Sharman Stone (Murray, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Immigration and Citizenship) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Acting Prime Minister. I refer her to a press release which she issued on 23 April 2003, when she was shadow immigration spokesman, and I quote her:

Another boat on the way. Another policy failure.

Given 41 boats carrying nearly 2,000 people have arrived in Australian waters since the Rudd government announced its changes to our border protection policies, will the Acting Prime Minister confirm that, by her own criteria, the government’s changes to immigration law represent a massive policy failure?

Julia Gillard (Lalor, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Prime Minister) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the shadow minister for her question. I presume that at the bottom of all of this is the opposition’s view that it is going to land a major political blow if somehow it can suggest it agrees with me. It is a very unusual thing for an opposition to seek to get political advantage by agreeing with the Deputy Prime Minister of the alternative political party and the government. But such is the convoluted logic the opposition has got itself into in these desperate days. I thank the shadow minister for watching the Laurie Oakes interview on Sunday. I am sure he is very grateful for her coming up in the viewer attendance numbers as well.

I say to the shadow minister that one of the things that have been debated during this nation’s various debates about asylum seeking and refugees is how you deal with the push factors that get people on the move and what one should do in relation to domestic policy settings. I say to the shadow minister—and I take her again to some inconvenient facts for her but things I think she should be recognising in this debate—that statistics from the UNHCR about the number of people on the move and the number of people looking for asylum—

Sharman Stone (Murray, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Immigration and Citizenship) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Mr Speaker, I raise a point of order obviously on relevance. The question was about policy failure in relation—

Harry Jenkins (Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Order! The member for Murray will resume her seat.

Julia Gillard (Lalor, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Prime Minister) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I know that as soon as I say the word ‘fact’ someone from the opposition—Pavlov’s dog style—needs to move a point of order because they do not want people to know the facts of this debate. The UNHCR facts are as follows: asylum seeker applications have increased by 28 per cent and the number of refugees returning home voluntarily decreased by 17 per cent compared to the previous year. Clearly, from those UNHCR statistics push factors are on the rise. On the question of assessing domestic policy settings and the implications of those domestic policy settings on the number of arrivals, I refer her to the analysis of her own colleague the member for Kooyong. Maybe when question time is at its conclusion she can go and have a cup of tea with him and talk this through with him in detail. But I think the shadow minister would have to acknowledge, in the words of the member for Kooyong:

In the five years before the introduction of temporary protection visas, there were 3,103 boat arrivals. In the five years after, boat arrivals increased to more than 11,000.

How does the shadow minister put the case that this government’s moving away from the TPV system has made a difference to boat arrivals when those statistics tell a story that is the complete reverse. What I would like the shadow minister to acknowledge—what her colleague the member for Kooyong acknowledges and what the UNHCR is chronicling for us—is that there are factors that get people on the move. The significant factor in our region at the moment is the aftermath of the civil war in Sri Lanka and no amount of manipulation of the truth by the shadow minister or the Leader of the Opposition is going to wish that fact away.

Harry Jenkins (Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Before giving the call to the member for Bendigo, I say to the member for Berowra that as the Father of the House he knows better than to try to interject, and I expect him to show some self-discipline.