Chris Bowen (McMahon, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Immigration and Citizenship) Share this | Hansard source

That has been the consistent advice to this government and that advice has been provided to the opposition. The arrangement with Malaysia that this government has entered into achieves just that outcome. It provides for people to be returned to Malaysia for processing alongside the 90,000 other asylum seekers and refugees in Malaysia. It returns them to where the vast majority, well over 80 per cent, begin their boat journey to Australia—the country of Malaysia.

There are sound policy and humanitarian reasons for supporting the processing of asylum seekers offshore when it is part of a sensible and well thought out regional framework. Importantly, our regional approach involves Australia playing more of a role in resettling refugees and assisting countries in the region towards more consistent standards and treatments. The Malaysia agreement delivers significant humanitarian and protection outcomes in the region.

The honourable member for Chifley asked about the importance of protections and they are protections outlined in the Malaysian arrangement. The guarantee of non-refoulement, the guarantee of access to health and education and work rights as appropriate and the commitment to ensure access to processing are all outlined in the arrangement with Malaysia. There are two ways to deal with protections. You can negotiate them with the country involved, you can work them through, you can consult with the UNHCR or you can simply adopt the policy of turning boats around on the seas, which would not have those protections built in. It would be open to the government to adopt the policy of turning boats around on the high sea, which apart from being dangerous not only to asylum seekers but to Australian naval personnel would also result inevitably, where those boats are not sunk or sabotaged, in those boats being returned to Indonesia. Indonesia is not a signatory to the refugee convention. Anybody who is returned to Indonesia would have no protections guaranteed through negotiations with this government. They would have no guarantee of non-refoulement, no guarantee of work rights, no protections built in.

If people are going to criticise protections built in with the Malaysian arrangement, it is appropriate that they also reflect on what the result would be of a policy of turning back boats, which is the policy of the opposition. It is the case that there are protections that can be built in with refugee signatory countries—Indonesia is not one of those—but I do note that being a refugee signatory country alone is not necessarily a guarantee of protection. For example, Afghanistan and Iran, our two largest source countries, are signatories. Iran is the country which the honourable member for Cook has proposed for a transfer agreement. But we on this side of the House would not see it having the appropriate protections in place.

We want to ensure that this government and future governments have the power to be able to manage Australia's border protection policies. Without this legislation being proposed by the government, there is no confidence that we could have any effective offshore processing regime. The questions this week are: can the two major parties in this country, which both support offshore processing, reach an agreement to make it lawful? Will we reach an agreement for the policy that both sides of this House support? Will we have an effective and lawful offshore processing regime? And can we work in the national interest? They are the questions people in the region are waiting to see answered. On this side of the House, we are committed to doing so.

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