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

I move:

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

There is nothing sadder than the sight of a desperate government deeply in denial, and in all the mishaps, the bungling and the incompetence that have characterised the brief tenure of the Rudd government there is no area of policy in which the Rudd government is more deeply in denial than the catastrophic failure of its border protection policy. In no area has there been a more catastrophic failure than the fiasco of the Rudd government’s border protection policy.

Let us go back to where we stood in August 2008 immediately before Senator Evans announced the weakening of the Howard government’s policies that had kept our borders secure for the last six years of that government. Do you know, Mr Deputy President, how many people were detained at the Christmas Island detention centre at that time? There were five. Do you know how many there are now? The Christmas Island detention centre is over capacity. There are more than 2,500, and others have had to be transported to the Australian mainland, because our borders are out of control. And yet, as we saw in his answers to Senator Williams’s question today, Senator Evans continues to deny that there is a cause-and-effect relationship between the weakening of those policies in August 2008 and the tremendous upsurge in the number of unauthorised boat arrivals in the two years since. In the last five years of the Howard government, after tough policies were introduced in 2001, the average number of unauthorised boat arrivals fell from a high number before the coalition government of the day introduced tough policies down to three per year.