Scott Morrison (Cook, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Immigration and Citizenship) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. The Prime Minister should attend one of those meetings and say, ‘My name is Kevin Rudd, the Prime Minister of Australia, and I’ve got a border protection problem.’ But we will not hear that from him, because he does not think he has a problem.

So what are the government going to do about it? They cannot spin the boats away. I know that this is the government’s preferred option for dealing with everything: ‘We’ll just spin it and maybe it will go away’. But we know that does not work. You have to take actual action to stop the boats. Then they say, ‘No, it is all about international forces’, as we have discussed. Kevin Rudd, the Prime Minister, is looking for an international solution; he is looking for a regional solution; he is looking for an Indonesian solution. But the one solution he will not offer is an Australian solution. He will not address an Australian solution that deals with domestic pull factors—the reason these boats are coming.

This is a government that inherited a solution, as the Leader of the Opposition often says, and decided to create a problem. The Prime Minister said he would turn the boats back. They were his words, not ours. We did not force him to say it. We did not challenge him to say it. He went out there and said it to big-note himself before the election. Implied in that promise was more than just turning boats back. He was trying to say: ‘Look, I’ll just be like the previous government. I’ll be like the government before.’ Just like the fiscal conservative promise, he said he would keep it going. We know that was a hollow promise. His heart was never in it. He never had any intention of following through and, as we learnt with the SIEV 36 explosion inquiry, he changed his mind and he changed his policy. He just did not tell anyone about it and he hoped everyone would just miss it on the way through.

This is a government that have abolished TPVs, have abolished the Pacific solution, have reversed their commitment to turn boats back, have abolished detention debt, have rolled back mandatory detention and have abolished the 45-day rule. They thought they could fiddle the thermostat on border protection and no-one would notice. The truth is that people smugglers have noticed the change in temperature under this government. They noticed straightaway, and 92 boats later the verdict is in—that is, the government’s policies have failed. Labor’s answer is to blame others and wind back the regime they inherited that was working, and now their answer is to bring people onshore and thereby dismantle the universal policy of offshore processing that was so successful under the Howard government. That policy will also go to the sword under this government, and what we will see as a result of that is a further escalation. Last summer we had four boats, and this year, in the quiet period, the monsoon period—not even the forces of nature can stop this government’s failures in border protection—we got to around 30 boats over summer. It has gone completely over the top.

Then there was the issue of the Oceanic Viking. Not only have their policies failed, but their inability to show resolve when the pressure is on has failed as well. The Prime Minister, it was revealed in Senate estimates—and he said it at this dispatch box—did not know the contents of the special deal with the Indonesian government regarding the passengers on the Oceanic Viking. That was proved under evidence in Senate estimates. This a Prime Minister who did not know, and did not want to know, and was basically hiding under his desk, trying to avoid eye contact with his national security adviser and his ministers so he could put political deniability ahead of the national interest—so he could put his own interest in being able to say, ‘I knew nothing about it,’ ahead of his obligations to protect this nation. He signed this country up to 76 people he knew nothing about without even knowing the terms of the agreement. He sold us out. That message has gone to the people smugglers and 40 more boats have arrived since then.

This is a government whose heart is just not in border protection. They try to be one thing, fail to be another and end up being nothing—and the Australian public know about it. Even their own supporters on the left would prefer them to just be honest—I assume, like the Minister for Immigration and Citizenship, Senator Evans—and bring people onshore. They think, ‘Let’s just close Christmas Island and bring people onshore.’ At least that would be an honest position from this government rather than this facade of pretence, of bravado, that does not result in any action. You can compare the actions of this government with those of John Howard, the former Prime Minister, who understood direct action. He understood, as did the member for Berowra, over those many years in government, the language that people smugglers understand—that is, ‘You are not getting here. We will undermine your product. We will destroy your product and we will stop the boats.’

Why do we want to stop the boats? The government will want to self-assess their moral virtue and cast judgment on all of those who believe in strong border protection from some high horse, but the truth is this: we want to stop the boats because people die on boats and we want to stop the boats because the minister at the table knows that every single person out of the 13½ thousand who come through illegal boat arrivals takes the place of the families of those and others who are sitting in refugee camps. That is our compassion. That is our record. That is our policy. We stop the boats. You fail to stop the boats. You are not even going to start stopping the boats. You should wake up to yourselves.

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