Julia Gillard (Lalor, Australian Labor Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

We will pursue a regional protection framework. We will pursue a regional processing centre. We have said that the regional processing centre should be located in a country that is a signatory to the refugee convention. It is central to these arrangements that the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees be involved. That is a proper process. We are in dialogue with East Timor, which is a signatory to the convention. We obviously said to Nauru, when it indicated that it may choose as a nation to become a signatory to the convention, that that would be terrific and if it needed any assistance with the technical questions in doing that then we would provide that assistance, but we will keep working, being transparent about these questions as we have today.

Of course, I expect that the Leader of the Opposition will continue with his campaigns about secret plans and his campaigns about fear in the local communities and more generally around the nation—the kind of fear we saw him engage in during the election campaign—and I presume we will see him continue with absurd policies like ‘boat phone’, where he thought that perhaps if he were the Prime Minister, sitting in Kirribilli, he might be in a better position to make an operational decision than a commander on the spot on one of our border patrol vessels and he would take it upon himself to pick up the phone and tell them what to do. Well, we will not engage in absurdities like that.

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