Cory Bernardi (SA, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary Assisting the Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

May I issue an apology to all the Australian people listening to this broadcast for wasting five minutes of their lives listening to a bunch of nonsense from Senator Pratt. It was just extraordinary that Senator Pratt was interjecting on Senator Joyce during his speech, saying, 'This is not a joke,' and yet everything that Senator Pratt has said makes an absolute mockery of what the government has been saying for the last three years and the 10 years previously. During this time our discredited Prime Minister—and I say she is discredited because we cannot believe a word that comes out of her mouth now—has duped an increasingly sceptical and disillusioned public by saying that offshore processing is inhumane, it is wrong and it has no place here in Australia. The only thing she has not acknowledged in the entire thing is that offshore processing actually stops the trade in people smuggling and it stops the boats from coming.

But according to the government the boats were coming due to push factors and it had nothing whatsoever to do with the soft treatment they have received in Australia since the government changed the laws. The facts speak for themselves: since 2008, 224 boats have come to this country, entering Australian waters illegally and carrying 11,246 arrivals seeking asylum. Since the last election we have had nearly 4,500 people arrive, and still the government said that nothing was wrong and that they would not go back to the inhumane treatment of refugees. There is nothing more inhumane than having people in a detention centre who are threatening the lives of other people by setting it on fire, by having riots and by planting bombs.

The government would not acknowledge these risks, but all of a sudden it has now done a deal. It has ditched the East Timor solution, which it has been defending for months since the last election, and it has cooked up the Malaysian solution. I say 'cooked up' because it has been cobbled together, clearly at the last minute. But the government's representative, Senator Pratt, has just told us that the government has been working on this for many months. They have been negotiating with themselves, because they have talked themselves out of a one-for-one deal to a one-for-two deal, a one-for-three deal et cetera, until they got a one-for-five deal. But let me tell you: that is not all you get, and it is not all that Malaysia get. They also get hundreds of millions of Australian taxpayer dollars.

The Australian people are very sympathetic to the plight of those who are in need. That is why we have a humanitarian refugee program. What they do not like are those people who are seeking to jump the queue and bypass the system. Yet this government seem to want to encourage that. They have said that they will not deal with an offshore processing centre on Nauru because it is not a signatory to the UNHCR—and yet they go off and deal with Malaysia, which is also not a signatory to the UNHCR. Is there any wonder that the Australian public are questioning the very legitimacy of this government?

Since when have we had a circumstance where the Australian people cannot believe a word that comes out of the Prime Minister's mouth? Since when have we had a circumstance where the Australian people believe that everything their government tells them is based on spin and lies? And they have got good reason to be suspicious of everything this government says, because not only do we know that the Prime Minister is an illegitimate prime minister but we also know that this government is so bereft of any structure and of any substance that it cannot manage the most simple policy decisions. It has put at risk Australia's border security. We know that; the evidence speaks for itself.

And now the government expect the Australian public to believe that they have done a good deal on our behalf, because when we get the next 800 people arriving in this country illegally we are going to swap them for 4,000 people who are in Malaysia seeking asylum. Eight hundred for 4,000—I would love to play poker with our Prime Minister. Whatever money she has got left after squandering it on so many bad programs would soon be in my pocket, because she cannot even carry off a bluff adequately. This is the problem we have: we have a government that do not know what they believe in and we have a Prime Minister who does not believe in anything. She has put everything on the shelf—everything that she has spent her entire life defending. And you wonder why the Australian people say, 'Enough is enough; we need to go to an election'.