Scott Morrison (Cook, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Immigration and Citizenship) Share this | Hansard source

The immigration minister has his hands in the pockets of Australian taxpayers again. I note that, once again, the minister is not in the chamber today to respond to this matter of public importance. Once again he has resumed his global search for Captain Emad out there beyond this place and he has sent his deputy the Minister for Home Affairs, my friend and colleague the member for Blaxland. I look forward to his contribution, but I would really like it if the minister for immigration would stand in this place for once and actually answer for the accountability of his public policy failings, because that is the subject of this matter of public importance debate today.

This minister has run out of money again. He came into this place yesterday and asked for another $1.7 billion from Australian taxpayers when he presented an Orwellianly titled appropriation bill to fund the implementation of the Houston report. Of the $1.7 billion in that appropriation bill, $1.3 billion was for the increase in the number of arrivals this year in excess of the government's estimate back in May. That is a misrepresentation, I think, to the Australian people, as I referred to earlier today, about the purposes for which this minister is seeking more money. This minister has run out of money because he has failed on our borders like no immigration minister ever before. His record of failure is without peer when it comes to these matters.

The budget will be blown on boats alone when it comes to the surplus. If the government want to know where their surplus is, they will find it as it recedes into the night on the boats that come to this country on a more than daily basis. They will find that surplus frittered away in detention centres at Christmas Island, at Curtin near Derby, up near Weipa in North Queensland and on Nauru as well. That is where the surplus has gone. This surplus will disappear into the night simply on the issue of boat blow-outs on our border alone. This surplus will prove more elusive to the government than Captain Emad when it comes to accounting for the significant blow-outs in costs they have occurred as a result of their budget failures.

The blow-outs on our borders will blow out the budget to the tune of $2.7 billion this year. That is a 2,000 per cent increase on what the government had put in its budget annually in 2009-10—a 2,000 per cent increase. Before MYEFO the blow-out was $4.9 billion over three years; today that blow-out over four years is $6.6 billion. That is the price of border failure in financial terms from this government.

But the government are still saying they are going to achieve a $1.2 billion surplus. In this place yesterday we asked the Prime Minister, as we have asked the minister each day, to explain what the new figure in the budget is based on. How many people are they expecting to turn up this year? In the budget they said it would be 450 per month. That was based on the 30-month average, which is the standing policy of the department of immigration and the department of finance when estimating the number of arrivals they anticipate in a given year. The Prime Minister refused to answer the question. The minister has refused the opportunity to respond to this question every time he has stepped up to a microphone anywhere in this country.

But I am going to help the minister out. On the 30-month average that has been adopted by the department, the 30-month average to the end of September is 713 arrivals per month. If this budget is based on 713 arrivals per month, they are out by a country mile because we are averaging 2,075 per month every month this year. So go the boats, so goes the surplus, and the government will never deliver a surplus so long as they cannot control our border. If they cannot control the border, they cannot control the budget. We have seen the figures blow out month after month, year after year, totalling a massive $6.6 billion over four years and out into the estimates. This is a history of failure that knows no peer.

That $1.7 billion included $268 million for the building of the Nauru and Manus Island facilities. I noted earlier today that, in January of this year, when the government said, 'We're opposed to building Nauru,' they said it would cost $422,000 per bed. That is what they said in January, when they did not want to do it. Now they are doing it—guess what? It costs $126,000 per bed. The thing I have learnt about the government is that they will demonise border policies that were successful under the coalition until the day they adopt them. That is what has happened here. They have adopted the Nauru and Manus Island policies. It took them years and they had to be dragged kicking and screaming to the table. We welcome that, but they have a long, long way to go. That is why the boats keep coming—because the government refuse to restore the full measures that worked under the Howard government.

We also know that there was a bill introduced today which seeks to effectively excise the Australian mainland from the migration zone. It is the same bill that came into this place in 2006. The member for Berowra will remember that well and he will remember the debates, I am sure. In those debates, it was said that this measure was 'a stain on our national character' and that it offended decency, by our now minister for immigration; that it was shameful and xenophobic, by the former Leader of the Opposition, Mr Crean; and that it was lunacy, indecent, inhumane and gutless, by another current minister. Yet today they bring it into the House and vote for it.

You can be confident that those who sit on this side of the House will vote in a way that is consistent with the way they have voted before on these matters. On that side of the House, all you have is hypocrisy, and that hypocrisy is the stain that sits on this government when it comes to its failures on borders and the stain it has put on the budget with the blow-outs that know no peer. This is a government that continues to make it up as it goes along when it comes to our borders. This is a government that has failed in every respect to come to terms with the magnitude of the error of its decision to abolish the policies that worked.

The 'stain on our national character' today is not what the now minister for immigration said all those years ago in 2006—and, looking back on representations of ourselves six years ago, we have all weathered a bit since then. What is clear is that the real stain on the national character is the one that has been inflicted by the government in relation to our borders. The stain that marks every member that sits opposite is the stain of cost, chaos and tragedy when it comes to their failures on our borders. It is the stain of over 28,000 people turning up on over 480 vessels; the stain of those who have been lost at sea; the stain of denying protection visas to over 8,000 people in this country because of this government's policies—

Mr Danby interjecting—

because they did not come on a boat.

Mr Danby interjecting—

That is the stain that the member for Melbourne Ports will have to explain to his electorate.

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