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

I did not say anything of the sort. This is the ludicrous misrepresentation that we get from a government that do not understand the implications of the policy decisions that they have taken. They still refuse to admit that it was those policy decisions that have led Australia down this blind alley—with over 30,000 people arriving here illegally on over 500 boats—from a problem that was solved when they came to office. The reason that we are dealing with it again is specifically because of the Labor Party's misguided policies. The reason that they are not going to be able to deal with it now is that, since they took those policy decisions of August 2008 that reinvigorated people smuggling, they have had a whole series of policy prescriptions, none of which they have been able to implement effectively, all of which they have announced and then either been unable to implement or not had the resolve to implement.

This is why we say now that it is the Labor Party themselves that are the obstacle for us to get any resolution to this issue. Even if the Labor Party were to come up with another policy tomorrow—and for all we know that is possible—why would the criminal gangs of people smugglers, who have been benefiting from the failed policies that the government have been pursuing since they came to office, take them remotely seriously when they say that they are going to do something differently to attack the people-smuggling trade?

We have heard it all before, as have the people smugglers, who are sophisticated enough to understand the implications of the policy debate here in Australia. These fateful decisions were taken in August 2008. The abolition of the Pacific solution and the abolition of temporary protection visas were the policies that allowed the people-smuggling trade to once again emerge, and this is why we have been inundated with illegal boat arrivals ever since.

But the misguided policies that were taken by the Labor Party have been compounded every time they have dealt with this issue. They reinvigorated the people-smuggling trade, and, when the people smugglers started sending people down to Australia illegally, the government initially denied that they had a problem. They denied that this was a real issue. They subsequently pinned it on international factors. We had minister after minister roll up to the dispatch box in this place and say: 'Well, it's got nothing to do with us. It's a turbulent international environment and that means people are going to seek to come here illegally.' They have now abandoned that excuse too.

Of course, one of the reasons the now Prime Minister Julia Gillard dispatched the former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd was his inability, as she saw it, to deal with the border protection crisis. By the time the government approached the 2010 election, they knew they had a political problem on their hands, so they did re-embrace something that they had been vilifying for a long time, and that is a regional processing centre. They said they were going to put a regional processing centre on the island nation of East Timor. They did so without doing any homework. It was announced as part of the Labor Party's policy platform for that election. They did not do their due diligence with the East Timorese government, who were taken by surprise by this announcement. Subsequently, that announcement was completely dead on arrival. They continued to push it as though it was somehow a live issue, as though somehow the East Timorese were considering it, to the detriment of actually coming up with an answer to this problem.

Finally, they faced reality and abandoned that, and they subsequently came up with this Malaysia people swap arrangement. The minister, as you heard, was going on about how, if we were to allow them to do the Malaysia people swap, this would somehow contribute to stopping people smuggling. He neglects to mention a few very salient points about that arrangement. Firstly, Malaysia is not a signatory to the United Nations Convention relating to the Status of Refugees, and therefore, if you were to send people there for processing, they would not be subject to the sorts of safeguards that we would expect them to be subject to. Secondly, and I think very importantly—and this is often lost in this debate—is that the arrangement that the Labor Party negotiated with Malaysia was a 4,000-for-800 people swap, so we were only going to send a maximum of 800 people to be processed there. In the context of illegal arrivals at the moment, that is about a week and a half of illegal arrivals—and they say that somehow this is going to be the silver bullet that gets people smugglers to take them seriously for once! The Malaysia arrangement was never going to do that. It is a flawed arrangement from our perspective because it does not provide the protections that we would expect, and it certainly does not provide the scale that is the result of the Labor Party's failed border protection policies.

There have been subsequent positions that the government has taken—and it would be very difficult for me to list them all. I am not sure that even Labor backbenchers or ministers can keep up with all the iterations of the Labor Party's border protection policies over the past five years. What we can say categorically about them, though, is that every single one of them has failed to do anything to put a dent in people smuggling. Even the announcement of going back for offshore processing in Nauru and Manus, which was a step in the right direction, has done nothing but accelerate the rate of illegal arrivals. Indeed, 25 per cent of the 30,000 people that have been smuggled here illegally under this government have come since that announcement was made on 13 August.

We can only conclude that the problem is now not the policies; it is the Labor Party themselves. They cannot now credibly come into this parliament or go outside this parliament and say, 'We've now got a new idea for something that's going to close down people smuggling,' because why would anybody, let alone the people smugglers, take them seriously when they have had such a litany of failure on this issue and, of course, it was their policies that started this issue in the first place?

See this speech in context