Eric Abetz (Tasmania, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations) Share this | Hansard source

It seems that the Australian Greens are as confused about the standing orders of this place as they are in relation to their immigration and asylum-seeker policy stance. We heard from the Greens that we are dealing with allegedly the most vulnerable people, those who are paying literally thousands and thousands of dollars to people-smugglers to come to Australia. They freely enter Indonesia, they travel there freely with no problems at all and then pay a criminal people-smuggler to get them to Australia, having thousands of dollars at their disposal. Somehow, they are the most vulnerable people.

Forget those who have been rotting in refugee camps around the world, not for weeks or months but for over a decade. There are literally millions of them all around the world. We in Australia need to ask ourselves this one question: do we want to be engaged in the humane resettlement of refugees? Overwhelmingly, the answer is yes, as it should be. The next question is: to whom out of the millions of refugees in the world should we be giving priority? We in the coalition make no bones about the fact that we do not believe priority should be given to the rich, who can afford to pay criminals to force their way into Australia and who turn a blind eye to our obligation to those who are sitting in camps in Somalia, in Kenya and in other places in Africa, where they have been for well over a decade.

For somebody like me, who works with my local refugee communities in Hobart, to be told I am a hypocrite on this is quite offensive. When you hear their tales of having been in refugee camps for up to 15 years you get an understanding of why these particular refugees are so offended when priority is being given to the criminal boat-people smuggling operations. That is why the coalition put in place a policy that worked to stop this criminal activity, which also puts lives at risk. We stopped it with the Nauru solution. The Labor Party deliberately dismantled that policy, and guess what: the influx of boats occurred and the influx of illegal arrivals re-entered the Australian scene. This disrupted the orderly resettlement of refugees into Australia that we had, in cooperation with the United Nations. We had a policy which worked. Labor dismantled it. Now, seeing the folly of their ways, Labor are trying to make themselves more hairy-chested than we as a coalition were in this space. We say to them that their Malaysia solution, where people can be caned for disobeying orders in Malaysia, is inhumane. The Labor Party themselves set the benchmark for offshore processing that the country should be a signatory to the UN convention. Well, Nauru is; Malaysia is not. All we have done is suggest to the government that they should adopt the Nauru solution, the Manus Island solution, and dump the Malaysia solution, where we were going to be giving them one of our illegal entrants for five of theirs, a swap which, in anybody's language, was not good. In relation to today's motion, it is simply calling on the Senate to reject:

... the Government's attempts to provide inadequate protections for asylum seekers in its proposed legislation to resurrect its Malaysian asylum seeker deal.

I would have thought the Australian Greens would support such a motion, but of course it is splitting them away from their Labor alliance partners and they now, undoubtedly in a deal with Labor, are trying to scuttle around to come up with an excuse as to why not to support this motion. As a result, the hapless Senator Hanson-Young has been called in to move an amendment which seeks to negate this. We say the Malaysia solution is not a solution, because it is inhumane and in breach of our international obligations, whereas the Nauru solution is workable, proven and humane. (Time expired)