Scott Morrison (Cook, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Immigration and Citizenship) Share this | Hansard source

You can see that this had been done just the day before I arrived. So there we have it. We have stage 3 works underway. They are not stage 2 works; they are stage 3 works.

The Minister for Immigration and Citizenship, who is at the table, yesterday told Sky News that he was being upfront, he was putting all the things out there that they were going to develop—and Curtin stage 3 was not on the list. Now the minister has to explain why he has wasted hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars on works that he is never going to proceed with. This may be a minister who decides not to build a house but to level the site and put all the services in. He may be that sort of a minister and be happy to waste public money. Maybe he should be put in charge of the BER project, given his success with GroceryWatch and other things. Maybe he should try that, because he is clearly happy to put in place stage 3 works and pretend to the Australian people and either not proceed or waste money.

This is a government that was quite happy to mislead the Australian people on these things before the election. It was happy to give the implication that East Timor was going to happen and that there was going to be no expansion of the onshore detention network—and all the while you were squirrelling away and putting these things in place. Why didn’t you have the guts to tell the Australian people that you were going to expand the onshore detention network and that East Timor was never going to happen in this term of parliament? You still refuse to do that.

On East Timor, in the time available, I make simply these points. There is no proposal. That was confirmed by the Indonesians just recently when the minister was there. Three months later, nothing has happened. There is not even a proposal. They do not know how many people it has to accommodate, who can come, whether families will be involved, what the cost is, who pays and how long people can stay. And what guarantees has this government given to the President of East Timor that those who are staying any more than three years under this proposal—just as Australia did the special deal for the Oceanic Vikingwill not be given a guarantee of resettlement here in this country?

By contrast, we have policies that have been proven to work. We have policies that have shown that we can once again restore the protection and integrity of Australia’s borders and our immigration system. We had policies in place when we were in government which dealt with the issues of children in detention which the Prime Minister today and yesterday shamelessly tried to appropriate to her own actions. They used the very provisions we put into the act and then tried to pretend there were currently children behind razor wire, which the minister knows has not been the case since 2005. The Prime Minister knows that. If she did not want to be disingenuous, there was no need to mention razor wire. This coalition has a policy that is proven and has worked. We will restore offshore processing in Nauru if we are able to form government. We will take the sugar off the table with permanent protection visas. We will turn boats back where the circumstances permit. We have the resolve to do that. We will tighten up the assessment process to ensure that those who get rid of their documentation are not going to get refugee status. We have the resolve to follow this through, because we have the resolve to stop the boats, unlike this government. (Time expired)

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