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

In 1999, 13 per cent of protection visa applications lodged by Iraqi and Afghan unauthorised boat arrivals were from women and children. By 2001, this had increased to 48.1 per cent. So the member for Cook should not lecture me or anybody else in this chamber about women and children on boats when the policies which he still advocates for, more than 10 years after the Howard government introduced them, caused more women and children to get on boats and come to Australia. Perhaps that is why the opposition did not oppose the abolition of temporary protection visas when this government abolished them. Maybe that is why: they had actually worked out that this was a policy that had adverse impacts. The member for Cook seems to deny that they did not oppose the abolition of temporary protection visas. He might want to remind the House when they voted against that abolition; he might want to show us in the Hansard.

The other answer that the member for Cook has to everything is Nauru. If you ask the member for Cook what the meaning of life is, he says, ‘Nauru.’ If you ask the member for Cook whether families and children should be put in community detention, he says, ‘Nauru.’ If a bell rings, he says, ‘Nauru.’ The member for Cook’s answer to everything is Nauru. If the member for Cook were now in my place as the minister for immigration, he says that the Nauru detention centre would be up and running.

There are a few little problems with the member for Cook’s little analysis. As the member acknowledged to me yesterday across the chamber—I would say that it is not reflected in Hansard because it was an aside—the Nauru detention centre is now largely a school. I asked him what he would do about the school that is now being run at the detention centre. He said, ‘We’ll build another one.’ So not only would he have opened a detention centre at Nauru by now but he would have apparently built a school in the last few weeks for the people of Nauru, which would be a remarkable achievement. I wonder how much it would cost to build a school in Nauru as well as open a detention centre. I thought that I might go back and have a look at the costings and see how much they built in for the school. But there were no coalition costings for a detention centre at Nauru released during the election campaign. The official audit might not have picked that up.

So we have more little tricky problems for the opposition—apart from the fact that Nauru does not have a functioning government; it has been in caretaker mode since last April. I wonder whether the shadow minister for immigration on his trip to Nauru had a talk to the International Organisation for Migration, which ran the centre on Nauru, and asked them whether they would be willing to do so again. I suggest that he might want to do that or maybe talk to the UNHCR about how they feel about a centre at Nauru to see whether they think it would be a viable option going forward.

I wonder if the member for Cook will consider a further point. His answer to everything is Nauru. At its peak, Nauru detention centre had 1,200 people. If you ask him what he would do about detention in Australia, he says, ‘Nauru.’ But it would only cater for 1,200 people unless the member for Cook is proposing a significant expansion.

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