Julia Gillard (Lalor, Australian Labor Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

To the Leader of the Opposition I say this: we made available to him a briefing so he could get the facts. He has the facts now. He has the facts from the experts who also served the Howard government. Coming into this parliament and trying to twist the truth just will not cut it. Those experts who sat with the Leader of the Opposition advised him that Nauru will not work. That is what they told him and he screams, 'Give it a go!' He has been told by the best advice available to government that Nauru will not work. He has been told by the best advice available to government that it will cost hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars. So the policy proposition he is now putting before the Australian people is that he will rip money off Australian taxpayers to fund a solution that experts have told him will not work. Those same experts told him that Malaysia will send a hard-hitting deterrence message. You cannot have it more simply than that. It is clear that Malaysia will send a powerful message to smash the people-smugglers' business model. It is clear that Nauru will not work.

I say to the Leader of the Opposition that, just as he does when he is dealing with climate change, it may be that he wants to go before the Australian people and argue in the face of expert advice. He does that with climate change, where he says, 'Don't listen to the scientists.' He does it with climate change where he says, 'Don't listen to the economists.' And now in this area of policy he may well be saying to the Australian people that he rejects out-of-hand the advice of the Ambassador for People Smuggling Issues, the advice of the secretary of the department of immigration. That is a matter for him. He can go and argue that in the Australian community. What he ought not to do is to come to this parliament and not support legislation which would put executive government in the position of being able to make its best decisions about offshore processing.

I freely accept that there is a difference between me and the Leader of the Opposition. I have absorbed the facts and the advice and I am acting on them. Those facts and that advice spell out to me that we must do the Malaysia arrangement. The Leader of the Opposition, in denial of the facts, in denial of the advice, insists on Nauru. That is as it may be, but the proposition that will come before this parliament will be a proposition that will put executive government in the position to implement the policy that it wants to implement. We will implement Malaysia; we will implement a complementary centre in PNG. If the Leader of the Opposition is ever Prime Minister of this country then he can implement Nauru. But what he should not do, and this is the test for him, is to deny executive government the legislative authority to make that decision. Ironically, if he goes down that path of wrecking and denying the national interest, he is actually going down a path which would deny any future Liberal government, if it were ever elected, the ability to implement the solution it argues for. It is this point of national interest that the Leader of the Opposition must answer.

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