David Bushby (Tasmania, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am always amazed when I hear government senators get up and try and defend the indefensible. The fact is that history will record Labor's approach to asylum seekers coming to Australia over the past 10 years as one of the most hypocritical, most inconsistent and most politically opportunistic gaggle of positions on a policy issue that has ever been seen in this country. Indeed, I will not be surprised if future political science courses devote a large chunk of their classes to the flip-flopping changes in position that the Labor Party has taken on this particular issue over the last 10 years.

Senator Collins spent most of her speech attacking the coalition on our policy, saying that we deliberately sought to demonise asylum seekers and that it was we who started that. That is not at all true. The demonising started with Labor when the boats started coming in the late 1990s. I believe, in fact, that it may even have been the now Prime Minister, Ms Gillard, who started that demonising, by attacking the Howard government over the boats that were coming and claiming that Labor would turn them back. Our approach, of course—

Senator Wong interjecting—

That is a separate issue. Our approach was to fix the problem, so we put in place a suite of measures that were designed to actually stop the boats from coming and ensure that people had no incentive to hop on a leaky boat, risking their lives and the lives of their families by crossing the open seas on a journey to a country they had no surety they would ever reach.

Senator Collins also raised temporary protection visas, but she made no case against them whatsoever. She just damned them openly without explaining at all why she thought there was a problem with them or why they did not work. I have yet to hear from a senator on that side of the chamber any information at all about why temporary protection visas are not a valid approach to take in tackling this issue.

In relation to Nauru, Senator Collins said that arrangements in Malaysia were very different. The arrangements in Malaysia are very different. They will be very different, particularly for those people who are sent there compared with those who were sent to Nauru or who could be sent to Nauru. Those who end up in Malaysia will be subject to Malaysian justice. They will be subject to their rules, their laws and their ways of dealing with asylum seekers when they reach there. The fact is that Malaysia has laws that allow asylum seekers to be physically punished. There are nowhere near the controls that Australia had over their treatment when people in similar positions were sent to Nauru or to Papua New Guinea—control that was exercised directly at that time.

Senator Furner talked about the failings of turning around the boats, as if this were the crux of our policy. Indeed, he focused on the fact that turning around boats came with some risks. Indeed it does, but that is not the crux of our policy. The mainstays of our program have been proven to work—just look at the numbers. You just have to look at how many people were coming in the early 2000s. Yet two or three years later, after we had put in place our measures, they had slowed to a trickle and almost to a stop. The crux of our program is offshore processing on Nauru and in other nations that have signed up to the UNHCR convention, and the temporary protection visas. Turning around boats is something that we would do only on those very rare occasions when it is both safe and possible to do so. By definition, if it is safe and possible to do so, those issues raised by Senator Furner are irrelevant.

Labor's policies over this have flip-flopped, as I mentioned, all over the place over the last 10 years. They have gone from setting up onshore detention, as Senator Fierravanti-Wells mentioned—in fact the Keating government was the first government to set up mandatory detention—to attacking the former Howard government over the problem in the late 1990s. As I mentioned, Prime Minister Gillard played a key role in attacking us in regard to boats that were arriving and our lack of action over it. She told us how they would stop the boats and then totally opposed the measures which the Howard government implemented to do just that and which, contrary to Minister Carr's claims today, totally and demonstrably worked by turning the annual numbers around so absolutely that, by the time this government took over in 2007, there were only a handful of people left in detention and the boats had almost completely stopped arriving.

So what did they do then? Having achieved the treasury bench they wound back all measures implemented during the Howard years. It worked so well, with the consequence that we have now seen over 12,000 illegal arrivals and over 241 boats. (Time expired)

Question agreed to.