Concetta Fierravanti-Wells (NSW, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Immigration and Shadow Parliamentary Secretary Assisting the Leader in the Senate) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answers given by the Minister for Immigration and Citizenship (Senator Evans) to questions without notice asked today, relating to asylum seekers.

I commence my comments by looking at today’s article in the Australian. I do not normally quote Paul Kelly, but if Paul Kelly is saying that ‘Rudd is treating us like mugs’, maybe it is time that the Prime Minister really did take note. Mr Kelly says:

There is an emerging credibility gap in the Rudd government’s navigation of contentious policy issues, a compulsion that denies the obvious and rests on the apparent assumption that Australians are mugs.

Does the Prime Minister think that the Australian public cannot see through all of this spin? I will quote another section from Mr Kelly’s article:

He seems to think almost any line can be spun and will be believed, even when it is nonsense.

Of course, it is sheer nonsense when this government says that a deal which looks like a special deal, sounds like a special deal and is precisely a special deal, is actually not a special deal. Are you taking the Australian public for fools? You are really taking them for a ride. Admit that this is a special deal.

In my many years of involvement in immigration matters, I have to say that I have never seen anything quite like this. The Minister for Immigration and Citizenship is not here, and it is interesting that the minister has not been present in any of the motions to take note or answers or any of the MPIs that we have had in relation to this very important border protection issue. He has not been here to answer to this Senate and to the Australian public for his conduct. One only has to look at the department of immigration’s figures to see that in 2007-08 89 refugees processed by the UNHCR in Indonesia were resettled in Australia. In 2008-09, 35 were  resettled—hardly large numbers. Indeed, the minister recently told us at the FECCA conference that around 1,300 people had been resettled to third countries from Indonesia since 2001, with Australia taking about a third of those refugees. So in about eight years we have taken about 430 people from Indonesia and resettled them here.

Those people have been sitting in Indonesia for years and years. The processes that they have gone through have been slow and painstaking, but the people on the Oceanic Viking were given a codified letter, as the minister tells us. The codified letter, the bribe that they were offered because the Prime Minister was so desperate for them to get off this ship, is nowhere near what any other person who has been sitting in Indonesia will ever be offered. Indeed, how can the government possibly still persist in treating the Australian public with utter contempt by denying that this was a special deal to bribe the asylum seekers off that boat?

Then we have this situation where the Prime Minister now says, ‘Of course, I didn’t know anything about this.’ For goodness sake, this is a Prime Minister—and I am not going to criticise workaholics—who is really into the detail. Do not tell me that he did not know! Now he says that it was his staff who negotiated. It was interesting to hear the minister’s answer—or non-answer!—to Senator Ryan in relation to this very question, because the minister failed to answer the question about the Prime Minister’s staff’s involvement in this deal. That is the answer that the Australian public need to know.