Michaelia Cash (WA, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Immigration) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answers given by the Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research (Senator Carr) to questions without notice asked by Senators Ronaldson and Cash today relating to asylum seekers and the Malaysian agreement.

Minister Carr set a new low today when he answered these questions in question time. For Minister Carr to come into this chamber and accuse the opposition of not respecting the human rights of asylum seekers when it comes to our policies is an act of absolute hypocrisy. Who can forget what the former Leader of the Opposition, Kevin Rudd, said in November 2007 in relation to turning back the boats? I quote this as to what Kevin Rudd said:

Kevin Rudd has taken a tough line on border security, warning that a Labor government will turn the boats back ...

That was what your policy was going to be prior to the election: you were going to turn the boats back. So to come in here and accuse us on this side of the chamber of not respecting the rights of asylum seekers is an absolute disgrace. But what is even worse is to say that this side's policies were responsi­ble for the deaths of asylum seekers coming here, because we all know what the Prime Minister told caucus on Monday, don't we? We all know that the Prime Minister told the Labor Party caucus that four per cent of people coming to this country by boat drown. Do you know what that means? It means that under the current government's policies, on their watch, approximately 440 people have possibly drowned in trying to come to Australia. So don't you ever come into this place and try to tell us that when it comes to our policies we do not respect the human rights of others, because based on that statistic, which your own Prime Minister in caucus told you about, you are an absolute disgrace.

But it does not stop there, does it? The government is still committed to the Malay­sian solution. The government is still comm­itted to a solution which the other place found so abhorrent that they passed a motion condemning the government's legislation in this regard. Why did they do that? They did that for a number of reasons. First and foremost, the House of Representatives—the other place—knows that, under the Malay­sian deal, for the people that we send to Malaysia there is a very good chance that they will be caned. Why is that? We heard it from the minister himself today. The agree­ment that has been drawn up between the government of Australia and the Malaysian government is not legally binding, so it does not matter what the minister comes into this place and says in relation to guarantees by the Gillard government that asylum seekers that we send to Malaysia will not be caned. They have no legal basis at all for making that claim, because the agreement that they have entered into is a non-binding agree­ment. On top of that, section 6(3) of the Malaysian Immigration Act actually gives Malaysians the right to cane and flog—put it any way you like, I can tell you right now it is not very nice—asylum seekers who enter their country. You cannot say that that is not true because statistics themselves do not lie. I say to the Left of the Labor Party: you must be very, very proud of the policies that your government is entering into. Sixteen people a day, sixteen refugees a day, are flogged in Malaysia, and you come into this parliament and ask us to agree with you in condoning a policy that is in breach of our international obligations on torture and that, without a doubt, will see people that we send to Malaysia under your government policy caned. That is a disgrace.