Jamie Briggs (Mayo, Liberal Party, Chairman of the Scrutiny of Government Waste Committee) Share this | Hansard source

Madam Deputy Speaker Burke, it is a real pleasure to see you back in the chair and in that role, a role you undertook very well in the last parliament, if I may say so. I rise to speak today on this MPI, the terms of which are ‘the failure of the government to implement effective border protection policies’. Nowhere has this been felt more than in my Adelaide Hills community when the bombshell hit yesterday. There was an announcement by the Prime Minister and the Minister for Immigration and Citizenship, without any consultation whatsoever, of a plan to build an immigration detention centre at the current defence housing at Inverbrackie, near the Woodside army barracks in the Adelaide Hills. It will now be used by the immigration department as a new detention centre, highlighting very much the failure of this government’s management of Australia’s borders.

From the scant information available, it seems that the properties at Inverbrackie, of which there are 90, will be used for up to 400 people consisting of family units, as described by the Prime Minister in her press conference yesterday. That is about as much information as we have on the public record, other than the fact that the Adelaide ABC was told yesterday afternoon by an immigration official from South Australia that the approximate cost of the upgrade would be $10 million. We do not know what that will pay for. We know they have to improve the houses, because defence has said in the last five or so years that those houses are unfit for defence personnel. Presumably it will pay for some security arrangements because currently the village at Inverbrackie has open access and so forth. So we know nothing about the details other than that by December this year, a mere six weeks away, there will be 400 people moving into the current houses there.

That shows that this is a government who has completely lost control of this issue, and the people who will feel this the most are those who live in my community. It appears to be an emergency measure taken with no plans for the future. This is, of course, an unfortunate and inevitable result of Labor’s mismanagement of Australia’s border protection. But the most outrageous aspect of this decision and the announcement yesterday was the total lack of consultation with the community and people concerned. My office was inundated yesterday afternoon, this morning and this afternoon with concerned constituents wanting to get some detail about how this is going to affect our area. But what chance do they have when the Labor Premier of the state, a man who used to be best mates with the former Prime Minister, was not even told until the last minute? Labor Premier Mike Rann this morning told ABC radio that he had received a phone call from the minister an hour before the announcement, telling him what has happened. There was no choice, no discussion, no opportunity to consult—just an instruction from the minister. Premier Rann said:

I got a phone call … about an hour before the announcement was made by Julia Gillard essentially telling us what was going to happen. We just want to know what it actually means in terms of the impact on the local community, the impact on police, teachers, schools and health facilities …

So do I, Premier Rann, and so does my community. Not even the Labor Premier was able to ask important questions like: how will the local primary school cope? What about the already stretched health services in the Adelaide Hills? What about the law enforcement services? What other impacts on community services will there be? There is no indication from the government on how long they intend to operate this facility or at what cost. I suspect the government actually has not got a clue.

The reality is that this will put additional pressure on already stretched services in the Adelaide Hills. The federal government is obviously in such a panic that it appears not to have considered at all how the community will cope. So blatant was the snub by the Prime Minister that even when she was in the Adelaide Hills on Sunday, appearing in Aldgate at the CFS to get a nice photo opportunity, she did not utter a word of this decision. She was 17 kilometres from Inverbrackie on Sunday and she could not be bothered—she did not have the balls or the ability—to tell the Adelaide people what she was planning to do.

It appears that the Adelaide Hills is good enough for the Prime Minister to have a photo opportunity but is not good enough for her to ask the community what they think of having 400 asylum seekers placed into detention in the middle of the community. Maybe it should not surprise South Australians, because this Prime Minister has decided that South Australia is expendable to her political needs. No-one should ever forget that this Prime Minister walked into South Australia in the middle of the election campaign and promised to do whatever it took to fix the Murray-Darling Basin. She said she would implement every last finding of the basin plan, yet last Sunday she walked away from that promise. So the fact that the Prime Minister, after playing on the fears of South Australians when it came to water during the election and is now walking away from that, would decide without consultation to build a new detention centre in the Adelaide Hills should come as no surprise. This Labor government is rotten to the core and has lost complete control of Australia’s borders.

It is actually worth asking every South Australian member and senator what they are doing to stand up for South Australia on these issues. Where is the Minister for Finance and Deregulation? She let South Australia down in the last term of government on the water issue. Where does she stand on this issue? Where is the Minister for Mental Health and Ageing? He is a new appointment but is not standing up on this issue. Where is the most famous minister, the member for Adelaide? I noticed a hard-hitting interview with her in the Adelaide Independent today, but where does she stand on these issues? The famous faceless man Senator Farrell has been appointed the Parliamentary Secretary for Sustainability and Urban Water but has not said anything about it yet. Maybe he has been busy looking after some state Labor matters which are taking up a bit of time at the moment. There has been nothing either from my good friend the member for Kingston or her counterpart and sidekick, the member for Wakefield.

The problem that these members have is that they are led by a Prime Minister who has given up representing South Australia and our interests. There are some in my community who have very strong views from both perspectives on this issue—and that is understandable. My personal view on the issue is, as it has always been, that people who get onto these boats are not to blame. I would prefer a situation where these people never got on the boats in the first place. However, we must have a strong border protection regime that ensures an orderly process is in place to manage our refugee intake. That is why I very much support our shadow minister’s approach on this issue. I thought he gave an outstanding speech earlier in this debate.

Australia needs a border protection system that ensures this issue is managed efficiently and effectively. This government has failed to do so and my community has to deal with that failure. My dispute is not with the people who get on these boats. My dispute is with the Labor government over its mismanagement of this issue. This, of course, is the government that promised during the election to create a solution to fix this issue, led by the Prime Minister and her sidekick, Commander Bradbury. However, since that ill-fated visit to the Darwin customs command centre—the member for Lindsay, from Western Sydney and with no responsibilities on the issue, went up there to get a political kick out of it—we have seen nothing but further failure and backing away from the promises that they did make. I wonder whether the member for Lindsay will highlight to his constituents in his first post-election newsletter exactly what the new policy of the Labor Party is on this issue.

There are some in this parliament—we just heard a speech along with these lines—who like to claim moral superiority on this issue. However, this does not sway us, and nor should it, from the belief that we should stop people getting on these boats as much as we can in the first place. That is a much more humane way of dealing with this very difficult issue. Weakening our border protection laws and encouraging people smugglers back into business is not the most humane way to deal with the issue. Australia should continue its proud history of accepting genuine refugees, but the issue must be managed in an efficient and effective manner, as it was under the Howard government and as it has not been during the first three years of the Rudd-Gillard government. Spending another $10 million on a short-term solution in my community without consultation with the state Labor government, the local council or the community is not the answer. Making a major decision without consulting the community on the effects on their schools, health services, law enforcement and transport needs is also not the answer, but it is of course the modern Labor way. This government stands condemned for its complete mismanagement of Australia’s borders and the effect it is having not only on the people who are in these detention centres but on the broader Australian public. This detention centre should not proceed.

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