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

This bill makes a number of amendments to the Customs Act 1901 that relate to the import of restricted goods, customs controlled areas, cargo reporting and importing vessels, among other measures. Most of them are relatively technical, although there is a new offence that has been created through this act. I first want to put this bill in some context in relation to the way the government has treated the Australian Customs and Border Protection Service since the government changed in 2007. It is a sad fact that with Customs we have an agency that is being asked to bear the brunt of two very significant failures of the Labor government: firstly, the failure to protect our borders and, secondly, the failure to run fiscal policy properly and the astonishing waste of money that we have seen under this government since they came to office in 2007.

On border protection, I think 2012 was definitely the year when things went completely and utterly off the rails. That was the year the Labor Party embraced many different policies for their border protection regime, none of which have worked and all of which have resulted in further failure. In 2012, we saw 274 boats arrive illegally in Australia. They carried a record 17,270 people, which was more people in that one year—2012—than arrived under the whole term of the Howard government. That is the equivalent of 47 people a day arriving illegally on Labor's watch. I will put that into some context by mentioning other advanced democracies and the way they have responded to these issues. When 10 Chinese asylum seekers arrived in Darwin in March last year on their way to New Zealand to claim asylum, the response of the New Zealand government was to create a temporary protection visa category similar to what we previously had in this country before it was abolished by the Labor Party when they came to office. So we had a boat that did not even arrive in New Zealand—just the intent to get to New Zealand was enough to make the Key government change policy. The Harper government in Canada made similar changes to stop the flow of illegal boats arriving on their shores. The catalyst for that was the arrival of one boat containing asylum seekers from Sri Lanka that had come an enormous way, from Sri Lanka through to British Columbia. That boat—

See this speech in context