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

That is a reformulation of the question. The Deputy Leader of the Opposition talks about asylum seekers sent by Iran and other places. I am responding to that, the question originally asked rather than it reformulated in view of the error made. So the issue here of course for Australia is we do not want to see people get on boats, we do not want to see people risk their lives at sea and we do not want to see a circumstance where people smugglers have a product to sell. So the idea of the regional protection framework, the regional processing centre, the policy suite and setting here, which we are pursuing in dialogue—and of course the minister for immigration was recently visiting countries in our region, including East Timor, doing just that—is to create a circumstance where there is not an incentive for that forward transit. The government will continue to pursue these policies. We will continue to work through what is complex and requires an integrated policy response. What we will not ever do is succumb to the three-word slogans. What we will not ever do is pretend that a politician sitting in Sydney or Canberra somehow has a better insight into operational decisions than a commander on a patrol boat. With those words I will table an analysis of the deputy leader’s geography in a doorstop on 27 July 2010—talking about Nauru and somehow she thinks it is Vanuatu.

See this speech in context