Guy Barnett (Tasmania, Liberal Party, Chairman of the Scrutiny of Government Waste Committee) Share this | Hansard source

There were the childcare centres, as Senator Bernardi indicates. The government have ripped that promise up and thrown it away. In the quiet of a late Friday night, I think it was, the minister made that announcement at the bottom of a press release she put out, just quietly trying to tell people, ‘It’s not a big deal.’ The fact is: honesty is important in politics. Integrity is critical to building trust in members of parliament and decision-makers at the federal, state or local government level. And you have lost that trust. People do not trust what the government say anymore. That will be the problem with your federal budget—your assumptions and your figures just will not be believed. They are dodgy, unbelievable assumptions. On the one hand you say, ‘Put a tax on smoking and smoking will go down,’ but on the other hand you say, ‘Put a tax on mining and mining investment will go up.’ Come on! Pull the other one! Who is going to believe it? Your assumptions simply are not believable.

There is plenty more to be said about this, but I know others need to share their views. I do just want to refer to an article in the Age entitled ‘Push for missing asylum seekers inquiry’. What are the government going to do about the prognosis and the problems before them? They seem to have mishandled this issue so badly. Of course there should be an inquiry. We have had the tragic situation in which five Sri Lankan Tamils are believed to be dead after abandoning their failing boat last Wednesday, which is five days after Australian authorities learned it had run out of fuel. The issues are coming at us thick and fast, and the government simply cannot get a grip on the situation.

On the whole immigration process, Australia has a good record, and I am proud of that record of welcoming refugees to this country—those people who are doing what they consider to be the right thing in the various refugee camps around the world. We care for our fellow Australians, whether they be refugees or otherwise, and we should continue to do so. There is no excuse for not showing care and compassion. At the same time, we need to protect the national interest. We need to protect our immigration system and to make sure that our borders are secure so that we know exactly who is coming to this country and the manner in which they are coming. That is up to us as a parliament.

I think the government has not got it right. It needs to get it right and the time has come for the government to be called to account. This will happen, of course, in the weeks and months leading up to the federal election. People will have an opportunity to decide who is better able to manage our borders, to keep them secure, and who is better able to ensure that we have a professionally administered, carefully and properly operating immigration system so that we know exactly who is coming to the country and the nature of their coming. At the moment the immigration system is being run very poorly indeed.

Turning to population policy, the government seems to have and to accept the view that the population is huge and growing, but there is no rationale, no management and no thinking behind that particular view. It is a concern for a lot of Australians—they do not like it. I know, whether it is in Tasmania or other parts of Australia that I visit, people are feeling unsettled about this government’s approach to border security, about this government’s approach to population policy and to immigration policy more generally. The rubber will hit the road in the next weeks and months as we head into the election. I ask Australians to think carefully about who is better able to manage our borders, our immigration system and our population policy.