Wilson Tuckey (O'Connor, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

The member for Moreton made some comments upon which I would like to remark. He told us that peace in our time is just around the corner in terms of this boat-people problem because the President of Indonesia told us Indonesia is going to enact a law to jail people smugglers. Such legislation, of course, does not exist at present, and the only charges that can be levelled against some of the organisers of people smuggling are to do with the law of the sea, or something like that, and are virtually irrelevant. There has already been media comment that this legislation is some years away—and, were it the responsibility of the Rudd government, considering the speed with which they manage to administer the processes of this House, I imagine it would probably be years away also.

That in itself is an important fact. But it is also interesting to note that there still exists, anchored in an Indonesian harbour, a vessel that has on board some 230 persons who were within Australian waters and directly approaching Christmas Island when the pick-up boat for the senior people smuggler on board failed to turn up. He then ordered the boat to turn around and go back. The boat was still in international waters but, as I understand it, the Rudd government then requested the Indonesian government to intercept it as it was in their waters. That vessel remains a great concern to all international parties involved. But the point I want to make is that, by some means or other, that failed. Now, what was supposed to be the outcome for the 230 persons on that vessel? So sophisticated have the people smugglers become that they now have a pick-up vessel so that they do not get caught. In fact, this fellow refused to be caught—other than that he was still on the vessel when it was intercepted by the Indonesians. He was quoted as telling someone else on board, ‘That won’t worry me very much; I won’t get into much trouble from that.’

But when the process works, as it obviously has done time and time again, the mastermind will not be on the vessel when it gets into Australian waters. Yes, there will be some person with a background in fishing, or something else, to whom the threat of incarceration in Australia is not all that serious. It has got to be understood that when you are in jail in Australia you get pocket money. It is not a great deal for someone who is earning good money in the Australian community, but it is a veritable fortune, on a seven-day-a-week basis, to some of the Indonesian people who take on the job of taking responsibility on arrival for being ‘the people smuggler’.

You can almost have some sympathy for these people. They take that responsibility; they know they will be incarcerated. They get their pocket money and, as time goes by, on frequent occasions they get a charter jet flight back to Indonesia and are returned to their home town. That also happens with some illegal fishing people. So one might wonder: where is the disincentive, where is the fright, in all of that? Even when, as I hope they do, the Indonesian government enacts this law, as the President promised us he would, is that going to stop the problem? With due respect to the Indonesian people, should Australia be relying on them to overcome this problem for Australia?

That is the first of the issues. The member for Moreton also said that in circumstances of great conflict you take your children away. That is quite a reasonable argument until one considers the circumstances. If you are in the Tamil region of Sri Lanka, you actually live a very small number of kilometres across the ocean from a place called Tamil Nadu on the southern tip of the Indian subcontinent. If you are worried about your kids, why would you not simply do that short sea journey, probably in a ferry? I doubt there is not an adequate interconnection by sea across to that district. You have your children in a secure place and no doubt from there you could travel to a UN refugee camp and seek, notwithstanding you are a Tamil in Tamil Nadu, refugee status. Millions of people, tragically, do just that. They seek refugee status and many, as the record shows, spend years in those circumstances.

Around the world, the Canadians per capita I think are the most generous, and Australia is second in its generosity, or its compassion—whichever is the better choice of word. These people get the opportunity, the integrity of their claim having been checked and it being confirmed that they do not have a record that indicates they would be a danger here in Australia or Canada or the United States, under UN arrangements to come into Australia, to be one of the 13,000 legal refugees that this country accepts annually. That number has been sustained through a variety of political parties governing this country. It is a significant number of people and many bring no skills, no nothing. There was a case that got a lot of publicity because a child died on the flight. That risk was known before they got on the plane. When they got here there was criticism of the agency, and the agency had to look after them in a brand new flat because, as it was pointed out, these people had no skills even with the telephone. They come, and I am not saying they should not come. What I am saying is that that is the level of compassion in Australia.

The member for Moreton mentioned those who come in by plane—and they do, where they can acquire false passports and they get past our system. Everything we can possibly do to improve the security of our passport system is to be recommended. That is border protection. But in fact those who get on the boats have not been waiting in a queue. They typically have not been assessed for their entitlement to be declared a refugee—they just turn up. Then all those processes have to be applied on Christmas Island, at great cost to the Australian taxpayer—notwithstanding that it would all be done offshore by a reputable organisation in the United Nations.

