Gary Humphries (ACT, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Citizenship) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Anti-People Smuggling and Other Measures Bill 2010. I acknowledge that this debate takes place at a time when the federal government is backflipping and backtracking left, right and centre as its disastrous performance, in this case on border protection, comes home to roost. The sound border protection policies of the Howard government have now been comprehensively undone, and this has sent a strong signal to people smugglers that Australia is fair game for their criminal trade. This has profound implications and has placed considerable strain on our facilities at Christmas Island. Indeed, those facilities are now so strained that asylum seekers have had to be moved from Christmas Island to places like Darwin and Curtin. Of course, there is also considerable strain on Customs officers and Navy personnel who are attempting to cope with the consequences of that failing policy.

The government’s failed border protection policies have, at the same time, encouraged people smuggling across our region. They have persuaded vulnerable people to make dangerous journeys across the ocean in unsafe vessels, which has resulted in some cases in the tragic and unnecessary loss of life. Only in the last week or so we have seen what appears to be the loss of five lives in the Indian Ocean. That loss of life was unnecessary, it was avoidable but it was, in many ways, the consequence of policy settings which encourage people to engage people smugglers and to make these journeys. The Rudd Labor government has, in the face of ongoing pressure and swamped with continuing arrivals, realised that it has a policy setting which is unworkable and disastrous. It is in the process of taking stock of its policies and attempting to backtrack on the settings that it has put in place—but, in my opinion, only partially successfully.

This bill amends several acts in relation to Australia’s anti-people-smuggling legislative framework. In relation to the Criminal Code, the bill creates a new offence of supporting the offence of people smuggling which targets people who organise, finance and provide other material support to people-smuggling ventures entering foreign countries, whether or not via Australia. The penalty for this offence is a very steep one: imprisonment for a maximum of 12 years, a fine of $110,000 or both. The bill creates two new people-smuggling related offences in the Migration Act: firstly, the offence of supporting the offence of people smuggling and, secondly, the aggravated offence of people smuggling, involving such things as exploitation, danger of death or serious harm, which will carry a penalty of imprisonment for a maximum of 20 years, a fine of $220,000 or both.

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There are also amendments affecting the enforcement mechanisms available to those attempting to combat people smuggling. In relation to the Surveillance Devices Act, the bill will extend emergency authorisation for the use of a surveillance device to investigations into the aggravated offence of people smuggling. Currently the ability to maintain emergency authorisation for a surveillance device does not extend to offences under the Migration Act. In relation to the Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Act, this bill will simplify the criteria to be satisfied by agencies when applying for telecommunications interception warrants for investigating people-smuggling offences under the Migration Act. Under these amendments, agencies will no longer have to establish that the offence involves two or more offenders and substantial planning and organisation as well as the use of sophisticated methods and techniques and so forth.

This bill will amend the definition of the term ‘security’ in the ASIO Act to officially give the agency the statutory power to obtain and evaluate intelligence relevant to the protection of Australia’s territorial border integrity from serious threats. Such intelligence can then be communicated to agencies such as the Australian Customs and Border Protection Service or other law enforcement agencies.

All of that is good insofar as it strengthens the capacity of Australian government agencies and others with whom we cooperate to detect and deter, perhaps through prosecution, the trade of people smuggling. So the coalition supports what is contained in this legislation, but we need to acknowledge that in a very substantial way what is contained in this legislation is simply window-dressing. It is an attempt to disguise the fact that this government has presided over a weakening of Australia’s border protection policies and so it has brought forward tough-looking, tough-sounding legislation to beef up penalties against those who engage in people smuggling in a way which is good insofar as it goes, but which fails to acknowledge that the vast majority of people smugglers in the past have not been apprehended and prosecuted and in the future they are unlikely to be apprehended and prosecuted.

There is one arm of government policy which seeks to suppress people smuggling as an industry, but there is another arm of government policy which is quite clearly at the present time encouraging that trade to occur. The change made by the Rudd government to the Howard government’s border protection policies is precisely the kind of policy setting I am referring to. We have one part of government policy which is applying the brake to people smuggling and another part of government policy which is applying the accelerator. While that confused and mismatched policy is in place, we will not see an end to the very large trade in people carried out by people smugglers across Australia’s northern borders.

It is worth reflecting at this point on how that dismantling of Australia’s border protection policies has come about. It is a matter of record that in 2000 and 2001, after a significant number of boat arrivals, the Howard government took strong action to deter the trade in people. It made the tough decisions in the interests of Australia’s border security through a range of settings including offshore processing of asylum seekers, maintaining a policy of mandatory detention of asylum seekers, excising territories from our migration zone that were previously attractive to people smugglers and engaging in an effective partnership with regional players such as Indonesia. The result of that change of policy was stark and clear. After the surge of arrivals in 2000 and 2001 and the announcement of new policies, we saw in 2002-03 no boats arrive on Australia’s northern shores. In 2003-04, there were only three boats. In 2004-05, again there were no boats. In the following three years, eight, four and three boats arrived in each of those financial years respectively.

The last of those years was 2007-08, a period which was partly under the new Rudd government. In the early year or so of the Rudd government’s reign, the slow pace of boat arrivals that had been characteristic of the previous government continued, but in August 2008 the government announced a change of policy. The government’s announcement was intended to send a signal that Australia was relaxing its previously ‘harsh’ border protection arrangements. Whether or not the government intended the signal to be as clear as it was is irrelevant. The fact is that it sent a very clear signal to people-smuggling operations around our region and the consequence was a surge in arrivals by boat.

