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

At the end of the day the legislation that will come before the parliament is not about Malaysia and it is not about Nauru; it is about executive government having the power to determine the offshore processing arrangements it believes are appropriate. I say to members opposite, who now apparently have a new-found love for the refugee convention, that members opposite made arrangements to process asylum seekers on Nauru when it was not signatory to the refugee convention. It may be that some time in the future a government wants to go down a comparable path to the path that the Howard government went down when it initiated processing in Nauru—that is, a non-signatory country, and that is relying on a memorandum of understanding.

My point to those opposite is that if it was good enough for them to seek to have that power and to exercise it in government, what on earth can justify denying it to this government or governments in the future through a proper amendment to the Migration Act? This proper amendment to the Migration Act deals with core obligations under the refugee convention.

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