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

Thank you. In 2003, the Howard government started to build a detention centre on Christmas Island that cost $400 million. They were planning for more boat arrivals; otherwise, why would you build a detention centre? They were anticipating that the people would come. The opposition, through the honourable member for Cook, say that their suite of measures will fix the problem of turning back boats ‘where circumstances permit’. That is a hollow promise too. Of the 240 boats that arrived under the Howard government, only seven were turned back. And that was given up, too, because they realised under the Howard government that that did not work. No boats were turned back after 2003. The practical reality is that there is nowhere to turn the boats back to. Who are you going to turn them back to? Send them back to where? To avoid being turned back, boats are sabotaged, putting Australian Customs and Border Protection and Defence personnel at risk. We have seen it and do not want to do that.

Then temporary protection visas were introduced. We have heard that the temporary protection visas worked, that they stopped the people coming by boat. They were introduced, to the best of my memory, in 1999 and, after that, still about another 8½ thousand people came on boats, so I have not seen the evidence that temporary protection visas worked. Yet here we are being told that if we reintroduce them that will fix it again. The reality is there is no easy fix for this issue. Whether you are in government or in opposition, the position has to be that it is a work in progress, that we have to work through it and come to reasonable solutions to shared problems, because the issue of refugees is a shared problem.

Of the people who did come here and were granted temporary protection visas—about 11,000 people—only three per cent ever left Australia. We said to about 11,000 people, ‘You’ll have a temporary protection visa and, even though you’ve fled a country with conflict and you fear persecution, you can live here with this uncertainty under a temporary protection visa.’ Yet only three per cent of them ever went back. It is cruel, apart from being a failed solution to that problem.

The opposition also talk about going it alone on offshore processing. Mr Abbott has agreed with the government on the need for a regional processing centre—I have heard him say it. But the federal Labor government is committed to getting it right. What we are talking about is establishing a regional centre with the cooperation of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in a country which is a signatory to the international Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees. That is critical because if we are going to have a shared solution to a shared problem, to have it in the region with the cooperation of the appropriate body, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, and, I would imagine, working with the International Organisation for Migration, then it has to be done within that framework. That is where the conversation is taking place at the moment.

I have a couple of points about East Timor. The President of East Timor, His Excellency Jose Ramos-Horta, has been given carriage of this matter for Timor-Leste. He said that Timor-Leste accepts in principle to accommodate a regional assessment centre, but the opinions of all East Timorese sensibilities will be listened to before a final response is given on the Australian proposal. They are involved in those conversations about that issue. A meeting is coming up soon in Bali where I am sure that issue will be on the table.

There is one person I think of who sets quite a moral barometer for this issue, the late Peter Andren. I remember that he was a very popular member in his own area. He spoke on this always from the point of a moral position. Yes, when you are in government you have to have practical solutions, sensible solutions, but we are looking at people—(Time expired)

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