Janelle Saffin (Page, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

In politics people often say that if you say something often enough, long enough and hard enough—if you repeat it over and over—people will get to believing it. That is what I have heard from the coalition over the years. They keep saying: ‘Under the Howard government we had the solution and we stopped the boats. We stopped the people coming.’ It is simply not true, and the evidence does not support it. I will turn to that later on in my contribution, but I wanted to state that at the outset. I am sure some of the honourable members opposite now believe it, because they have said it long enough that they have deluded themselves. It is a fact that it just did not work.

With this debate what causes me concern is to have to be debating such a critical humanitarian issue in an atmosphere of attack and demonisation. Both planks—attack and demonisation—are there for one reason only. The honourable member for Cook raises this MPI today, but he and his coalition colleagues are doing it simply to try to gain political support by pretending to have solutions and demonising the others. It is always easy to demonise people we consider to be the others—people who are different from us, who are boat people, who come here differently. Gone are the days when there was bipartisan support on this issue. I hope that one day we can return to that, because the people around the world who are refugees and who are seeking asylum in countries around the world, particularly the wealthy developed countries, deserve better.

The honourable member for Cook talks about a crisis. There is a crisis, and it is an international crisis. It is a crisis for the tens of millions of refugees worldwide. A large percentage of those are women and children, so there is clearly a crisis, but it is in the international area. In talking about this issue there sometimes is also the charge that if you express some support for common decency you are a bleeding heart. I am happy to be accused and wear that badge. If talking about and acting on common decency means I am a bleeding heart, so be it.

I want to turn to the issue of the honourable member for Cook and others saying that under the Howard government they stopped the boats and they have the solutions or the suite of measures that the honourable member for Cook refers to. There were 240 boats that arrived under the Howard government. They carried over 13,600 asylum seekers. It is all within the timing. We have to look at the timing and at what is happening internationally and in our region. The boats stopped coming because global circumstances changed, and that is a fact. That happens because of what is happening in the international community with the conflicts in our region and the conflicts around the globe. The Taliban regime fell at the end of 2001, and millions of Afghans were able to return home. That is a fact. In 2003—

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