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

I did want to make the obligations under the arrangement clear. There are obligations allowing those transferred to work and children to get an education. The UNHCR, the United Nations agency charged with upholding the refugee convention, will also assist transferees to access services and undertake refugee status determinations. And, to ensure the ongoing welfare of transferees, there will be an oversight body that will include representatives of UNHCR and the International Organisation for Migration, as well as Australian and Malaysian officials.

I say to the Leader of the Opposition: they are the obligations that Malaysia has freely entered into in this arrangement between us. The Malaysian government has done this freely. The Malaysian government has done it freely because it stands ready to implement it. The Leader of the Opposition has no evidence available to him—no evidence whatsoever—to suggest that the Malaysian government will not honour the obligations it has freely entered into. The Leader of the Opposition says that the only thing that ever compels anybody to do anything is legal compulsion. Well, I actually believe that, in the real world, decent people who freely enter into agreements that have obligations in them do that because they genuinely intend to meet their obligations. The Malaysian government has done that, and I think this sort of casual insulting of the government of Malaysia is not proper and not of assistance to us or to our role in the region.

I say to the Leader of the Opposition as well—and he needs to think about this—that the opposition in the past, when it was in government and indeed when it has been in opposition, has talked about things like towing boats back to Indonesia. Now, there are all the practical difficulties of that, all the risk of loss of life at sea—and the fact that Indonesia is not a signatory country. Indonesia has not entered into an arrangement of this nature with Australia. So how can the Leader of the Opposition say that that is satisfactory but this arrangement with Malaysia is not?

But, at the end of the day, I do not ask the Leader of the Opposition to resolve all of those conundrums and questions. But I am asking him to do what he said he would do earlier today when I met with him, which is consider the amendments that I have presented to him—those amendments being amendments which would enable executive government to act to have offshore processing and to do that in a way which is beyond legal risk.

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