Chris Evans (WA, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the Government in the Senate) Share this | Hansard source

I note the deliberately provocative language, but I can inform Senator Cash that, in terms of the irregular maritime arrivals, all persons who are intercepted seeking to enter Australia in an unauthorised manner by boat are taken to Christmas Island for processing. The processing includes, in the initial stages, an interview and further processing for the purposes of establishing identity, health status and security checks. I made that clear in the earlier answer to Senator Back. The number of people who arrive with sufficient papers for identification varies. I do not have the exact figure. Some arrive with a passport or an identity document and others arrive with nothing at all. Some have other personal information. Many have virtually no personal possessions other than the clothes they stand up in.

What we do as a government is use the relevant agencies to interview and work with those asylum seekers to establish their identity, to ensure that they have no communicable diseases and that they are healthy and we begin a process of providing the appropriate security checks—exactly the same type of operation that occurred under the previous government. As we know with arrivals by air, many people have arrived by air with false documentation. So the mere possession of documentation would not be sufficient to identify the person. We do the appropriate checks through relevant Australian agencies to identify persons before they are processed.