Malcolm Turnbull (Wentworth, Liberal Party, Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is again to the Acting Prime Minister. I refer her to the government’s repeated assertions that the surge in boat arrivals to Australia is due to international push factors and to the fact that the UN High Commissioner for Refugees reports that the number of refugees has decreased from 9.9 million as at 31 December 2006 to 9.1 million at the end of 2008 and that in the first eight months of this year UNHCR figures show that the number of asylum applications has declined from the same period last year. I ask the Acting Prime Minister: why is the government trying to trick the Australian people with spin rather than admitting its policy failure has rolled out the red carpet to people smugglers?

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

I always find that it is best if public policy debates are informed by a few facts, and so the Leader of the Opposition perhaps might like to take notice of the following facts. In 2008 there was an 85 per cent increase in the number of Afghan asylum seekers claiming protection in industrialised countries worldwide—a fact the Leader of the Opposition might not like to acknowledge, but a fact nevertheless: an 85 per cent increase in the number of Afghan asylum seekers. At the same time, Sri Lanka has just emerged from a decades-long civil war which cost tens of thousands of lives, uprooted hundreds of thousands of Sri Lankans and left an economic divide between north and south and east and west.

Opposition Member:

Opposition member interjecting—

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

I have just heard the opposition interject that the war is over. Perhaps the member who interjected may like to consider this very sobering and tragic statistic. There are currently 250,000 Tamils from the north of Sri Lanka in camps for internally displaced people. The Tamil community in Sri Lanka feels marginalised and the hard work of postwar political reconciliation lies ahead. We understand that Sri Lanka faces an immense challenge in dealing with the legacy of this very bitter conflict. These are factors motivating people to seek to leave Sri Lanka, sometimes illegally.

On the question of the pull factors that the Leader of the Opposition referred to, these are the accurate statistics on the push factors—the things that are getting people to start moving. On an analysis of the pull factors, perhaps I can refer him to an article in the Sunday Age, by the member for Kooyong, entitled ‘Razor wire returns’. I have to say that I do not often agree with the member for Kooyong. In the time I have been in this place, since 1998, we have had some spectacular disagreements on the Joint Committee of Public Accounts and Audit and on other matters. But I refer the Leader of the Opposition to this article and I would ask him to reflect on it before he makes further statements about the question of asylum seeking. The member for Kooyong said:

Did refusing to give permanent protection to people found to be genuine refugees deter? Again, no. 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. Did the coalition government’s eventually giving the overwhelming majority of temporary protection visa-holders permanent protection lead to a surge of refugees? No.

I refer the Leader of the Opposition to those words. They might help him answer the question he has asked.