Laurie Ferguson (Werriwa, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

And, as was indicated, we have no agreement with them. Nauru is a recipe for failure. Those opposite say that we have had so many boats and so many claimants since we suggested Malaysia. They know very well that in the same sort of period, after they suggested Nauru, the boats kept coming. The numbers in that lead-up period—a very similar time frame—were very strong.

Those opposite can argue that a lot of the people from Nauru eventually went to New Zealand and they did not all come to Australia. The fact of life is that the overwhelming majority went to New Zealand or Australia, and anyone who follows immigration knows that New Zealand is often the first step to migration to Australia. That is why Australia had some concerns a decade ago with regard to the huge number of Fijian-Indian claimants that New Zealand was taking because, in a very short time, they would be coming here afterwards. So the policy that supposedly stopped the boats led to most of these people eventually coming to Australia—the overwhelming majority of them. The cost of this has been assessed as $1 billion—$1 billion of taxpayers' money will be needed for this useless, senseless alternative with respect to Nauru. The situation is the same with regard to TPVs. Most of these people eventually came here, but it was after individual human suffering.

Mr Pyne interjecting—

It is right, member for Sturt. The overwhelming majority of them came here, but they were separated from their families for years on end. Basically, there was no effective retardation of the eventual success of their cases.

We do need offshore processing because, quite frankly, onshore processing is a recipe for people to have decades-long cases against the Australian legal system. In the last fortnight, a person walked into my office—admittedly, he had arrived by plane, but it is the same picture as when people get so much access to our system—who had been fighting the Australian legal system for two decades from a baseless case. I heard from a Hazara last Friday on a rejected spouse case. He had come by boat and he is now complaining that there are so many Hazaras coming by boat with fraudulent claims. This is the kind of situation we have. We do need to have a deterrent to dissuade people from paying people smugglers and to dissuade people from believing that they will be successful if they arrive.

People cite to me the huge approval rate of people who arrive by boat. I say that they are inflated figures. I say that the 90 per cent pass rate—and recently it was a 70 per cent rate—does not necessarily indicate the bona fides of cases. The reason the pass rate is so high is that many of these people cannot be sent back to their homeland, even when they are rejected. Even where we have agreements with countries, we return very few under Labor or Liberal governments. We find it difficult to disprove their cases because they either do not have identification or they destroyed it on the way here. The contrast for the people in the camps is that they are in situ. We can seriously look at their claims on the spot. We can investigate them more thoroughly.

I very strongly endorse the government's proposals that we must in some manner give people in the camps and those living nearby a bit of room in this intake. We cannot have the intake totally dominated by those who come by boats and planes. We have to ensure that the government of the day has some say and can respond to the UNHCR's request as to what it sees as the most needy peoples around the world at any point in time. If the arrivals are totally dominated by boats and planes, then the government of the day, Labor or Liberal, can have no say when it is said that we should react to the labour situation in Burma or we should have something to say with regard to Bosnia; we should respond and support what the UNHCR says is the demand of the day.

People criticise Malaysia. In recent times we have seen them get rid of the emergency situation and we have seen them agree to work rights. Perhaps work rights are of no interest to the opposition. I noted the comments of their then spokesperson in the report Immigration detention in Australia, when it was proposed that we give work rights to released claimants. Dr Sharman Stone, at 1.7 in the report, said:

As unemployment continues to climb, it cannot be assured that asylum seekers can readily step into and keep employment. As well the perception of additional competition in the work place will cause more stress to Australians in the workforce as they compete to gain or hold what work is still available …

Today, we see the alliance between the Greens, the Leader of the Opposition and the coalition—a desperate attempt to make sure that the government cannot operate the Malaysian scheme, which they are very fearful will succeed. They are very fearful that the number of boats will be reduced, that the rhetoric about the process being out of control will diminish and that the ammunition will disappear.

Quite frankly, the situation is that it is important in this country that the Australian people, who are fair but not stupid, can have confidence in the government of the day that is operating the system, and that the department of immigration is determining who are the humanitarian refugees. Every day of the week in Europe we are seeing growth in the Swedish Social Democratic Party, the Old Finns, the Freedom Party in the Netherlands, and other parties in Europe. There must be confidence that the government of the day can operate an offshore program and that it can determine that people will be dissuaded from attempting to come here. I strongly recommend the legislation.

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