George Brandis (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you, Senator Ferguson, and I will come to you in a moment. Mr Burke continued: ‘Once it was introduced, more boats came—the boat that we remember being sunk five years ago this week, filled with 146 children—for one simple reason: the reason there were so many children there was that overwhelmingly they had dads in Australia who were not allowed to sponsor their infant children to join them.’ Wrong, wrong, wrong! Senator Ferguson, who sat with me on the Senate Select Committee into a Certain Maritime Incident in 2002, which exhaustively canvassed the circumstances of the sinking of SIEVX, well knows that each of those propositions is absolutely false.

As the minister pointed out in her answer to Senator Johnston, there was not a skerrick of evidence given to that committee, nor has it ever been asserted, that the overwhelming majority of the children who drowned as a result of the SIEVX tragedy were seeking to join their parents in Australia. That callous, ignorant and untruthful statement by Mr Tony Burke just goes to show how free the Australian Labor Party are with the truth and how they have even been prepared to sink so low as to play fast and loose with the truth about a personal tragedy.