Tony Abbott (Warringah, Liberal Party, Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

Bad policy based on a deception. Mr Deputy Speaker, you may care to listen to and mark these words of the Prime Minister spoken on 8 July last year, in the middle of the election campaign:

I would rule out anywhere that is not a signatory to the Refugee Convention.

I am not going to call that a lie, Mr Deputy Speaker, but it was certainly a gross deception—yet another gross deception. Now this Prime Minister wants the coalition to connive at a policy based on gross deception. We will not connive at policies based on gross deception.

The Malaysia people swap is a thoroughly bad policy. What sensible government would go to another country and do a five-for-one deal? What decent government would send boat people to a country where they could be exposed to caning? Malaysia is a friend of Australia, but their standards are not our standards, and it is very wrong of Australia to send people who have come into our care, however briefly, to a country whose standards are so different from ours. Most of all, it is a policy that just does not work, has not worked and will not work. Look at the facts: this so-called deterrent has not deterred 1,000 illegal boat people from arriving on our shores since it was first announced. Four hundred have arrived since it was signed. Why should the coalition consider supporting a policy which has so comprehensively failed?

Malaysia is a proven failure. Nauru is a proven success. Let us be crystal clear: this is a Prime Minister who came into this House and did not tell a lie, but did say something that was grievously untrue. She came into this House yesterday and said 90 per cent of those who went to Nauru ended up in Australia. Wrong, wrong, wrong, Prime Minister. If you cannot get your facts right in this House, how can we expect you to get your policy right for the country? Some 1,500 people went to Nauru under the Pacific solution. Fully 30 per cent of them were repatriated to their home countries, 27 per cent went to countries other than Australia and only 43 per cent came to Australia. Some of them came to Australia after a very long wait in Nauru and that is why, in conjunction with other policies, it was such an effective deterrent.

This Prime Minister just cannot help herself. There is almost nothing that this Prime Minister says which is consistent with what she has previously said. She was against offshore processing: it was 'costly, unsustainable and wrong in principle'. Now we must not have offshore processing but offshore dumping, because that is what will happen to the people that she wants to send to Malaysia. Back in 2002 she actually supported turning boats around. She said:

The navy has turned back four boats to Indonesia. They were in sea-worthy shape and arrived in Indonesia. It has made a very big difference …

Last year she said:

… 'turn the boats back'. This needs to be seen for what it is. It's a shallow slogan. It's nonsense.

She supported turning boats around, she opposed turning boats around, but it is okay. Now she supports a virtual turnaround of boats. Just as Al Gore invented the internet: whatever policy she wants, she invented it.

First of all she supported temporary protection visas. Back in 2002, Labor's policy was that an unauthorised arrival with a genuine refugee claim would in the first instance get a short temporary protection visa. At the beginning of last year she said, 'The Rudd government is proud of its reforms in abolishing temporary protection visas and in closing the so-called Pacific solution,'—which, at least in respect of Mannus, she wants to resurrect.

The Prime Minister was ferociously against more onshore detention centres during the election campaign. Since the election, in the absence of the BER, the only thing that she wants to build is onshore detention centres. Of course, we were never ever under any circumstances going to send boat people to countries that had not signed the UN refugee convention, but now she cannot wait to get people forced onto planes and off them in Malaysia, a country that has not signed.

This is a floundering, desperate Prime Minister at the head of a divided and directionless government. It is her responsibility to get her legislation through this parliament. She is the government.

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