Roger Price (Chifley, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question without notice is to the Prime Minister. Can the Prime Minister explain why, when Indonesia will not change its terror laws to keep Abu Bakar Bashir in jail, he will change our immigration laws to keep Indonesians happy?

John Howard (Bennelong, Liberal Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

We are changing our laws to make them stronger in Australia’s national interest. I am very interested indeed that the Chief Opposition Whip should have asked this question. It took my mind back to the latter months of 2001, when the current Leader of the Opposition was also then Leader of the Opposition and he was highly critical of the anti-people-smuggling policies of my government. One of the strongest arguments he advanced was, in a nutshell, that in order to solve this problem you had to have total cooperation with Indonesia. The strongest possible argument was that we should make sure that we cooperated with Indonesia. This is what the Leader of the Opposition then said:

Effective measures to combat people-smuggling require cooperation with neighbouring countries that are serving as transit routes for illegal people movement to Australia. People-smuggling poses a significant national security problem not only for Australia but also for our neighbours, including Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines.

This is what he went on to say:

A Labor government will pursue the issue of people-smuggling with the highest levels of the Indonesian government. We will do so in the context of a wholehearted commitment to build a mutually beneficial relationship with the new Indonesia.

In essence, what the Leader of the Opposition was saying then was in fact true—that is, in order to stop people-smuggling you need the cooperation of Indonesia. Everything that we have done has been designed to maintain that cooperation. But to suggest that that is an exercise in anything other than the sovereignty of this country is, to borrow a phrase used by the Leader of the Opposition earlier, plainly ludicrous.