Andrew Laming (Bowman, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Regional Health Services and Indigenous Health) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to also support this motion by my colleague the member for Cook that criticises the six-month freeze and demands that the coalition’s long-known responses, which have been taken to an election and were actually proven to work back in 2003-04, be implemented again today by this government. Already covered are the measures that we introduced: temporary protection visas, that we move to using Nauru rather than the never-never East Timor solution, that we turn boats around where feasible, that we streamline review by using case officers as the UNHCR does rather than panels, that we return unsuccessful applicants and, particularly, that we deem individuals who destroy their materials intentionally not to be refugees.

It has been an issue of great pride that Australia is a nation based on immigration, but that actually has no part in this discussion today. It is always interesting when government members start to pull out references they have written for fine Hazara individuals—it means that they are getting close to the bottom of the barrel when it comes to looking for solutions to international people movements. Of course we acknowledge that there are great people who arrive here irregularly and that has never ever been questioned on this side of the debate. This is fundamentally about the fairest way to identify refugees from among those who move for other reasons, including the economic.

As we know, the situation in parts of Afghanistan, Pakistan and Sri Lanka is extremely complex, but this government has failed to prove that any explicit factors arose over the last six months to make it easier to assess Afghanistan. What has happened in the last six months that you could not assess given that, since our forces are deployed in Oruzgan province, we are intimately connected to all the conditions in Afghanistan? And how has that changed in six months? The only thing that changed was that there was a federal election.

The Orwellianly named ‘tough and humane’ strategy was actually the weak and perversely inhumane idea of locking these people up without any form of processing. It simply led to massive queues in processing which will now, of course, have to be dealt with when this freeze is lifted. There is no evidence that this government could not have processed people in that six-month timeframe. There is no argument why a genuine refugee could not have been recognised almost immediately under standard UNHCR processing. Let us be honest—there are individuals who fled having had immediate relatives assassinated in front of them in their own household—we are talking horrible, horrible stories. To simply sweep them up in one large group and say we will not process them for six months is utterly inhumane. It is way more inhumane than the conditions that the former government imposed in 2000 and 2001, when there were large numbers of arrivals.

One of the reasons we are extremely strong on this issue is that those on this side of the chamber sat through the previous Prime Minister smugly responding to every question about this issue by simply reading out numbers from the Howard era, stating that the arrivals were greater then. Only slowly was that smugness wiped off the face of the Prime Minister who had unpicked all these laws, when the numbers arriving were finally even larger than for that period under the Howard government. I agree that there are a large number of arrivals now, as there were in 2000-01, but the difference is that the former Howard government came up with solutions. Not only is this government not coming up with solutions, they are patently turning a blind eye to solutions that worked and absolutely avoiding implementing them for no reason other than that they were our solutions.

Poor old Nauru has a completely constructed place for processing to occur and the only reason Nauru is not used is because the government need to find another nation to avoid actually going back and using something that worked, using something that was used by the previous government. That is bloody-mindedness, as is them saying, ‘We need a regional framework’ to avoid using the solution available to us—the one that worked—because it came from the previous government. This notion that we need a regional framework which involves a whole host of countries simply virtually guarantees that we will never see East Timor as a valid solution, and it is terribly unfair that that nation was singled out. It will now appear to many that East Timor’s leadership are heartless if they do not accept this current Prime Minister’s solution. Where was the negotiation? It was a glass of wine with the ceremonial president, with none of the hard and adaptive work that would have taken weeks. No, this government needed to go to an election and they needed a get-out-of-jail-free card.

It is tragic that the excuse that East Timor is a signatory to the convention and the protocols from 1951 and 1967 means that the government cannot consider Nauru, but will consider any other nation. It is wrong that Australia does not take the lead—as the former Indonesian president said: we provide the sugar. We should be doing way more than talking about vague solutions with a whole host of countries. We should be getting on and doing what the coalition did effectively after 2001, and that was TPVs, using a nation that was already set up for processing refugees, turning boats around where applicable and, of course, returning unsuccessful claimants for asylum promptly. (Time expired)

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