What else do they do? There is a limit to the number of people that the Australian economy can accommodate. If and when they are found to be refugees, are they counted in the 13,000 to the exclusion of some other individual who has done the right thing and is still waiting to get a place in Australia or Canada or elsewhere in a United Nations refugee camp? In other words, are these people queue jumpers? And is that fair? And at what point do you apply compassion to someone who is excluding someone who probably is entitled to more compassion? They are the questions. As you would well remember, Madam Deputy Speaker Vale, the Howard government party room agonised over these questions. There was no redneck element there. The Prime Minister keeps reminding us about these things, as though it absolves him and his government of all blame. He is happy as long as he can point to something that has happened in the past. I hear his Minister for Health and Ageing carrying on about how many doctors’ places were cancelled. I can tell you there were 4,000 cancelled during the Hawke government because it took fright at the outcomes of its bulk-billing initiative and the surgeries that arose with pianos and other gross abuses of that manner. Their response was to say they had too many doctors and they had better save money by getting rid of some.

Once you have acquired government, it is no excuse to explain whether someone was better or worse than you. You have gone to an election knowing what the numbers were, and you are therefore able to judge your promises to the Australian people accordingly. There are all sorts of examples of the circumstances in health; health was such a problem that it was a major campaign issue. Then all of a sudden, when after two years they failed to fix the problem, they got up and said, ‘It was all your fault.’ They knew that when they made the promise. I give that only as an example, because this bill relates to boat people more particularly. These steps are designed to make it a little more difficult—if you can catch the smuggler. I have just given evidence about how sophisticated they are and whether that is the problem.

The Prime Minister delights in reading out the figures from after the election of the Howard government. In the year prior to the election of the Howard government, the number of boat people who arrived was 1,071, and the number of boats was 21. The Howard government, having inherited the problem, did not whinge about past circumstances; they set about bringing down various legislative responses. One of the problems was not stopping people coming but preventing them using every opportunity under the legal processes of Australia to stay here, because they had got two feet on the Australian mainland. It got to the point at one stage during the Howard government when there were 160 appeals in the High Court, none of which ever came to a hearing, because as they were called on they were withdrawn. That is just abuse of process. Who was paying for them to go through the various courts—losing every time but just going on appealing? And where did the money come from? And just how poor and downtrodden were these people who had the capacity to pay legal people to go on and on and on? One of the questions was: can we let these people stay here? You talk about the children they brought with them, two, three or sometimes more while they were resident in Australia.

We saw, as we are reminded, that the numbers of people arriving kept increasing. In 1999-2000 there were 4,175 and in the following year there were 4,137. That is when we said, ‘Enough is enough.’ We had tried reasonable measures and they were not working. We introduced the Pacific solution, we introduced offshore processing, we did everything in our power to prevent people gaining access to our courts to delay their deportation and, what is more, we sent out our Navy and Customs to intercept vessels before they got into Australian waters and to turn them back. It was suggested that that was dreadful, but what was the result of that? By 2002-03, we had no boats, no refugees, and no profits for people smugglers. It looked pretty good. Of course, that proceeded to 2003-04, when there were 82; in 2004-05 there were none; in 2005-06 there were eight boats and 61 persons. The Prime Minister never quotes those figures. He never learned from them, which is worse. The system was working. In 2007-08 the Rudd government were elected, and they made it patently obvious during their election campaign that the welcome sign was going back up.

We had pretty significant numbers going back into the mid-1990s, and in the early 2000s they stopped. Here we are debating a bill which applies initiatives only at the border, and what are we talking about? In 2008-09, 23 boats and 1,033 people arrived; in 2009-10, to 10 March, 64 boats and 3,011 people arrived. Why did that happen? We are told that the war in Afghanistan got worse. I do not think it has ever been worse or worser! Of course the war has always represented a great threat to the people who live there, and, by the way, they have a bit of a habit of blowing each other up. But the reality is that that is nothing new, and to call that a push factor as compared with a pull factor has no credibility whatsoever. So here we are, debating this bill again. We know how to fix it, and we are now starting to uncover just how much extra money has got to be found in the budget to cover the costs and the capital costs. I happened to be the minister for territories when the buildings over there on Christmas Island commenced, and I know what they cost and I know what the original detention centre cost. I always thought that it was far too expensive for the services required. We did not spend that sort of money on Nauru and places like that, and I do not believe that we should have a former hotel or motel to accommodate queue jumpers.

A young sailor walked up to me in an airport and told me how annoyed and disaffected they are in our defence forces and how far their morale has sunk since having to be nurserymen to these boats. They do not believe that that is what they joined the Navy for. They joined the Navy to protect our borders from aggression—and we heard that dreadful evidence being given in Darwin against our sailors for saving some of their own before they saved persons who had just blown up their own boat. They do not like it, the morale is right down at the bottom, and we never hear of it in this place. All in all, it should be the government’s responsibility. (Time expired)

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