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

During question time, I get to sit just down there on the opposition front bench and I look up at the front bench of government. Quite frankly, it is hard not to feel a little terrified—because these are the people who brought Australia the pink batts fiasco. The Australian taxpayer paid for the government to put pink batts in people's roofs and then the Australian taxpayer paid for the government to take pink batts out of people's roofs. These are the people who brought us cash for clunkers. They brought us the carbon tax—something they promised they would not do—which is going to raise the cost of living for every Australian whilst doing absolutely nothing for the environment.

They brought us the live cattle export fiasco, where a Four Corners documentary actually stopped the boats; it stopped the boats going from Australian ports, supporting Australian famers, taking our cattle to our export markets. They brought us overpriced school halls that literally wasted billions of dollars. They brought us Fuelwatch and GroceryWatch. I could go on and on.

The truth is that we have a cabinet and wider ministry that do not seem to understand the impact of their decisions in the real world. When they look at an issue and make a decision, they do not understand how that is going to play out in the real world. Whether you blame this on the uniformity of their backgrounds or an outdated ideology, it does not matter. There is probably no more grievous example of their incompetence than their border protection fiasco. The cabinet surely looked at this from their view of the world and failed to understand how it would play in the real world. The tragedy of all of this is that they stuck to these outdated and wrong policies in the face of clear and mounting evidence that they had failed spectacularly. They refused to acknowledge from 2008 onwards that their failed policies had emboldened and facilitated people smugglers.

People smugglers are very vicious criminals. I have heard government ministers say this recently; they did not say it for a long time. People smugglers see a situation that we might consider with compassion as a business opportunity. They see our natural desire to help vulnerable people as a weakness that they can exploit and make millions of dollars off, on the back of human misery. Border protection is not an area where our good deeds go unpunished, and this is apparent from what has happened since Labor came to office.

The arrival of illegal boats in Australia is not a new issue. We have been facing it for decades to a greater or lesser degree. Over a decade ago, we faced a big spike in people-smuggling and illegal arrivals. Of course, the more people succeed in coming illegally, the more people will follow in their wake. So, around the turn of the last decade, as more people were successfully smuggled here, even more people followed, until the then Howard government decided that they had to take action. They could not accept this loss of control over Australia's immigration system and they decided that they were going to retain control over who came to Australia.

The Howard government pursued a suite of policies that, it is fair to say, were controversial within the community. Different Australians had different views about the way we should approach this problem. But what I think is absolutely clear is that they were 100 per cent effective in achieving the aim that was set out for them—that is, they stopped people-smuggling. You cannot argue with that as an empirical fact. From the implementation of those policies in 2001, over the years 2002 to 2008, while those policies remained in place, we had on average three boat arrivals per year. When the government changed in 2007, there were four people in the detention centre at Christmas Island; there are now a couple of thousand. Those policies inarguably achieved the goal that we had, which was to stop people-smuggling.

When the Howard government pursued those policies, they were roundly criticised by the then Labor opposition. They were criticised by the now Prime Minister, who was their immigration spokesperson, who said of the Pacific solution that it would never work and that it was inconceivable that a decade later we would be processing people on Nauru. Of course, a decade later, it is the Labor Party, her own government, that have introduced legislation to process people on Nauru. This goes to show that, in pursuing policies to stop people-smuggling that worked but that were vilified and criticised by the Labor Party, we were right. Our policies to stop people-smuggling worked; they stopped it dead. They were controversial but they achieved what we needed them to achieve.

Those policies were not just related to offshore processing on Nauru. They involved two other very important planks: turning the boats back around when it was safe and appropriate to do so, and a form of temporary protection visa that denied people smugglers the ability to sell what they are selling, which is permanent residence in Australia. Those policies, combined with offshore processing, made up the suite of policies that worked. The problem with the current government's approach is that they have embraced just one leg of that three-legged approach, and these half-measures are clearly not deterring people smugglers, because they are going for another record month in September, on the back of record months for illegal arrivals in July and August. The reason for this is that the Labor Party just do not have any credibility after announcing another policy U-turn on border protection. They have a history of not understanding the consequences of their policies when they make them.

It was their abolition of the Pacific solution that led to this crisis in the first place. That happened in 2008. The then minister, who astonishingly still sits in the cabinet, said it was his proudest day in politics. He maintains that position even in the face of the evidence we now have that it directly resulted in invigorated people-smuggling, which led to hundreds of deaths and enormous consequences for Australia and the Australian taxpayer. The abolition of the Howard government's Pacific solution was followed, inevitably, by an enormous spike in people-smuggling. It started slowly at first, but the more success people-smugglers had the more people sought to be smuggled down here, and so it increased. It increased in 2009. It increased in 2010. It increased in 2011.

During that time, the Labor Party refused to acknowledge that it was their policies that had created these enormous pull factors for Australia. They sought to blame everything else, despite the evidence that it was this change in policy that had led to people-smugglers bringing literally thousands of people here. They said: 'It's not our fault; it's the international situation, it's push factors. There's nothing we can do.' In the face of mounting evidence to the contrary, they stuck to those failed policies. But then, as the Australian people decided that they really could not stomach the fact that we were no longer in control of our immigration system, the government realised they had a political problem on their hands and they started doing a series of backflips.

They were resolutely opposed to offshore processing. They were then resolutely opposed to offshore processing in countries that had not signed the UN Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees. Yet, during the 2010 election campaign, when they realised that border protection was one of their primary political problems, they came up with what can now only be called the 'Malaysia fiasco', whereby they did a five-for-one people swap—800 people for 4,000. Wouldn't you want to play poker with these guys? Ultimately it was struck down by the High Court, yet over a year later they still cling to this failed policy.

Prior to that, during the 2010 election it was the East Timor arrangement that they championed, one that was never going to fly, because the East Timorese were never going to wear it. If the Prime Minister had actually picked up the phone and spoken to the government of East Timor, she might have been aware of that.

The truth is that the Labor Party has no credibility on this. That is why, when they make the announcement that people now run the risk of being sent to Nauru, nobody takes them seriously. They do not have credibility. If they were serious, they would use every weapon available in their arsenal to send the message to people smugglers that this time it is different, that now offshore processing will take place on Nauru or in PNG, if it is available, that there is a return to temporary protection visas and turning the boats around when it is safe and appropriate to do so. Only this suite of policies has worked in the past and only this suite of policies will work to achieve the results we need, which is to squash people-smuggling.

See this speech in context