Richard Marles (Corio, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Immigration and Border Protection) Share this | Hansard source

Firstly, despite however many attempts the minister makes to play down the significance of the impact of the regional resettlement arrangement on the suite of measures which has reduced the flow of asylum seeker vessels, he cannot get past the simple fact that this is a policy which he and his government have continued to prosecute. It is a policy which, clearly, he agrees has a big impact. It is a policy in terms of offshore processing which never existed under the Howard government, and it was a policy that he criticised quite openly at the time that the agreement was actually made with PNG.

It may be an inconvenient truth for the minister but the figures are all there. When you look at the number of asylum seeker vessels that were coming to Australia, they reduced by 90 per cent from the time that the agreement was put in place within a couple of months and that number did not just persist for a couple of weeks; it persisted right through to 19 December. Prior to 19 December the government did not turn around a single boat. Prior to 19 December the government did not buy any fishing vessels, as they said they would do, in Indonesia. There was no substantive policy that was implemented by the government until 19 December and yet the decrease in the numbers as a result of the regional resettlement arrangement implemented by the former Labor government with PNG persisted.

The minister likes to talk about a blank page—that there was no ball to drop, that all we did was announce, that we did not 'negotiate', a word he used in relation to his efforts, as if we just magically out of thin air got an agreement with PNG. He described it as nothing other than an 'empty promise' by the former Prime Minister and by the former immigration minister. So I ask this question of the minister: given that it was an agreement with Papua New Guinea, to which Papua New Guinea was a party, and you have described this now as an 'empty promise', do you also then say that it was an empty promise on the part of the PNG Prime Minister?

Mr Morrison interjecting—

Oh, that is convenient. Even though it was an agreement between two parties. Do you say there was an empty promise on behalf of the PNG foreign minister and immigration minister?

Mr Morrison interjecting—

And therein lies the complete contradiction in the minister's own rhetoric here, because he is talking in relation to an agreement—a joint announcement between two parties, Australia and PNG—that one party did it as a hollow, empty promise but the other party, speaking at precisely the same time, Prime Minister, Foreign Minister and Attorney-General of PNG, was not. Both speaking at precisely the same time but there's was full of substance but ours was a hollow empty promise! That is, of course, ridiculous. This was an agreement that was negotiated between Australia and PNG that required significant diplomacy. There was an undertaking from PNG that was arrived at by virtue of this negotiation to resettle people in PNG. That was a breakthrough in terms of the relationship that Australia had with PNG or, for that matter, with any other country in the region. It totally changed the game in terms of asylum seekers coming to this country by boat. What it meant was that Australia was taken off the table, and Australia was taken off the table by virtue of an agreement that the former government negotiated with the PNG government. It was announced jointly, and you described that as 'an empty promise'. I would be interested to see how your counterparts in PNG would regard you in describing what they did then as being nothing other than 'an empty promise'.

That minister talked about temporary protection visas as being a critical part of his program in seeing an end to the flow of asylum seeker vessels. The question I have to the minister in relation to this is very simple: does the minister imagine, or does the minister contemplate, that it would be possible under his stewardship in this portfolio—under his government—that a visa would be offered to and asylum seeker coming to Australia by boat after 19 July last year or, indeed, at any point in the future? Do you say that any person who came after 19 July last year would be entitled to any visa to this country? Because if the answer to that is 'no', then it does not matter what you do or do not do to the cohort of 30,000 people who are here because Australia, by your own admission, has been taken off the table. So TPVs are clearly redundant. The minister has conceded that in his answer right now.

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