Rowan Ramsey (Grey, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

The member for Wakefield; goodness me, I could go on all day! That is one of the very few light notes in this debate.

The issue of asylum seekers and boat people has been a deeply troubling issue for Australia for a long period—over 10 years. As an outsider, when we were looking at round 1 in the times of Tampa and the Pacific solution, I found it difficult enough as a Liberal to accommodate the Liberal position, I must say. I actually visited a resident of Baxter detention centre in that period, at the behest of a friend who was a regular visitor there. He was a fine gentleman; he was Iranian. He would have made a great Australian, I do not have much doubt. But in fact he was found not to be a genuine refugee and he returned to Europe. Therein lies much of the heat of this argument about who are genuine refugees, who are not genuine refugees and on what basis they come to Australia.

There are a few things I would like to say. The Grey electorate was one of the epicentres of the protest movement during those years in the early 2000s. The Woomera detention centre—which, I might add, is still there and could be used—is mothballed. The Woomera detention centre and the Baxter detention centre—which has now been largely dismantled and the remnants handed over to the Defence Force—became the protest centre for Australia every Easter. I wonder now how some members of the government feel about their allies from that time, who used to come up and fight with police, throw rocks and demonstrate outside Baxter detention centre because of the great evil done by John Howard and Philip Ruddock, the member for Berowra, who spoke so powerfully here alongside me earlier in this debate and exposed the truth and the hypocrisy of the arguments put forward on the government side. I wonder where those protesters are now. Where are those hundreds of people that flocked to Baxter and fought with police so they could get on national television? Where are they now? There are more people in detention in Australia now than there were then. but those demonstrators, those people of the far Left decried the Howard government for their inhumane actions—that is the way it was described—and assaulted the Howard government on a daily basis for what they proclaimed was the inhumane Pacific solution. As a Liberal who was uncomfortable with that policy, I came to respect the policy because it worked. It stopped the boats. There were no more boats. There were 300 people in six years.

The hubris of the government—the conceit when it thought it could play with those rules and not make a difference—is almost indescribable. Now the government have turned the full 180 degrees and they ask us to dismantle the human rights that Kim Beazley insisted on when the Liberal government sought the opposition's support when the Pacific solution was introduced. It is difficult to believe that some of the Left who proclaimed such strong support for human rights and values can ask us in Australia to turn our backs. We will send 800 people under the government's proposal to Malaysia, unprocessed with no guarantees on their futures at all. In return we will get 4,000 people who undoubtedly will deserve a new chance in Australia. But there is a system already for them to come into Australia. This is a bridge too far. I told you it was difficult enough in the first place for me to support the old policy, but this asks us to go much further and make the world a harder place. I support the amendments.

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