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

Of course, what we want to achieve is effective turnarounds. What the Deputy Leader of the Opposition must know is that the people smugglers' business model has changed. They do not sit in the boats now enabling our Navy and patrol boat personnel to turn the boats around. There is not a way of going out to sea and turning the boats around and taking them to Indonesia, for two reasons. Reason No. 1: the transnational crime of people smuggling, like other transnational crimes, mutates in the way that it goes about its business, depending on enforcement techniques. Knowing that boats are at risk of being turned around, what happens now is that people disable boats. So you are left with a stark choice: do you leave people to drown at sea or do you go and pick them up? Well, we are Australian. We go and pick them up—of course we do. Then, of course, the attitude of Indonesia has changed. Indonesia does not take boat returns.

The Deputy Leader of the Opposition claims some expertise in foreign affairs. I know the Leader of the Opposition doubts it and he is looking to the member for Kooyong to take her job, but she must know that Indonesia does not take boat returns any longer and she must understand the hypocrisy of the Leader of the Opposition pretending that Indonesia will take boat returns, pretending that boats can be turned around and taken to a non refugee signatory country, with no protections negotiated. And then they come in here and bleat—

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