This all comes from the Prime Minister who, as the king of spin, the day before the 2007 election when asked: ‘What would you do about boat arrivals in northern waters?’ said: ‘You’d turn them back’. That was what the Prime Minister to be said on the eve of the 2007 election. He said he believed in an ‘orderly immigration system’, but after a suitable interval he then set about undoing the coalition’s policy settings and repeatedly blamed push factors for the surge of arrivals that followed. He is responsible therefore, through his government’s decisions, for the large number of arrivals on Christmas Island and elsewhere in the interim. When those arrivals began to become politically embarrassing to the government, the Prime Minister referred to people smugglers as ‘representing the absolute scum of the earth’. Even while he was in the process of stimulating their business and allowing them to make the profits that they made and continue to make from people smuggling, he was describing them as the ‘absolute scum of the earth’.

It was this Prime Minister who called in a favour from the President of Indonesia in October of 2009 to stop a boat coming to Australia that he could not stomach, which subsequently led to an embarrassing and longstanding stand-off in Indonesian waters. This is the Prime Minister who offered a special deal to 78 asylum seekers on the Oceanic Viking, including the transfer to Australia of four asylum seekers who were later deemed a security risk by ASIO after a rushed check of their security status. This is the Prime Minister who continued to let numbers increase on Christmas Island because of a lack of conviction and a lack of will to alter the policy settings and who placed such strain on the resources that eventually Australia has had to let that number of asylum seekers overflow to the Australian mainland and facilities that had been closed for some time have had to be reopened. This is also the Prime Minister who planned for only 200 arrivals at Christmas Island in the 2009-10 financial year and who embarrassingly had to come back to the Australian parliament and ask for a further $134 million to cover the 1,400 arrivals that had actually taken place. That in turn has turned out to be an inadequate amount of money to cover that cost, with a record 4,580 arrivals and counting this financial year to date, including two further boats in the earlier part of this week.

It is not hard to see why people smugglers understand that a different policy has applied in Australia, that it is now open season once again and that the considerable profits that they are likely to generate from their nefarious activities are now available for them to continue to pursue. Welcome as the measures in this bill are and effective as they may be in the small number of cases where people smugglers can actually be intercepted and their work interdicted, the bill does not alter the fact that this legislation will not change the landscape with respect to that trade in people. It will not alter the landscape and it will not affect the number of people travelling to Australia. Nor, I suspect, will the government’s announcement that it will temporarily suspend the processing of asylum seekers from Sri Lanka and Afghanistan.

We saw the evidence produced by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees report that showed a 29 per cent increase in asylum applications in Australia while countries such as the United Kingdom experienced a five per cent decline in 2009, the clearest evidence that these policies simply are not making a difference. The changes in policy are simply not going to make any substantial improvement in the outlook for this particular problem that the government is now facing.

This is a government that clearly has difficulty in making difficult decisions. It is a government that cannot deliver and is flailing around desperately trying to make order out of chaos as it tries to satisfy both those critics on its left, who believe that it is already being too harsh with asylum seekers, and the critics on the right, a category which I suspect includes at this point the vast majority of Australians, who simply think that the government has lost control of our borders and who are not prepared to accept that the present policy makes any sense.

I have to say that, although there is a very powerful debate that has taken place in Australia over the status and entitlements of refugees—and I do not propose to traverse that debate here today—I think that anybody who is concerned about the welfare of refugees and is concerned to make sure that their interests are protected would do everything in their power to ensure that those people are not encouraged to board those unseaworthy vessels in Indonesian ports for that hazardous journey to Australia. Whatever we think about the need to protect refugees and to offer them protection and safe haven, we would never want a policy that is as firmly based on passage across the sea in those boats as the present government’s policy appears to be.

An indication of the way in which the government’s policy settings have changed the landscape came in an interview only a couple of weeks ago on the ABC, on 24 April, in which a would-be Iraqi asylum seeker had this to say:

Kevin Rudd—he’s changed everything about refugee. If I go to Australia now, different, different … Maybe accepted but when John Howard, president, Australia, he said come back to Indonesia.

I think that it is not surprising to hear those sorts of comments made. It is a question of perception, and the perception of those people who use the services of people smugglers is that this government’s policy has allowed them to make that journey and to obtain something of value from making that journey, and the people smugglers are more than willing to satisfy that particular market.

It is not surprising, therefore, that on 23 February this year, in the midst of the hype surrounding the counterterrorism white paper, Ministers McClelland, Evans and O’Connor announced a policy shift to try to disguise the green light which has been given to people smugglers for some time. It appears to date as if that attempt at smoke and mirrors has not succeeded in changing the approach of either people smugglers or their customers. I suspect that the government will need something else to achieve the effect that it desires.

To reiterate, the opposition does support this bill but we predict that it will have little impact on the scale of the people-smuggling industry in our region. In the future, we fear for the lives of those people who continue to make those journeys in that way and who obviously place themselves and their families at great risk by undertaking those journeys. We have a policy today that is neither tough nor humane. The Prime Minister said he wanted and was achieving a policy that was tough and humane. Clearly it is neither of those things. The 122 boats that have arrived since August 2008 and the 5,621 arrivals on those boats are stark testimony to the need to change policy, a change which we are yet to see from this government. The boats are still coming. There were two more earlier this week, carrying 36 and 86 people respectively. This indicates that the government still has not understood the nature and effect of its policy. I urge the government to assess the need to go back and revisit these policies. What is on the table today is welcome and will make a difference on the margin, but it does not tackle and address the real problem at the heart of the government’s flawed border protection polices.