you disembark the vessel. When you are safely onshore in Indonesia an Australian immigration officer will be in contact with you every day until the resettlement process is finalised.

Does the Prime Minister seriously, honestly, expect us to believe that this special deal is what every asylum seeker and refugee is offered in Indonesia? Does every asylum seeker, does every refugee, now in Indonesia get the assistance of a highly professional team of Australian officers every day to assist them in processing their claims? Is every refugee in Indonesia guaranteed resettlement within four to six weeks? Is every asylum seeker guaranteed resettlement within 12 weeks? This is not just special treatment. This was a gold-plated inducement to persuade the 78 asylum seekers to leave the vessel. It is obvious that this was a very, very special deal.

But when we asked the Prime Minister how many other refugees in Indonesia would be offered resettlement here in four to six weeks, or whether he could identify a single other refugee there to whom the specific promises in this deal would apply, he offers no answer—because, as we know from the data, there has never been a deal like it. The UNHCR’s own figures indicate there were 2,107 people registered as asylum seekers in Indonesia as at 26 October 2009. Yet the figures from Australia’s own immigration department indicate the following resettlement numbers from Indonesia over recent years: in 2008-09, 35 and in 2007-08, 89. What does this tell us? It tells us that the resettlement of refugees into Australia from detention centres in Indonesia is a slow and painstaking process occurring over many months and many years. We know, from these figures alone, that the offer accepted by the asylum seekers on board the Oceanic Viking is without any precedent. What other reason could they have had to have stepped off the boat they had refused to leave for the best part of four weeks, other than the guarantee—the guarantee, no less—of a fast-track entry into Australia.

The Prime Minister will not admit to any of this. He simply stands up and says a special deal was not a special deal. Yet the fact that it has not been offered to any other asylum seeker in Indonesia, or indeed to any other asylum seeker in any other country, indicates that it is a unique and special arrangement. The Australian people are incredulous that he cannot bring himself to tell it for what it is—a special, preferential deal. He knows that this offer makes a nonsense of his claim to be tough on the people smugglers. It sends out a signal to the people smugglers a mile high that Australia is a soft touch: that the Rudd carpet has been rolled out; that Kevin will fix you up; come on down. This is the politics of weakness and capitulation.

He comes in to the parliament and, when asked some simple questions about how this offer came to be made, refuses to provide any detail. He says that this offer—this momentous and unique offer, which has never been extended to any other people, to any other refugees—was formulated by the Border Protection Sub-Committee of Cabinet. He said that he had no knowledge of it being made. He said that he was not aware of it before it was being made. He said his staff were on the committee. So he is asking the House and the Australian people to believe that an offer as important as this—as central to the resolution of an immigration-border protection crisis, which has been on the front page of every newspaper in Australia, day after day for a month—was made by a committee of the cabinet, on which his own staff were present, and that he was not consulted about the terms of that offer nor was he told about the offer prior to it being made to the asylum seekers on the Oceanic Viking. It strains credulity. This is a Prime Minister who is known for his workaholism, who is said to be a control freak, who is said to have his fingers in every pie. Here is the biggest political challenge he is facing and yet the offer to resolve it, he says, was made by a committee with his staff upon it and he was not consulted or advised about it. I suppose it is possible, but it is hardly credible.

The reality is this. We are dealing with criminal people smugglers who are running businesses. Those businesses involve them offering a product and that product is the near certainty of permanent residence in Australia. That is what they are asking people to part with $10,000 or $15,000 for. That is what they are marketing. The more certain that outcome is, the softer Australia is seen as a target and the more seats on more boats they can sell. It is as simple as that. The approach the Prime Minister has taken to the Oceanic Viking has sent precisely the wrong message. The New Zealand Minister of Immigration, Jonathan Coleman, spoke plainly about his government’s attitude. He spoke for consistency of policy. He said:

The New Zealand Government does not believe that an ad hoc approach to dealing with individual cases like the Oceanic Viking will send the right message.

If he did not like that advice, he could have had regard to the Sri Lankan Ambassador to the United Nations, who went further. Contradicting the Prime Minister, he said the policy changes we have made here are the main factor in this surge. He said:

If the pull factors are addressed, attempts to enter Australia will cease. The lucky country is a magnet and many will seek to enter it.

We have a Prime Minister who has rolled out the Rudd carpet and sent up a big signal to the people smugglers. He is promoting the trade that we should all be trying to prevent. By having a weaker and softer border protection policy, he is inviting people smuggling instead of stamping it out. (Time expired)

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