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

Your own government will see what the results are of those actions. They speak for themselves. Let us go to the record: 2002-03, zero arrivals; 2003-04, three arrivals; 2004-05, zero arrivals; and then eight arrivals, four arrivals, three arrivals. But by that time this government just could not resist the temptation, could they? In they went with their legislative unpicking and what do we have to speak of right now? Let us look at the figures: 1,100 arrivals this year alone, 42 boats this year alone, and 92 since those policies were unpicked and unravelled.

These are enormous influxes of individuals hopeful for the sugar that this government provides. Exactly how does that translate in a country like Pakistan, where Afghans have been living there for a generation? It translates like this: people talk. They talk about the easiest way in and they say the soft touch is Kevin Rudd. They say: ‘Get those boats out and put up a Kevin 07 flag. Fly them under that flag and you’ll be okay’. That is the message that goes through those camps on the Afghan-Pakistan border.

You have not been there. Have any of you members been to those border camps? Have you travelled up the Khyber Pass? Have you actually seen those populations in the eastern parts of Afghanistan whose only hope is to find a country that will potentially take them? More often than not it is becoming a flight to Indonesia and then a boat trip across, and this government is simply tempting this all along.

I just make a quite simple point, as a humble opposition MP, that we almost have a situation where the language was tough but compassionate and hardline—all of this kind of language was spoken out of two sides of the mouth, depending on who was listening. The Australian people are waking up to that. I am sure you realise that is happening as well, when you pour over the polls and what language will resonate and what will not. The government can see it.

What really annoys me is that we have had a debate for the last 12 months on denial. We know what policy I am talking about. The other side’s definition of denial is when there is vigorous debate on this side of the chamber, just as there is in the community. That is called denial. Of course, there is scepticism throughout the world of science and one can be called a sceptic. But do I not see true denial over there? There is no debate over the data. There is no debate over the arrivals. There is no great scientific debate going on about what has happened to these legislative provisions—all of them broken down by this government—and the direct cause and effect. Just how blind does one have to be to not see a cause and effect between unravelling the laws and a veritable armada of boats heading in this direction?

How much do this prime minister and this government plan to spend on this problem? Was it $654 million over six years? Is it now closer to a billion? I think listeners have a right to ask the question: how much is this going to cost? How much does it cost to incarcerate, to hold, to promise, to judge, to do all of the research and offer all of the appeals? It amounts to close to a billion dollars. We know already that if you break those costs up you get $81,000 per person and $26,000 per person for customs and border protection. That is not even mentioning the threat, the danger and the risk that this prime minister is placing our border protection personnel in.

I do not think that they need to be doing this kind of work if a simple legislative solution was proven to work four or five years ago. But they do. They do it because they serve Australia. They do it because that is their role, their job, their training and they are proud of doing it. But this is something that one individual on the other side could fix with some decent laws. That is all we are asking for here today. That is why we on this side are supporting this bill today. Of course we are going to support the empowerment of ASIO to obtain, correlate and evaluate intelligence and enable them to be even more front-footed when it comes to identifying individuals who not are only people-smuggling but are actually supporting the practice of people smuggling. There will be no arguments here.

But I think what has been completely missed is that we have a government which really have no heart in this issue. You can see that they are soft and spongy and moist. There is no commitment to this whatsoever. They walk on both sides of the street saying one thing on one side to appease the special interest groups and then doing their very, very best to keep it off talkback radio on the other. You can dither, you can deny, you can delay—all those options are open to this government, but I am simply giving a very humble and understated warning that this one ain’t going to go away. This one simply is not going to vanish. You are not going to wake up one morning and find that someone else is going to come up with a solution, because this lot hold the reins of government. An entire nation turns to Prime Minister Rudd for some evidence that there will be some kind of solution, but they will not be able to keep papering over it—and all his speakers who are going to follow.

There will be range of arguments here, such as: ‘Oh, there’s all these push factors,’ ‘Things are terrible in Sri Lanka at the moment,’ and ‘Things are hotting up a little bit in Afghanistan.’ But this is a criminal trade; it is all entirely funded by people looking to take advantage of the desperate. Never forget that. Never forget what happens on those boats—the appalling treatment—and then we have a Prime Minister who actually has the hide to crow about disrupting some of this trade in Indonesia and in the nations to the north. I simply ask the question: what do you do when you disrupt a boat that departs? Do these people find their way back home? No. Do they get any processing in Australia? No. Those who are disrupted in Indonesia simply stay in Indonesia and have another crack—they just have to find another $5,000. That is not humane, but that is not even acknowledged on the other side of the chamber. There is no long-term solution; there is just disruption—making it someone else’s problem, hoping the Indonesian President will not speak out about it and then trying to do some kind of deal to keep the whole thing quiet. But there is no long-term solution.

Where are the discussions with the Afghan and the Pakistani governments? Where is the action and the bipartisan, bilateral approach with Sri Lanka? That is not happening at all. It is all Indonesia’s problem, and then the government simply hopes that the next boat does not come. But we have got to the point where we need an update—not every day; it is getting to an update every session—to try to work out when the next one is coming. Control has been lost. There is absolutely no plan, except to keep moving things around—What is it; the pea and the shell game, where you just keep moving things around?—and hoping for a solution from somebody else. What is the latest proposal now? Christmas Island is overflowing. Potentially another 600 people are on the high seas right now. And the plan? We will take the low-risk males and move them to Darwin, and when Darwin is overrun we will take more high-risk males and move them to Curtin over in WA and then move someone else into Darwin. This is just calculated, cowardly retreat in a policy sense. It is nothing else.

Let us go back to a bit of history, because often what Mr Rudd tends to do is to blithely read out figures from before the Howard government brought in the solution and say that things were actually worse then. Well, let’s remember what the Deputy Prime Minister actually said in some press releases when she said: ‘Boat’—singular—‘proves government has no solutions’. Don’t these things come round to haunt you if you live long enough? What was the second one in 2003? ‘Another boat; another failure.’ I would like to know whether the now Deputy Prime Minister ever had a press release that had anything in the plural. They were jumping up and down at the sight of a boat, singular, because they were lucky to see three a year. What we are looking at now is an order of magnitude greater. One would have thought any responsible Australian government would have said, ‘We need a legislative solution,’ but, instead, what we have is legislative retreat to the point of desperation and breakdown.

We have heard all that doublespeak, and when one goes back to the pubs such as the ones in my electorate—the Alex, the Sands, the Capalaba Tavern, the Cleveland Tavern, the Railway Tavern, the Grand View, the Vicky Point Tavern and all those—and speak at the public bar—

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