Scott Morrison (Cook, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Immigration and Citizenship) Share this | Hansard source

I will refer to the member for Lindsay by his appropriate title rather than what I referred to him as before. It was the member for Lindsay who—before he went on that great expedition to Darwin, the well-known port in Lindsay—went out there and encouraged Australians that he was all keen on border protection and so was the Prime Minister, and the people of Lindsay did not have to worry about the government thinking they were racist because they were concerned about the government’s border protection failures. They did not have to worry about that, because that was all behind us. But in this place several weeks ago the Prime Minister restated her assault on the Australian people for having concerns about her border protection failures.

They have no policy at all. This is their policy to stop the boats: East Timor. We can have a processing centre in East Timor—as a new millennium project, I suspect. It will not be this millennium; we will have to wait for the next one. It will be the millennium processing centre at East Timor in the next millennium, to go with the Millennium Dome, I suppose, from this millennium.

The minister was saying last night: ‘It takes time and we have to wait and wait. We do not have an immediate plan; we have a long-term plan.’ I think a millennium is a particularly long period of time. But this is the plan that the government has and it is a plan that is coming to nothing.

This is a plan that worked: on 1 September 2001 Prime Minister Howard said, ‘There will be third-country processing at Nauru’; 19 days later the centre opened. Eight months after the Prime Minister announced her processing centre in East Timor, it is no closer to coming into being. This is a processing centre that is a ‘never-never’ solution.

The only other proposals they put forward, apart from removing the Howard government’s regime, was the asylum freeze. That worked well. It led to a tripling in the amount of time people spent in detention and a doubling in the detention population and it was such a great deterrent that over 50 boats turned up in the meantime and over 2,000 people. Every time this government touches this area, it completely turns to mush. The cost that is paid in humanitarian and financial terms and in the integrity of our immigration program is simply too high.

I have a challenge for this minister. This minister has to decide this week whether he is going to be part of the solution or part of the problem. This minister has to decide whether he is going to walk out of this chamber today and walk into the Prime Minister’s office and say: ‘We’ve got it wrong. We shouldn’t have changed the policy of the Howard regime. It has absolutely turned to mush. I am sitting in a sea of disaster when it comes to our detention network and you will not let me take the decision.’ That is a decision that I am sure the minister knows he has to take—he would know he has to take these decisions—and he can decide to do that today or he can roll over to the Prime Minister and continue to swim in this sea of absolute failure.

I do not think the minister will do that. I think this minister is part of the problem not the solution. His only answer to date is to go out there and employ another six media officers to spin the boats away. You cannot spin them away; you have to act and you need to act now.

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