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

We are debating this bill about consolidating maritime powers at a time when the front-line men and women of Australian Customs and Border Protection Command and their naval colleagues are operating at absolute breaking point. Both the personnel and the boats in which they operate, because of the government's failure to secure our borders, are operating beyond reasonable demands. I would hope that the House would bear in mind our responsibilities to these men and women in particular and make sure that this bill does not create any further hardships for them. I want to go to an issue that may be within this bill later on in my speech.

What we do know is that we had a system of robust border protection instituted well over a decade ago by the previous government. That system has been completely degraded since the government changed in 2007 and the consequences for the men and women who protect our borders have been enormous. They have been forced to operate at a completely unsustainable operational tempo. If you go and speak to those officers, their frustration about the circumstances in which they have been placed by this government is obvious for everyone to see.

We are debating this bill at a time when the climate for people smugglers has been far too friendly. Clearly this is an issue that the parliament has been debating. We debated it last week and the government took a step in the right direction by finally relenting in its opposition to offshore processing on Manus and Nauru. But our great concern in the opposition—and we would like to see these measures work but we are concerned that they will not—is that the measure that was taken last week just does not go far enough.

It only adopts one plank of the three planks of the opposition's policy, which we believe very firmly needs to be implemented if we are going to bring the curtain down on a very shameful period in Australia's border protection policy. Over 22½ thousand people have arrived illegally with all the enormous consequences for us as a nation that flow on from that fact.

Events occurred last week—that is, the use of two merchant vessels to pick up asylum seekers who had made a distress call—and the issues that arose as a result of these events need to be aired in this debate. The distress call was taken by the Australian Maritime Safety Authority, and merchant vessels went to the aid of those people. In the case of the MV Parsifal, what happened then is deeply disturbing. This merchant ship rescued a boatload of asylum seekers; apparently they were 44 nautical miles from Indonesia. The minister then informed the public on Sky News that after this boat went to the aid of these people—as is required under the International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea, and to the credit of the crew of the boat—the captain of the vessel, which was on its way to Singapore, fulfilled his obligations. At the request of the Australian authorities he picked up the people who had called for distress, and under any circumstances he was perfectly entitled—and should have been able—to continue to his destination once he had fulfilled his obligations to rescue people and take the people he picked up to the nearest place of safety, which is generally understood to be the nearest port. The captain, as was his right, determined that he was going to continue on his voyage to Singapore. The minister informed us on Sky News that the boatload of asylum seekers then threatened violence and became very aggressive and insisted that the boat turn around and deliver them to Christmas Island. The captain decided that the risk to his crew was too great and acquiesced to the request of those asylum seekers to come to Australia.

This is completely and utterly unacceptable. You wonder why the government was prepared to acquiesce. A merchant vessel went and fulfilled its duty to pick people up when they were in apparent distress and the people, who you would think would be grateful for being rescued by a merchant vessel, then turned on the captain and the officers of the merchant vessel and insisted they come to Australia. This situation is completely and utterly out of control. It is exactly the definition of piracy—using violence to take a ship off the course on which it is supposed to be going. It is not acceptable that potential acts of piracy go unpunished by the Australian government, and it is not acceptable that merchant vessels that go to the aid of people in distress have to fear for their own safety from the people they have picked up and who then find themselves in this apparently life-threatening situation.

The problem is that the Labor government never thinks through the consequences of its actions. This boat was well within the Indonesian search-and-rescue zone and very close to Indonesia itself, yet the government was prepared to acquiesce to the asylum seekers' desire to come to Australia. You wonder how far this policy would go. What are the territorial limits of the Australian government's acceptance of people's desire to come to Australia? What if they had been north of Indonesia? Would they have been allowed to say 'we are going to come to Australia', and the Australian government is going to do nothing about it? What if it was a vessel that had left Sri Lanka and was off the coast of India and was picked up by a passing merchant vessel and they insisted that they come to Australia? Would they be allowed to come to Australia in such circumstances? Clearly the government does not think through the sorts of decisions that it makes.

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