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

I second the motion. After selling the Nine Network to Alan Bond for a billion dollars and buying it back three years later for a quarter of that price, Kerry Packer once famously said, 'You only get one Alan Bond in your lifetime.' Well, Malaysia only gets one Julia Gillard. The great negotiator must explain to this House why she was completely rolled by the Malaysian government, who clearly saw this desperate Prime Minister coming—selling out Australia's interest in a fit of panic and desperation, as her government has lurched from crisis to crisis on our borders and in our detention centres.

Under the Prime Minister's panicked deal—five-for-one refugee swap—as the Leader of the Opposition said, we will send 800 to Malaysia at a cost of $95,000 each. We will pay for the privilege of taking back 4,000 at $54,000 each. These will be added to our existing program of refugee and humanitarian entrants, a program which is strongly supported by this side of the House, and the settlement services that support it. But it is a program under which, at its current level of intake, after five years one in three have a job and more than 80 per cent are still on welfare—and they want to add another 4,000 to the government funded program.

The other point is that on the weekend the Prime Minister said: 'It is 800 to be used as we want to use them.' Well, it is clear from today's reports that she did not read the fine detail, because clearly Malaysia, at the end of the day, will veto who gets to come to Malaysia—and, as the Leader of the Opposition said, not just who gets sent to their country, not just the circumstances in which they get sent, but how much the Australian taxpayers are going to pay for that privilege. The only big winner tonight from this government's federal budget will be the Malaysian government. They are the big winners. They are the ones who have secured the big deal out of this government with this five-for-one refugee swap.

On this deal, this Prime Minister needs to explain many things, because this deal just has not landed yet. Like all of the other things we have heard them bring into this place, the detail just never comes. And when it finally gets trawled over, the whole thing just unravels. We still do not know, as the Deputy Leader of the Opposition put to the Prime Minister today, whether children will be returned under this deal. No answer today. Who will monitor the welfare of the 800 returned to Malaysia and how, and who will pay for this monitoring? How will they ensure that those sent back to Malaysia do not find their way back into the people smugglers' queue and on another boat back to Australia? How will they be sent to Malaysia? The minister said on the weekend that it is an operational decision whether they will be sent by boat or by plane. Has the government got a firm commitment out of Malaysia that we will not have a repeat of the Oceanic Vikingdebacle, when people refused to get off the boat and the former Prime Minister cut a special deal with those asylum seekers on that boat that we all remember too well—and that, frankly, amongst other poor decisions of this government, set this whole crisis into the making?

This is a stopgap measure. It is a one-off desperate deal, a bilateral deal with one country, good for a dozen boats and then it is back to business as usual under this government—business as usual under which 224 boats arrived on their watch, business as usual under which over 11,000 people can turn up. We have 6,800 people in detention; half of them have been there for more than six months, and that includes a thousand children under this government's policies. That is their record.

What we have seen from this government is a series of bad decisions. This is just the latest. The first one, we will remember, was the asylum freeze, which this Prime Minister described at the time as being a deal in the national interest. It resulted in 58 more boats coming, carrying 2,800 more people. It resulted in a doubling of the number of people in detention and a tripling of the processing time, which I am sure has played a significant role in the riots we have seen.

Then there was the never-ever East Timor processing centre, the other great solution to this problem. Now we have the Malaysian people-go-round. This is a government that does not have the policy, that does not have the resolve and that does not have the necessary ticker to deal with this issue. 'Ticker' means strong decisions. You have the policies in front of you from the opposition; it is time to implement them. (Time expired)

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