Andrew Southcott (Boothby, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Primary Healthcare) Share this | Hansard source

When faced with the decision of the High Court last year there were two possible responses. One response was to address the issue, which the High Court had identified, that the Malaysian people-swap deal was quite simply illegal under Australian law. Under Australian law there were protections for people who were seeking asylum. That is why I support the amendment to the Migration Legislation Amendment (The Bali Process) Bill 2012 as moved by the member for Cook and the shadow minister.

This is a good amendment. It means that Australia and the Minister for Immigration and Citizenship can use any of the signatories to the UN Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees. There are over 148 signatories. I find it extraordinary that the Labor Party—the party of Evatt and Chifley, the party of Gareth Evans—has so little regard for the United Nations and their agencies and for a multilateral convention which is administered by one of the UN agencies. The Labor Party used to be the party that supported the United Nations and that supported multilateral treaties.

There has been some historic revisionism about the events leading up to 2001, and I remember very well the first border protection bill that John Howard brought into this chamber. The then Leader of the Opposition, Kim Beazley, did not support it and the Labor Party did not support it. One of the issues then, as it is now, was the protection that was there for refugees. This is an issue which all countries face—Europe faces it, the United Kingdom faces it and the United States faces it—and the one thing that differentiates Australia is that up until 2007 Australia had shown a solution to the issue of people smuggling and strong policies in the area of border protection. One of the problems with what the incoming government did in 2007 was that it started to pick at the regime that was there when it came to office. There were only four people in detention centres, but as the government picked at it the thing began to unravel.

We have heard talk about a regional solution. The idea is not new. The Howard government was represented at the original Bali conference in February 2002. In this debate we should remember the tremendous cooperation we have through members of the Australian Public Service and, particularly, the Australian Federal Police, and the excellent work that they do right across the region to combat people smuggling.

Labor now supports offshore processing. We have always believed on this side that offshore processing is an important element of the deterrent to people smuggling. That is why we had Manus Island and Nauru. One of the things we see now is a government which is floundering about. In the lead-up to 2007 one of the things the member for Griffith talked about when he was trying to position the Labor Party as a party that could deal with these issues was the layers of the onion. He talked about how we needed to manage national security and how we then needed to manage the economy and how we needed to do those two things before we could do anything else. That was to reassure people that the Labor Party could manage these issues. What we have seen now is over 300 boats arrive during the Labor Party's watch. We now have a desperate government seeking desperate measures.

The solution has to be the reintroduction of temporary protection visas. The solution has to be offshore processing. The solution has to include the protections that are there in the UN Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees. We have a strong migration program and we have a strong humanitarian re-settlement program, but it needs to be an orderly program, and this government has lost control.

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