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

For every 400 people who are arriving on Christmas Island these days, only about a hundred are going off. There are now about 1,900 people on Christmas Island in a facility that was built for just 400 people. In July 2008, there were six people on Christmas Island—just six—and today there are 1,900.

The costs of running this program under this government, as the floodgates have opened, are going through the roof. I refer to the government’s estimate at the beginning of the budget for this current year. With all the international push factors which were apparently going on and putting pressure on arrivals, their conclusion was that 200 people would arrive. By November, they realised they were probably a bit out and they thought, ‘Well, we think that 1,400 people are going to arrive this year.’ When they disclosed that at Senate estimates, 2,600 people had already arrived illegally by boat. They asked for an extra $132 million to deal with this increase in arrivals of 1,400 people. However, in just making up the shortfall to now, there are around 3,100 people who have arrived this year and the projection for the full financial year, based on the average, means they will have to add another $250 million to that total this year alone. When you take that out over the three forward years of estimates and you add it to this year, it means that the cost of this government’s failed border protection policy on the budget and over the forward estimates is $1 billion.

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