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

Yes, exactly right. But I would suggest that what we do not have here is a strategy. What we have is the purchase of a number of very expensive bandaids. I do not call it a strategy when you are faced, over a couple of years, with such a huge expansion of demand for beds that you have to start bringing extra money out to provide those beds—4,900 more beds since the election, $400 million—none of which was forecast in the budget. It was all a surprise, but that is no strategy. This is catching up; this is a bandaid and a very big and expensive bandaid indeed.

Clearly as the government tries to address the primary problem of stopping these boats—addressing the problem not with the means, not with the tools that have worked in the past for this country but through just shadow-boxing around, trying to achieve something without doing what needs to be done—of course what needs to be done is the reintroduction of temporary protection visas. What needs to be done is making presumptions against the refugee status if someone turns up without identity papers.

The coalition policy is well known and it has been tabled again tonight, so I am very happy about that. I recently got figures back regarding a question on notice I put to the minister for immigration. I asked how many people who came from, for instance, Pakistan in 2010 used aircraft on their way here. The result was around 2,600 of those people came from Afghanistan. Rather they said that they used aircraft. I suspect that there were probably more that used aircraft but did not say that they did. In fact, there must be a whole lot more than that who came from Afghanistan. An interesting point is that of all of those who came from Afghanistan, only about 550 or 600 people had identity papers when they got here. That is an interesting point. I am sure the member for Solomon agrees with this: there are huge numbers of people coming, thousands of people coming, and yet, despite the fact that they have travelled through places like Indonesia, through airports—Jakarta, maybe Kuala Lumpur or however—by the time they get here a mere fraction still retain their identity papers.

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