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

You will keep, Senator Cameron. The commitment during the election campaign was to establish a regional processing centre in East Timor. We then learned that at the time that that announcement was made there had been no discussion with the Prime Minister or any member of the government of East Timor at all. There had been a glancing reference to the possibility in a telephone conversation with the ceremonial head of state of East Timor. That was exposed. It was then exposed that there had been no planning or preparation for such a regional processing centre and it dawned on the Australian people very swiftly that this was just another political slogan, another piece of political spin.

I waited in vain yesterday as I sat through the Governor-General’s speech from the chair for some reference to a policy to deal with asylum seekers—a problem that the Labor government created and which Ms Gillard promised during the election campaign to fix—and I heard one sentence which addressed the issue. This is the government’s policy to stop the influx of asylum seekers penetrating our maritime borders:

On the issue of border protection, the government seeks to remove the incentive for asylum seekers to undertake dangerous sea voyages to Australia while promoting an approach to assessing refugee claims that is efficient, timely and fair.

That is the plan. You could almost hear those people smugglers shuddering in their boots all the way across in Sumatra as they heard the announcement of the government’s plan to destroy their business, to destroy their livelihood—this traffic in human misery that puts lives at risk. What does the record show? The record shows this: since the election itself—and let us remember the election was only a mere month or so ago, on 21 August—there have been another 510 unlawful arrivals in Australia on 10 vessels. To put that into context, in the seven years between the time when the Howard government tightened the policies and eliminated the problem in 2001 and the time in 2008 when the Labor government weakened the policies and reinvented the problem there were 441 arrivals. There were 441 arrivals in seven years. There have been 510 arrivals in four weeks. So much for the promise to address this issue.

I want to close on what was bound to be one of the themes, one of the mantras, of this government. It is again, in Orwellian language, an attempt to delegitimise the role of the parliament. We have heard it from Mr Combet. We have heard it from the Prime Minister. We heard it only this morning from Dr Craig Emerson on the ABC radio show with Madonna King I debate him on every Wednesday morning. The allegation is that the coalition is opposing a consensus. This word ‘consensus’ is the new weasel word, because if you have a consensus then what it means is that everybody agrees with everybody else. Well, Mr Acting Deputy President, let me tell you: we do not agree with many of the government’s proposals. We do not agree with maintaining a weak asylum seeker policy. We do not agree with a carbon tax. We do not agree with a mining tax. These are sharp and distinct differences. There is no consensus and there should not be a consensus.

We are not going to be wreckers in this new parliament; we are going to oppose what we regard as being inimical to the national interest. I am going to let you in on a secret, Mr Acting Deputy President: we have a cunning plan. We have a very cunning strategy, and it is this: where we agree with the government’s bills we will vote for them and where we disagree with the government’s bills we will vote against them. That is the plan. In the meantime the Prime Minister and her ministers and her talking heads like Senator Conroy over there—after an election in which almost exactly 50 per cent of the country voted one way and almost exactly 50 per cent of the country voted the other way—seek to delegitimise a difference of principle and a difference of policy. It is our role in this parliament—it is our role in the House of Representatives no less than it is our role in the Senate—for the opposition to oppose measures where we consider that to be in the national interest. No genuine democrat is afraid of a vigorous parliament, but this government is already foreshadowing its extreme sensitivity to vigorous parliamentary debate.