Chris Bowen (McMahon, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Immigration and Citizenship) Share this | Hansard source

I welcome this MPI. When I saw that the member for Cook had lodged this MPI, I thought: ‘That’s a very good thing, because the shadow minister gets 15 minutes to talk and we might actually hear something of substance from the shadow minister. We might actually hear more than the facile sophistry that he normally provides in his sound grabs.’ I thought that in 15 minutes he would have to give us more than, ‘We’d turn the boats back,’ more than, ‘Nauru,’ and more than—my personal favourite and one of the great own goals of the last election campaign—‘We’d have a boat phone.’ I thought we might actually hear more from the shadow minister for immigration and it would make a very good change. But, alas, I was disappointed. Alas, we got 15 minutes of sound bites from the shadow minister for immigration. We got the normal shrillness. We got the normal lightweight performance.

We heard a lot from the member for Cook about the record of the Howard government. He has put the record of the Howard government on the table for analysis, so it is appropriate that I respond. They stopped the boats, he said. They had a strong regime, he said, and they took permanent residency off the table. They took permanent residency off the table, the member for Cook argued, by using temporary protection visas. The member for Cook has got himself a little stuck on this in recent times, as recently as today. He says that temporary protection visas were so important in stopping the flow of people into this country. He says that they worked—and he said it just now in the chamber today. Let us have a look at this. Temporary protection visas were introduced in October 1999. There were 3,722 unauthorised arrivals in 1999.

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