Deborah O'Neill (Robertson, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Prime Minister. Why is it important to have a negotiated plan to help restore offshore processing of asylum seekers as soon as possible? How will this help break the people smugglers' business model that has led to so much loss of life recently?

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

I thank the member for Robertson for her question. I know she, like so many members across the parliament, has been concerned to see this parliament work together to achieve change and to enable our nation, following the High Court case, to have offshore processing of asylum seekers. We saw in this parliament yesterday just how deeply many members of this parliament feel about this issue, and no-one can fail to have been moved by the tragedies that we have seen in recent days with the loss of life at sea. I think across this parliament we are rightly fearful that we will see more losses of life at sea if people continue to get into boats, many of them unseaworthy, having paid a people smuggler to try to get to our shores. So it is the right thing to do to send an effective message of deterrence. It is the right thing to do to seek to deter people from making those dangerous journeys. And all of us want to see the evil people who ply a people-smuggling trade and profit from it brought to book and taken out of working that kind of evil and seeking to profit on misery.

This has been the subject of much heated debate in this parliament, but the time for that kind of heat is gone. Now is the time to get an effective outcome to the parliamentary deliberations. Yesterday the House of Representatives expressed its will about new laws to enable offshore processing. The new laws that the House endorsed do not represent the government's plan. They do not represent the opposition's plan. They bring together the key elements of both the government's plan and the opposition's plan. That means that that bill was asking everybody to take a step forward, to move from a rigid position and to embrace compromise and change. That bill—that compromise proposition moved by the member for Lyne—was adopted by this House and is now before the Senate. We are now in a very straightforward situation: either we can leave this parliament with laws that enable offshore processing at the end of this parliamentary day or we can fail the test of getting laws in place. It is a yes or no divide now, and I urge every senator, no matter their party political persuasion, to work today with their fellow senators to ensure that we see these laws adopted and that parts of the government's plan combined with parts of the opposition's plan can be put into effect in the weeks ahead.