Stephen Parry (Tasmania, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

What does a policy failure look like? How would we know one if we saw one? Perhaps a policy failure could be identified as the comprehensive failure to achieve every single one of a government’s stated objectives. We know what the government’s stated objectives are in relation to border protection. The stated objectives of the Rudd Labor government in relation to border protection were essentially the same as the stated objectives of the Howard government and other Australian governments before them—that is, to keep Australia’s maritime borders secure from unlawful arrivals.

So how can we judge whether the policy objective as stated by the Rudd Labor government has been achieved? It is not very hard. We can identify whether there has been a failure to achieve that objective by the extent to which there has been penetration of Australia’s maritime borders or attempts to penetrate those borders, and by that test the Rudd Labor government’s policy failure in relation to border protection has been absolute and  comprehensive. But, sadly, it is even worse than that. Not only has there been a comprehensive and total policy failure; by adopting a new suite of policies, announced in this chamber by the Minister for Immigration and Citizenship, Senator Evans, in August last year, the Rudd Labor government has—as my friend and colleague Tony Abbott said on Lateline last night—taken a situation which had been solved and created a problem. That is the difference, as Mr Abbott pointed out.

When the Howard government was in office it found a problem and created a solution. At the time of the election of the Rudd Labor government, there was no longer a problem. The problem had been solved by the policy of the Howard government. The Rudd government, through its incompetence, through its inability to match its tough rhetoric with tough policies, in fact reinvented the problem.

Let us see what the track record was. The document to which I am about to refer has been prepared by the Parliamentary Library. It tabulates unlawful boat arrivals in Australia since 1989, before the election of the Howard government. It goes all the way back to when the Hawke government was in office. The document tells us that, in the four financial years from 1990 to 1994, there were about four or five unlawful boat arrivals a year. They began to increase significantly in 1994-95, when there were 21 unlawful arrivals. They fell away again for a few years and then the problem got really severe in 1998-99, when there were 42 unlawful arrivals. That was on the watch of the Howard government. It became more severe in the following year, 1999-2000, when there were 75 unlawful arrivals. In 2000-01 it remained very severe, when there were 54 unlawful arrivals, with 4,137 passengers on the boats. That is the year in which the Howard government introduced a suite of tough and decisive measures.

What happened after the Howard government introduced those measures in 2001? In 2001-02, the number of boat arrivals fell from 54 to 19, because the people smugglers were being put out of business. The people smugglers were being put out of business because they could no longer deliver to their customers the promise to secure an immigration outcome on the shores of Australia. In 2002-03 the number of unlawful boats setting sail across the Timor Sea for Australia had fallen to zero. In the following year there were three. In 2004-05 there were zero. So I do not think—