Michael Keenan (Stirling, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Justice, Customs and Border Protection) Share this | Hansard source

And he is still, unbelievably, the third most senior minister in this government. Of course, the response of the people smugglers was almost instantaneous. These announcements and the policy passed through the parliament in August of 2008. We started to have illegal boat arrivals within the space of months. They trickled through, initially, but the people smugglers, once they tested this governments resolve, saw how weak it was and how muddle-headed it was on border protection and increased the rate of illegal arrivals.

Labor provided an enormous stimulus package for people-smuggling. We then had the farce of the Oceanic Viking. We had asylum seekers literally take over an Australian government vessel and then stare down the government in what was surely one of the most shameful chapters in Australia's border protection history. The then Prime Minister, the now foreign minister, insisted that no special deal had been done to get the people on the Oceanic Viking off, when everybody knew that that was complete and utter nonsense. The farce culminated when the Labor Party sent a private plane to Indonesia to pick up people held in Indonesia, who ASIO had said were a threat to national security, and bring them to Australia. Unbelievably, because of the Oceanic Viking farce Labor chartered a private plane, flew it to Indonesia and brought back people to Australia who ASIO said were a security risk to Australia. Of course, because of this lack of resolve, because of this farce, illegal arrivals continued and the pace that they arrived in Australia increased.

Labor then goes into a massive panic. The Labor members start to understand how much damage this is doing to them amongst the Australian people, because the Australian people actually expect the federal government to protect our borders. Then the policy retreat beings. First of all we had the ill-fated and discriminatory processing freeze on Afghan and Sri Lankan asylum seekers. For periods of three months and six months they said that they were not going to process people's asylum plans from specific countries. As the shadow immigration minister said, it was 'the most discriminatory policy since the White Australia policy.' What happened after that, of course, is that our detention centres—astonishingly enough, when claims were not being processed—filled up to such an extent that order within the detention network started to break down. We had riots, we had mass breakouts, we had hundreds of critical incidents and we had the farce of the immigration minister being unable to tell this parliament how many people were detained on Christmas Island. They could not even successfully do a head count. We had radio announcers telling him that there had been a homemade bomb in the Villawood Detention Centre, which was something he had absolutely no idea about.

The culmination of these disasters was the knifing of the then Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, now foreign minister, and the replacing of that Prime Minister with the current Prime Minister, Julia Gillard. She nominated Labor's border protection farce as one of the reasons the previous government had lost its way. She said she was going to start offshore processing, something she had previously opposed and panned the Howard government for. She announced, without consulting the government of East Timor, that they were going to do it in East Timor. Astonishingly, the people and the government of East Timor were not receptive to that idea and did not think that it was particularly reasonable for the Australian government to announce what was going to happen within their sovereign territory. That was an absolute failure. They then went to Papua New Guinea. The Papua New Guinea government appeared to be receptive to the idea of re-opening Manus Island but, as ever, this government managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. They sent the Parliamentary Secretary for Pacific Island Affairs, they grievously insulted the Papua New Guinea government and that proposal stalled.

We then had this Malaysia arrangement, the five-for-one people-swap deal, with the Australian taxpayer paying all of the costs. That was struck down by the High Court and we subsequently have the government flailing around desperate for the opposition's approval to get through amendments to the Migration Act that would give them unfettered carte blanche to do what they like within this area even though everything they have tried for the past four years has been an utter failure. If you cannot have a border protection policy, if you cannot get one through the parliament, then why do you continue to seek to govern? There is absolutely no reason why this Labor government— (Time expired)

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