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

Perhaps I will take up the last few comments that the minister made in his answer in terms of that accusation of 1,200 people dying on Labor's watch. I would also make the point that more than 650 people perished after the coalition teamed up with the Greens to see that the Malaysian arrangement which had been negotiated never came to pass. That was an arrangement which would have seen hundreds of people returned—in effect, hundreds of people turned around. You have here a government which claims that the only step that was ever taken which made a difference to the flow of asylum seeker vessels was their policy of turnbacks. If turning people around is what has made the difference then by the government's own logic, had they supported Malaysia more than two years ago, this all would have been brought to an end much earlier. But what we see from this government in this area of policy is always a rush to politics ahead of policy.

I also say that the minister made the observation that a question was not asked of him during question time today in respect of whether or not he still stood by his comments of last week, when he denied that any money was paid to people smugglers. I am not sure it would have made any difference if a question had been asked of him during question time; when I have asked the question of him tonight, he has resolutely failed to answer it. In fact, he went absolutely nowhere near it. So asking questions of this minister rarely yields a straight answer.

As the minister has sought to invoke generals Campbell and Bottrell, I also place on record that they are both fine servicemen who have made an enormous contribution to this country in every role that they have performed. We have nothing but the highest admiration for the work that they have done, and nothing that we have ever said would seek to impugn the work that General Campbell and General Bottrell have done. I think it is particularly appropriate that that gets raised in this context.

On another matter, I do want to raise the question of the proposed citizenship legislation and ask the minister when he intends to introduce a bill and when he intends to talk to the opposition about it. This is a proposition which was first put into the public domain by the government more than a year ago when then Minister Morrison raised the prospect of stripping dual citizens who had been engaged in terrorist activities.

From the point of view of the Labor Party, we do think that there is a principle which is contained in the act right now which sees that, if somebody does take up arms against Australia, their citizenship is cancelled. That is in the construct of a traditional state-on-state fight. We think it is appropriate that that be updated to take into account a phenomenon such as ISIS, along with making sure that people are not rendered stateless. We have made that clear. But the only document we have seen from the government is a leaked question time brief in which there are eight key points—three of which are about the Labor Party. The phrase 'national security' does not appear among them at all. It seems to us that the focus from the government's point of view is, again, much more around politics than what is a critically important piece of policy.

We see a government that is utterly divided both in its cabinet and its party room. We saw the minister, I imagine, take legislation to the cabinet and get rolled. We then saw his predecessor come out and try to clean up with a compromise proposal. We have seen 40 backbenchers petition the Prime Minister and, in a sense, stand over the cabinet to act in a particular way. Then we have seen Senator Cory Bernardi from the other place try and inject himself into this whole debate almost as the voice of reason—which just shows that we are absolutely looking through the looking glass when it comes to this whole episode.

Where that leaves us, though, is with government members scrapping, like kids in the schoolyard, around a profound piece of legislation. It is hard to think of a more important piece of legislation for any country than the legislation that provides for its citizenry. There is nothing more important—it is a paramount obligation—than that a government provide for the safety of its citizenry. In respect of both of these, we see a government which is treating national security with contempt and treating the Citizenship Act with contempt. The question of the minister is simply this: when are we going to see a bill and when are we going to get briefed on it?

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