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

In answer to the Leader of the Opposition's question: (1) the government's policy is that we want to implement the arrangement with Malaysia, and that does require amending of the legislation, as I have already indicated to the Leader of the Opposition, and that is a decision he faces; (2) we have taken the best possible advice on structuring this arrangement and its deterrence value, and I am advised that the Secretary of the Department of Immigration and Citizenship, Mr Metcalfe, in discussing these questions with the opposition—he certainly said this to government, so this is the advice to us—said that the deterrence impact of transferring people will be very strong. So we obviously designed the Malaysia arrangement to have the maximum, strongest possible deterrence impact. So this is not about saying that this is processing of a certain number of people overseas in the way that, for example, under the Howard government a number of people were processed on Nauru. This is about people being transferred—people who are then not processed and do not come to Australia. So the deterrence effect—

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