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

My question is to the Prime Minister. Given the Prime Minister denies that any special or preferential deal has been offered to the 78 asylum seekers on board the Oceanic Viking, is the Prime Minister indicating that all people found to be refugees in Indonesia can now expect to be settled in Australia within four to six weeks?

Kevin Rudd (Griffith, Australian Labor Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Once again I thank the Leader of the Opposition for his question as, of course, he moves away from the point he has been so active on in debate over the last 24 hours, which is his accusation that I misled the House on my knowledge of the contents of the Jakarta embassy’s immigration document, which was the subject of his questions yesterday. The Leader of the Opposition said without doubt that the Prime Minister had misled the House on this matter.

Opposition Member:

An opposition member—Hear, hear!

Kevin Rudd (Griffith, Australian Labor Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I hear the ‘hear, hears’ from those opposite; therefore I have this uncanny sense of deja vu. When was the last time we had this Leader of the Opposition stand up and say that I had misled the House on such a matter? What we had last time was, of course, the forged email affair around Utegate when the Leader of the Opposition stood up and made an accusation publicly that I had misled the parliament on the basis of no evidence at all, which perhaps explains why he was crab-walking a million miles away from his accusation on the doors this morning.

Christopher Pyne (Sturt, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Education, Apprenticeships and Training) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Mr Speaker, I rise on a point of order. The question was extremely specific, it did not go to any of these matters in the past and I would ask you to ask the Prime Minister to be relevant to the question or to sit down.

Honourable Members:

Honourable members interjecting—

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

Order! The House will come to order. The Manager of Opposition Business will resume his seat. I take it that the member for Sturt, given that his attention span seemed to be very short about the point of order, knows that is not a defence. The Prime Minister is responding to the question. The Prime Minister has the call.

Kevin Rudd (Griffith, Australian Labor Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Thank you, Mr Speaker. Was this yet another example of the Leader of the Opposition simply shooting from the lip and hoping that something might materialise by fax or email at a subsequent occasion? We have seen this before. The honourable gentleman’s question goes to the consistency of government policy and its approach to these matters. I refer again to the letter from the secretary of the immigration department, who was also the secretary of the immigration department under the previous Australian government, which says that the Indonesian government and the Australian government have agreed to a set of arrangements regarding time frames for the processing of the group in Indonesia, consistent with international practice and resettlement procedures. I draw that again to the Leader of the Opposition’s attention as it was a letter I tabled in the House yesterday.