Nick Champion (Wakefield, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is interesting listening to the member for Stirling. You would have thought those opposite had opposed our changes in 2007 but they did not oppose them in the Senate. The shadow minister at the time, Sharman Stone, supported them. The Liberal Party supported those changes.

Again, those opposite complain about the Malaysian transfer agreement but they refused to vote for it in this parliament. When that bill passed this House, they were running around this place offering amendments to other members, offering an increase in the humanitarian intake to 20,000—that subsequently became a recommendation of the Houston report—and now they are backing away from that. We had the member for Cook ask why we have not cooperated with the Sri Lankan navy to turn around boats on the high sea and then we had the member for Stirling come in and talk about the processing of Sri Lankan claimants. It is a very interesting catalogue of inconsistencies that the opposition bring up.

There are inconsistencies in this MPI. Those opposite talk about the full suite of policies. But in most of their MPI speeches they ignored the Houston report and its 22 recommendations. There was barely a mention of those recommendations. You hear government ministers talking about this report in great detail, going through it recommendation by recommendation. Indeed, the Labor Party and this government, the Gillard government, are the only people who are committed to the full implementation of those recommendations. The Greens are not committed; they want to cherry-pick the recommendations. The Liberals are not committed; they also want to cherry-pick the recommendations. The reason they want to cherry-pick the recommendations is they want the toxic debate that has gone on in this country for a decade to continue. The reason they want that is because they are interested in the politics of this issue and not in the policy. They have always been interested in politics and not in policy. That is why they are so inconsistent, so consistently inconsistent.

Day by day, week by week, we see the Liberals are desperate in the face of a fading primary vote that has been inflated over time by exaggeration and negativity—and that is all that was keeping it afloat—and they now are the subject of the public's considered judgement on that exaggeration and that negativity, and the air is slowly coming out of that balloon. The Leader of the Opposition is desperately floundering about half hiding and half seeking a new negative campaign to run. The member of the Cook just wants to reheat the old negative campaign, this old favourite of the Liberal Party, inconsistently nitpicking from day to day, undermining the government and the Australian national interest. That is why we see him out there—even though we have had the second plane land in Nauru and even though we have had offshore processing begin—day by day in the doorstops, in front of the cameras, basically nitpicking and seeking to send a different message than the Houston report sends or the government wants to send to people smugglers.

We know that this undermines the national interest, undermines the message of the Houston report, undermines parliamentary legislation and undermines the consistent message: do not come by boat, do not risk your life, do not pay a people smuggler. We know the terrible results of some of the accidents on the high sea. We have seen the terrible results. We know what is at stake: people's lives are at stake. We know the danger our ADF personnel put themselves in when trying to deal with this issue.

And yet the member for Cook is out still there, applying himself to this issue with only two political aims—not a policy aim but just political aims: votes for the Liberal Party—and his other hand firmly clasping his own leadership baton. We know that is what it is all about. It is about this sort of contest to replace Abbott at some point in the future. We know that it is all about getting his profile up. And he uses this terrible issue as an incense burner to his party's desperate desire for primary votes, its desperate thirst for office. He uses it as an incense burner to his own vanity—and what a dark vanity it is, that he would undermine the national interest in this way.

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