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

and maybe the minister will be able to tell us where Captain Emad is today, given that on the last few occasions he has been out searching!

This is a serious matter—five years of failure that have no peer. Earlier in this place today we were debating, as we continue to debate, the excision bill that is currently before the parliament. Back in 2006, it was the current Minister for Immigration and Citizenship who described that bill, should it be passed, as 'a stain on our national character'. One thing that is very clear is that the only stain is on that side of the House for their failure to put in place effective border protection measures over the last five years. In that 2006 speech, the minister for immigration said that he thought amending the bill was 'like putting lipstick on a pig'. The government's hypocrisy is such that it is now coming into this place trying to use that very pig, as the minister described it, to try and save their own political bacon—because it is this government, as it creeps from failure to backflip on this issue, that continues to repeat every single day it is in office the failures that have put Australia in such an adverse position when it comes to our borders. Labor's failures on our borders are without peer and, without any doubt, they have exceeded our worst expectations. Five years of failure, rising costs, chaos, tragedy and now hypocrisy on a grand scale: all of this has been on Labor's watch.

I refer now to page 2 of the Immigration Detention Statistics Summary of 23 November 2007, the day before the federal election of that year. When the Howard government left office in November 2007, the number of people who had arrived illegally in Australia by boat, described in here as 'unauthorised boat arrivals', who were in any form of detention—including community detention, alternative temporary detention in the community, immigration detention centres, residential housing and immigration transit accommodation, all of these places—was four. Four.

Opposition members: Four!

Four. You could count the number of people who had arrived illegally by boat who were in any form of detention, going through processing, on less than one hand. There were four. I seek leave to table the document.

Leave granted.

I turn now to the Immigration Detention Statistics Summary for 30 September 2012, the most recent that the government has published. It is a much bigger report this time; it goes for far more pages—there is a lot more to report. Going to page 5 of that report, the number of people in any of those forms of detention I just referred to who had arrived illegally by boat as of 30 September 2012 was 8,987. Now, that does not include the 4,000 or thereabouts we estimate are on bridging visas and out in the community, following the government's decision on 25 November last year; and it does not include the 4,000 that have turned up since that report was published. So it has gone from just four people to, we estimate now—including those inside and outside detention—over 12,000. If those metrics do not speak of policy failure, then I do not know what does.

There is a very interesting chart in that report. It is a chart showing the population in immigration detention since January 1990. If you want to know what lift-off looks like, this is what it looks like. When you get to January 2009, once the effects of the government's decision to abolish the Howard government measures took place, you get lift-off when it comes to illegal boat arrivals. You get lift-off. That graph is included in the earlier reports, Madam Speaker, and I seek leave to table that report of 30 September 2012.

Leave granted.

We have had to produce that result. Over 30,000 people have arrived on illegal boats since this government abolished the effective policies of the Howard government. That is a large number of people. The numbers that we might take under our immigration program may be relatively smaller, but 30,000 people is a lot of people. To give people an idea of how many people that might be: it is bigger than a town like Alice, as I said on the weekend; it is bigger than Albany; it is bigger than Busselton, as the member behind me mentioned; it is 1½ times the size of Goulburn; it is bigger than the city of Warrnambool; it is bigger than Nowra-Bomaderry, where I was last week; it is bigger than Mount Gambier; it is bigger than Gawler; it is bigger than Victor Harbor.

If you want to get another idea of how many people have turned up, then maybe the member for Lindsay can assist. The next time the member for Lindsay, the commander, is piped aboard the Panthers' stadium out there in Penrith, he should know that the number of people who have arrived on illegal boats under the watch of the government of which he has been a part is 1½ times the number of people you can put into the Panthers' stadium; it is 1½ times the number that you can put into the Sharks' stadium, in my own electorate of Cronulla; it is 1½ times the number you can put into Parramatta Stadium. For any major rugby league ground you go to, whether in New South Wales or Queensland, you will find that it is 1½ times the number you can put in it. It is more than you can put into Canberra Stadium, not far from this place.

Thirty thousand is a significant number to have arrived. For the Howard government to achieve that, it would have taken half a millennium, in terms of the number of people that arrived in the last six years after the Howard government's effective border protection policies were put in place.

This is the record of the government's failure on our borders, and it is getting worse. It is not getting better, it is getting worse, because more than half of those arrivals have turned up since the beginning of this year. More than a third of them have turned up since 1 July this year. Remember: on 1 July this year, the Treasurer stood at that dispatch box and presented a budget which said that the average number of people he estimated arrived every month was 450. The average figure for this financial year is more than 2,000. If you were to use the methodology adopted by the Department of Immigration and Citizenship for when MYEFO would have updated that figure, the 30-month average, then the figure now underpinning the budget would be around 715 per month, which is less than half what is occurring, which means that this budget, if anyone ever doubted it in the first place, is blown, and they have blown it on boats alone.

The cost of these increases in arrivals is breathtaking. The blow-out alone over the last four years, going out over the forward estimates, is $6.6 billion, and that does not include the cost of increasing the refugee and humanitarian intake, which is the policy of this government, to 20,000, which is 25,000 extra places over the next four years at a cost of $1.3 billion and at a cost of more than $50,000 per place.

To give people some understanding of the rate of increase: in 2007-08, the cost of managing this issue was $85 million a year; in this year, not including capital costs, the cost will be $2.4 billion. This chart I am showing sets out—

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