Luke Simpkins (Cowan, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I think it is strange indeed. Most countries have a requirement that you need a passport or some form of identity paper to progress through immigration control. But sadly, or conveniently perhaps, by the time someone gets on a boat, there must have been a bad wave or something like that because so many of their identity papers are floating around in the Timor Sea—maybe conveniently so. I really do wonder how ASIO and other agencies identify the people who are on these boats given the fact that clearly a vast majority of them have tried to conceal their identities. Who knows how you would identify someone who has no photo identification and will tell you basically what they think is going to work. Clearly, these are the problems that need to be fixed and these are the problems that this bill is not going to address.

On the point of the bill specifically: a couple of weeks ago a constituent came to me in my office and said that she had recently been standing near one of the post offices not far from my office. This had been a couple of weeks before she saw me. She said to me that there were two people talking about how they were transferring money back to Afghanistan or Pakistan or one of those two countries; she was not clear on that. They were sending as much money as they possibly could—$3,000 or $4,000 at a time—and this had been a regular thing. This lady said to me, ‘You know what that is all about?’ I suspect that I do know what that is about. I suspect that that is, as the member for Berowra was saying earlier, about people having decided, ‘The best way to get our relatives here is not to apply through the proper channels; the best way is to send money back home so that the people smugglers can be engaged and the money paid, subverting the system.’ As the member for Berowra said, we used to call them accessories. Maybe we could even call that a conspiracy to bypass the laws of this country. So there might be some value in this bill, but I really wonder whether, for those who do send money out of Australia to help their relatives bypass the system, this bill will still do what needs to be done and whether the $3,000 to $4,000 that might go at each point will actually be addressed here. I suspect not.

I go back—and I really have taken too much time tonight on this matter—to this: the ultimate problem the government faces is that there must be a true discouragement to those who come by boat; they have got to believe that the money that they might spend in paying people smugglers would be wasted and that there would be no guarantee of coming to this country. That is done through temporary protection visas; that is done through offshore processing. It has been achieved in the past. The problem was fixed back in 2001; John Howard fixed it. People were not losing their lives out on the Timor Sea. People were not losing their lives out on the Indian Ocean if they were coming from Sri Lanka. To me, the compassion in this argument is, very clearly, in putting measures in place that are going to discourage people from risking their lives. That is a damn good way to go.

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