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

Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker, and I apologise for my indulgences taken while you were in the chair. There can be no greater threat to the nation's security than a political party that puts its short-term political interest ahead of the national interest. That is what we have seen from this opposition, who only a year ago came into this House and voted against giving the government the power to do the Malaysian transfer agreement. They sat in this House with the Greens party, over on that side of the chamber, and voted against giving the government the ability to implement the Malaysian transfer agreement that may have prevented people coming through regular maritime arrivals.

This has been a long debate. It has been going on since the seventies. In the seventies you had Mick Young and Ian Macphee—those two fine gentleman of this House—sit down, in the wake of the terrible war in Vietnam and in the wake of 1,700 boat people arriving on our shores, and come to an agreement to bring refugees to our country in a safe way. That was part of bipartisan consensus, and it was a great tribute to Mick Young. The Labor Party at the time could have played the same grubby, short-term politics that the opposition today play. We could have done that, but Mick Young didn't—and Ian Macphee didn't. In the eighties and the nineties the Hawke and Keating governments implemented agreements with countries from which asylum seekers had fled from, like China and the rest, to prevent such arrivals and they implemented mandatory detention. It was the Labor Party which implemented that. It was the Labor Party which first said that we should manage the borders in that way.

Now we come to the noughties, in particular 1999 and 2001. We often hear the opposition crowing, in a sanctimonious way, about how John Howard solved this issue but they neglect to tell you that it is an issue that they presided over. In 1999, when John Howard was Prime Minister, 3,700 people arrived by boat. In the year 2000, when John Howard was Prime Minister, 2,939 people arrived by boat. In 2001, 5,516 people arrived by boat. An issue was resolved on his watch that he presided over.

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