Warren Snowdon (Lingiari, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for External Territories) Share this | Hansard source

It is a great pleasure for me to be here, and to see you sitting in the chair, Mr Acting Deputy Speaker Broadbent. I don't know about the bloke who just spoke though! Nevertheless, I respect the right of the member for Fadden to express his view. I do not have to agree with him, and I do not.

I want to make some observations, though, about history. You see, I have been here a fair while and I well recall events in this place from the late eighties around immigration, the Tampa and the children overboard and then subsequent events leading up to today. What I recall most vividly—and I heard the member for Grey extolling the virtues of former Prime Minister John Howard—to their great shame and everlasting disgrace, is the children overboard. Do you remember the children overboard? I do. You will remember HMAS Adelaidethe ship that was used—and its personnel rescuing people because their vessel had sunk. That was not what the parliament was told and that was not what the people of Australia were told.

Do you remember who the Minister for Defence was at the time? It was Mr Reith. Do you remember him and the Prime Minister showing a photograph of a person on a boat holding up a child and saying that this was about throwing children overboard? That was a lie that I was able to expose. How was I able to expose it? I exposed it accidently. I got handed a disc with 348 photographs of the events of that day taken by Navy personnel which demonstrated absolutely clearly that there were no children thrown overboard. What this was about was people seeking to save their children as the result of a vessel sinking. To their absolute disgrace, the government used it politically to demonize those people seeking to come to this place by sea, accused them of wanting to kill their children as a matter of blackmailing the community into saying, 'Well, let's bring them in,' when, in fact, what we saw where the courageous efforts of Australian naval personnel rescuing people who were dying as a result of a vessel sinking.

None of us in this place, least of all me—Christmas Island, after all, being part of my electorate—sanctions people coming here by sea illegally; none of us. And to think that the government could, as they continually do on a daily basis, accuse the opposition of being soft on people smugglers, that somehow we want to assist people smugglers to restart their nefarious trade to provide the opportunity for young people, older people and children to die at sea yet again, is an absolute insult and an insult to all Australians. I recall the days after the most recent tragedy when we were in government and my friend, Mr O'Connor—who was then the minister responsible—was on Christmas Island and saw the events that happened that day. In the weeks that followed I was there at memorial services. No-one—no-one—can get over the sadness of those events. To have the government try and perpetrate the perfidious lie that somehow we on this side of the parliament, by our actions in opposing this legislation, somehow or other assist people smugglers is to degrade the public debate in this country.

I am sorry, Mr Acting Deputy Speaker; I know what a good person you are. But, unfortunately, it is in the DNA of some in your party to use these events for gross political purposes, knowing factually and truthfully that what they are representing is wrong. Yesterday, the debate in the parliament during question time was most unedifying. The Minister for Immigration and Border Protection was grandstanding—as he is wont to do—and making gross accusations that he knows to be false, supported by the Prime Minister, who came to this place with the expectation of the Australian community that he was somehow or other different when he is not. He is just the same. Threatened or whatever by people in his own party over his leadership, he sinks to the lowest-common denominator. We have seen that in the parliament time and time again.

Of course now we have the very, very unedifying spectacle of him being exposed by the former Prime Minister, Mr Rudd, over claims by the Prime Minister that he sought to beg the then Prime Minister, Mr Rudd, over the issue of asylum seekers. Mr Rudd refutes those assertions and makes it very clear that if there is a lie being told it is not by him but by the Prime Minister. That raises a spectacle which is, again, unedifying, but yet it demonstrates again that truth will not prevail in this place where people are seen to use people who are in this case, on Manus Island and on Nauru as political cannon fodder—because that is what is happening again.

Let us be very, very clear. On 19 July 2013 the former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd announced our policy—the then Labor policy—that would ensure that no asylum seeker who came by boat to Australia would ever settle in Australia. He said:

From now on, any asylum-seeker who arrives in Australia by boat will have no chance of being settled in Australia as refugees.

Our position on this piece of legislation is totally consistent with that claim—totally consistent. There is nothing in what we are saying about this current piece of legislation to put forward the proposition that somehow or another, should someone who is currently on Nauru or Manus seek and become a third-party national—in other words, they go to another country and become a citizen of that country—and then should they seek to come to Australia and settle they would not be allowed to. That is consistent. That is absolutely consistent with the proposition which was put then in 2013 by former Prime Minister Rudd.

What we are being told is that people who might want to come here on a tourist visa some time in the future, or to come and visit family sometime in the future, somehow or another equates to resettlement. No-one in this place understands that argument, because clearly it is wrong.

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