George Brandis (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Attorney-General) Share this | Hansard source

I will, Senator Evans, but let me just interpolate to say that I do not think you need to have more than about a year 1 education in arithmetic to work out that when the number of arrivals falls from a peak of 75 to zero two years later that is a very sharp, indeed an absolute, decline. That did not happen for no reason; it happened because of the policies implemented by the Howard government—the tough policies implemented by the Howard government, and announced in the middle of 2001, which in August last year Senator Evans, the minister sitting at the table, abandoned. It remained the case that there were no—or single-digit numbers of—unauthorised boat arrivals right up until August last year when the Rudd Labor government, through its minister Senator Evans, announced the abandonment of the tough policies by which the Howard government had succeeded in the space of three years in taking the number of unauthorised boat arrivals from 75 a year to zero.

Is there anybody in the entire country who is so foolish that they would think that there was not a cause and effect relationship between the introduction of tough policies and the fall to zero of the number of unauthorised boat arrivals two years later? Equally, is there anybody so foolish that they would doubt that there is equally a cause and effect relationship between the announcement by Senator Evans of the withdrawal of those tough policies in August 2008 and the sharp upward spike in the number of unauthorised boat arrivals?

We have now gone from a situation where in the first year of the Rudd government, when the Howard government’s policies were still in place, there were only three unauthorised boat arrivals to a situation where, in the 15 months since the abandonment of those tough policies, there have been 45 unauthorised boat arrivals—and the trend is escalating. The number of unauthorised arrivals is increasing at an increasing rate. Those are the statistics from the Parliamentary Library’s tabulation—it went from 75 a year to zero in consequence of the adoption of tough policies by the Howard government and from three to 45 in the space of two years as a direct result of the abandonment of those tough policies by the Rudd Labor government.

This is what the opposition always says about this issue. It is not enough to have tough words—the Prime Minister is a past master at using belligerent language; you have to have the policy courage to match the tough rhetoric with tough policies. If you do not have tough policies, the people smugglers will see right through you—as they have seen right through the Rudd Labor government. They will be back in business—as they are back in business today—and they will ply their evil trade so as to imperil the lives of innocent people buying passage on their boats. That is the result of your policy failure and weakness. (Time expired)