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

It is a shame to see him go, Mr Deputy Speaker, but I do respect your ruling. Of course, we have had the latest chapter in the real action charade and this one even tops the boat phone for wacky ideas. This is one that has come out from the shadow minister in more recent times, the announcement that the first 3,750 boat arrivals in Australia each year would receive a protection visa and others would presumably go into indefinite and arbitrary detention. This is a masterstroke of a policy! So we create a scramble to be one of the first 3,750 people to get to Australia in that period, and if you happen to be the 3,751st you stay in detention indefinitely on an arbitrary basis and your application will not be processed. Once again the member for Cook has the hide to lecture us about the amount of time that people might spend in detention when his policy is mandatory, arbitrary detention.

All of this was put to the House in a motion moved by the member for Cook in recent weeks, that this was the Liberal Party policy and they called on the House to vote for it. The Liberal Party then tried to withdraw that motion in the Selection Committee. I wonder why that could be the case. Perhaps it is because they could not guarantee a unanimous vote on their own policies by their party room. When it did come to a vote, when the Selection Committee had the hide to force them to vote on their own motion, conveniently we found that some members of the opposition were paired so they avoided the embarrassment of having members of their own party vote against their policy, because there are honourable members opposite who know that things like temporary protection visas are a cheap and nasty policy which have no effect.

We have the shadow minister say we need a returns policy, and that is one area where the honourable gentleman and I agree; we do need to see people whose asylum claims have failed returned to their country of origin. Recently, as is on the public record, I have been progressing a returns agreement with Afghanistan. In going through this, I asked my department officials, ‘How many people from Afghanistan who arrived in Australia on an unauthorised boat in the years of the Howard government were returned involuntarily to Afghanistan? Over the 12 years how many were returned?’ Zero, not one—and again we find the member for Cook lecturing us about the need for a returns agreement, lecturing us about the need to return people who are not accepted as genuine refugees in Australia.

This government has been getting on with the job of progressing that, because we believe in taking those sorts of actions whereas the opposition prefer rhetoric. They prefer rhetoric to action. The Leader of the Opposition loves rhetoric like ‘peaceful invasions’ and ‘armadas’. He loves to stoke the issue but he does not want to stoke the policy response. Real action involves breaking the business model of people smugglers. It means engaging with our regional partners to remove the incentive to move from country to country within the Asia-Pacific. But it escapes the wit of the opposition to think of that. It escaped them for 12 years and it escapes them now because it is all too hard.

Instead we see their tired old policies of a bygone era and what we will see is an increasing call for the opposition to come clean and be honest about their policies, not to engage in rhetoric. We saw this again in recent days when the shadow minister was asked this: if the minister for immigration and if the government introduce a package into parliament to deal with the High Court case which opened up judicial appeal for people from offshore areas, what would be your response? He was entitled to say, properly, that they would need to look at it. He was entitled to say they had not yet been briefed by the government, which had not yet reached their position, but they would keep an open mind. That is not what he said. He gave a very clear indication that the Liberal Party would not support it. So it does not matter what the government does in policy terms as the opposition are more interested in scoring points than in coming up with a detailed policy response.

We want some honesty from the opposition. We want some honesty from the opposition about Nauru. We want to know about the legal advice they may have received about whether it would open up channels of appeal into Australia. We want to know how much it would cost. We want some honesty about the farce of turning back boats and about when the shadow minister and the alternative Prime Minister would authorise naval personnel putting their lives at risk to turn back boats as part of their policy stunt. We want some honesty about the latest little farce of a policy, about this scramble and this move to indefinite mandatory detention, this latest symbolic farce in the policy development of the opposition. Some honesty about this from the opposition would go a long way.

We will engage and we have engaged in an honest public policy discussion about these issues. We have said very clearly that these are issues that we are dealing with. We recognise that 6,170 people claimed asylum in Australia in 2009 and that makes us the 16th in the world and the 21st per capita in relation to asylum claims around the world. That compares to 33,250 in Belgium, 41,980 in Canada, the same number in France, 27,650 in Germany, 17,600 in Italy, 17,230 in Norway, 24,190 in Sweden, 14,490 in Switzerland, 29,840 in the United Kingdom and 49,020 in the United States of America. So these are issues, and we will deal with them in an open and honest way, something the opposition have singularly failed to do. They have their cheap policies and they have their sound grabs but what they do not have is sound policy. Sound policy not sound grabs—that is what we want to see from the opposition and perhaps we might hear it from the shadow minister for border protection as we did not hear it from the shadow minister for immigration.

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