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

We have the minister at the table trying to throw this back at us. I know the minister at the table, when he is in trouble, lifts the volume. When he is in trouble he lifts the velocity so you can hardly hear in the torrent of words that this minister gives us, but I would respectfully, politely, genuinely ask the minister: how does he justify what he is doing with what he has always said in the past? You owe it to this parliament; you owe it to the Australian people to give us an answer.

The coalition has been entirely consistent for the last 10 years—absolutely and entirely consistent at every point over the last decade. We have supported Nauru, temporary protection visas and turning boats around where it can safely be done. The only position that this Prime Minister has not had is the one that works—and she has had a few. This is a Prime Minister who stands for everything because she believes in absolutely nothing at all, and that is what we have seen repeatedly from this government on this particular issue.

Lest there be any doubt, let it be clear in this chamber that late last Friday in Melbourne my senior colleagues and I were given the government's preferred legislative arrangements. Those legislative arrangements completely stripped out the human rights protections that the Howard government had deliberately and self-consciously built into the Migration Act where offshore processing was concerned. That is what they did. This minister, who once said that as a matter of decency there had to be protections, had completely stripped them out of the legislative amendments that they gave to us on Friday. That was not offshore processing; it was offshore dumping. My colleagues and I were very honest with those officials. We said that our reaction to what the government proposed was that it was a serious detraction from human rights. That is what we said.

When I went to see the Prime Minister on Monday, I said, 'We will give your bill a second reading but we will move amendments to it because we believe that, as it stands, it betrays the human rights standards which a decent country like Australia should always observe and which the coalition has always believed in.' Then, what did the Prime Minister do? She said, 'Oh, the policy that I put to you on Friday has not even survived the weekend; we now have a new policy. The new policy writes back in those standards but does not make them compulsory.' These are the Clayton's obligations—the obligations you have when you do not have any obligations.

Then we went to probably the best lawyer in this country on these issues—former Solicitor-General David Bennett QC. We did not reject the government's proposals out of hand. We went to David Bennett QC and we got his opinion. His opinion is that the government's proposals, both of them, continue legal risk but strip out protections. By contrast, our proposal, as far as is humanly possible in this uncertain world, restores certainty and restores the ability of the executive government to make these decisions but does so in a way which is entirely consistent with human rights protections. What this government has done is pay lip-service to human rights protections without guaranteeing them. That is the disgrace of this government. That is why they had such a fractious caucus meeting today. That is why this government is now so totally ashamed of itself—because it has betrayed every principle that it has ever claimed to believe in.

We have a report today—the Left of the party quoting one of the Left's caucus spokesmen:

The Left of the Party does not believe we should go back to Howard-era politics.

Well, they have done something which is far worse. The Howard government would never have done what they are now attempting to do. This is a Prime Minister who now expects the opposition to rescue her from the disastrous position that she has put the government in because of her own failures of principle. I say: if she cannot get a majority in the parliament, she has options available to her. A government which has lost control of our borders does not deserve to stay in office. (Time expired)

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