Andrew Laming (Bowman, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

The year 2010 will be remembered as the year when Australians listening to this debate on the Anti-People Smuggling and Other Measures Bill 2010, either in the gallery or over the media, witnessed the disintegration of Australia’s border protection. It does not matter how much the story is twisted, about there being tough times in various countries in various states of decay or struggle, the absolute reality is that over the last decade or two there have been around 20 million displaced people. If we look in the UK and acknowledge the number of applications from asylum seekers, those numbers are simply not rising, as this government would put to you.

What we have on the other side is a massive scotoma of monumental proportions. When it comes to border control simply nothing is going to be done about it. We can see that. We can see a government so busy giving themselves gold stars that they are not even looking for a solution. I know that when one slinks, as a member of this place, back to local electorates, those on the other side steer well away from talkback radio, the pubs, the clubs and the shopping centre car parks because the conversations there are nothing like what they say here.

This government have become almost professionalised in the world of spin—of saying one thing here and doing something completely different back in their electorates. It has almost become pathological, so I know they do not even realise they are doing it anymore, but it has become almost impossible for this government to rescue themselves from this diabolical death dive that they are in over this policy.

Let us go back to some facts. Back in the days of Kevin 07, and we all remember the little flags on cars, it was a time when you picked out three or four policy issues—and wasn’t government going to be easy? Twelve years in opposition is plenty of time to come up with some decent policy but, by the time you got there, all you did as a government was to institute reviews. When it came to border protection it was easy to be ‘Howard lite’ during an election campaign but as soon as the hands got onto the reins and levers of government, suddenly it was all about unpicking for your special interest groups: unpicking the TPV, unpicking the 45-day rule, unpicking detention debt, and unpicking and rolling back any of that commitment you pretended to have while you were in opposition.

It was out on the media airwaves while they were in opposition that we heard them say, ‘We’ll turn those boats back’. Everyone in the gallery and in the media heard those words. How close is Prime Minister Rudd to any of that rhetoric that we heard before he was elected? Let us go to the data. All we have from this prime minister is reading out figures from before the Howard government instituted a series of reforms that made an enormous difference to this disgraceful, transnational, criminal activity called people smuggling. It has been acknowledged the world over. All that this new government had to do was not play with it and not fiddle with the knobs, but it was too much of a temptation, wasn’t it? Bill after bill came through this place and they thought they would just gradually drop down the modulation.

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