Gary Humphries (ACT, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Defence Materiel) Share this | Hansard source

At the request of Senator Fifield, I move:

That the Senate notes the failure of the Gillard Labor Government to maintain the confidence of the Australian people in its ability to protect our borders.

To illustrate the point which this motion is making, I ask senators to cast their minds back to the scene a little over four years ago, when the Howard government relinquished office, with respect to border security and the arrival of unauthorised maritime vessels. Members of this place will recall that at that point in time there were very few boat arrivals. The average number of arrivals each year was something in the vicinity of three boats. The issue had largely gone off the radar of Australians and certainly Australian politicians. The government, which had opened an offshore processing centre on Manus Island in Papua New Guinea, was able to close that centre because it was no longer necessary. The centre at Nauru opened by the government had very few people in it because the number of boats that were arriving necessitated very few people being detained at that centre.

How much difference a short year or so makes. In August 2008 the new Rudd Labor government decided that it would change those settings with respect to migration. The new Rudd Labor government decided that it would allow for the closure of Nauru and allow for processing to resume onshore. It would now use the facility on Christmas Island, built by the previous government and described by the Labor Party in opposition as a white elephant, to start to process boat arrivals. The rest is history. In a little over three years since that policy announcement was made, 12,500-plus people have arrived on over 244 boats, pursuant to the collapse of the government's policy on protecting Australia's borders. We have gross overcrowding at Australia's detention facilities. New facilities have had to be opened onshore. We have seen rioting and disorder at those places. Litigation is besetting the Commonwealth government. There have been a series of unedifying negotiations with other nations to attempt to restore an offshore processing system. Most recently the government, which has comprehensively failed to manage the situation, announced and presented legislation to the parliament to the effect that one solution only was available and would work, and that was the offshore processing in Malaysia of migrants or asylum seekers arriving on this shore. I ask senators to consider what has transpired between the dismantling of the previous government's policy and today. I particularly ask honourable senators to consider how many iterations we have had of this government's policy on border protection and to consider how credible today this government might be on this question.

We were told throughout the period of 2001 to 2007 that offshore processing did not work, that offshore processing was a failure. I recall one particular media release issued circa 2004 by the then shadow minister for immigration, one Julia Gillard, in which the headline read, 'Another boat, another policy failure.' It was a media release issued, incidentally, when the second boat for the year had arrived—shock, horror! Two boats in the course of one year was labelled by the Labor opposition then as policy failure.

We were told that offshore processing would not work and so the government undid offshore processing in August 2008. It became obvious after a short period of time with the surge in boat arrivals that this was not going to work. So in 2010 the new Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, announced that the government would indeed be seeking to restore an offshore processing model and it would be based on an offshore processing centre in East Timor. Of course, it quickly became apparent that East Timor was not signed up to that idea and after a few months of negotiation, if you can call it that, the option fell over.

So it went from, 'There will be no offshore processing,' to, 'Yes, we will have offshore processing.' But the option of East Timor fell over, so the government then started to look further afield. It rejected going to Nauru, where the previous government had a facility—and, indeed, those facilities still exist—because, we were told, Nauru was not a signatory to the UN convention on refugees and therefore an option based on Nauru was unacceptable. The government said, 'We could not go there. They didn't accept civilised values. We couldn't go to Nauru.' So the government looked at other places. It tried to set up a facility on Manus Island. For reasons not entirely clear to anybody, Manus Island appears not to be on the government's agenda at the moment. Eventually, a few months ago, the government announced it was going to adopt the Malaysian solution, that it would go to Malaysia. So it went from a position of saying, 'We don't believe in offshore processing,' to, 'Yes, maybe we do need offshore processing, but it has to be in East Timor,' to, 'Yes, we do want offshore processing, but it should now be on Manus Island in Papua New Guinea,' to, 'No, we cannot go to Nauru and, yes, we must go to Malaysia. Malaysia is not just the best solution available to us but the only solution. No other place is acceptable as a reception point for asylum seekers arriving on Australia's shores. It has to be Malaysia.'

The government comes to this parliament and says, 'After all those iterations of our policy, we have now got it right. We now know what the solution is and you must pass our legislation. Yes, we did tell you that offshore processing did not work, but now we believe that it does. Yes, we did tell you that we as a nation could not possibly deal with a country which has not signed the UN convention on refugees, but now we think that we can.' This government has had no consistency with its position. It has no credibility. It cannot be trusted now to explain to the Australian people how border protection policy has collapsed and collapsed totally. Like freshly caught fish at the bottom of a boat, thrashing about and breathing desperately for life, this government's policy is dying before the eyes of the Australian people. The lack of any vestigial remnants of credibility on this policy is painfully obvious to all who have observed the situation the government has put itself in.

This is reinforced by the Newspoll published earlier this week in which a paltry 17 per cent of Australians expressed confidence in the Labor Party to solve the issue of asylum seekers arriving in Australia. That is an appalling indication of how totally the Australian people's confidence in this government has fallen. Of all the areas of public policy listed in that poll, none recorded a lower level of public confidence than the government's treatment of asylum seekers. For the government to maintain that the parliament must pass this legislation now, given the complete collapse of its credibility in this area, is breathtaking in its audaciousness.

There were other iterations in all of this. At one stage the government promised a coast guard. They were going to protect Australia's borders with coast guard vessels which were going to ensure that somehow these people smugglers would not be able to ply their trade. We learnt that that was going to be based on three vessels. Three vessels were to protect 34,000 kilometres of coastline from the arrival of people by boat. It was such a ridiculous policy. I do not think it even made it to the 2007 election it was so lacking in credibility.

We have in front of us now, amidst the smoky ruins of policies, a policy to send people to Malaysia. The Senate has had the opportunity through its Legal and Constitutional Affairs References Committee to examine what this option actually means. In examining the evidence, the committee was overwhelmed by the inappropriateness of this option. It was not hard to discern a drift on the part of the witnesses and the submitters to the inquiry because there was only one class of witnesses and submitters—one that said that this option was not going to work. Every single witness and every single submission said the same thing. The result was a report which justifiably came to the conclusion—indeed, on the available evidence must have come to the conclusion—that the option was simply not the right one for Australia to pursue. It was based in part on the evidence of appalling conditions in Malaysia with respect to the treatment of asylum seekers: the mistreatment of those people in a country which does not recognise legal rights for asylum seekers or refugees; the caning of people in those places in cruel conditions; the fact that women often have to sell themselves into prostitution to support their families because they are not legally, as asylum seekers, entitled to work in that country; and other privations and unacceptable conditions which any civilised nation ought to shy away from, not embrace.

That stands in contrast to the proposals that were working on Nauru under the previous government, which the federal coalition would return to if elected to government. If Australia itself were again running the facility on Nauru, as it did under the Howard government, all of those horrendous circumstances prevailing in Malaysia could be avoided.. We could guarantee that people would not be caned, that people would be treated fairly and that there would be proper education, health care and so forth for those detained. But this government persists, or at least we think it persists. We are yet to discover what the government is going to do today. We are aware of rumours that the government's policy is being reconsidered as we speak in this chamber. Perhaps it will not be long before the members of the Labor Party in this place support what I am saying and accept that Malaysia is not the right solution. Who knows? That might be the outcome of a meeting which is underway in the building at the moment.

The government has proffered countless excuses as to why it cannot return to the proven, successful policies of the previous government. The explanation that we could not deal with a country that had not signed the refugee convention fell over some time ago when we discovered that Malaysia would not sign the convention but Nauru would. It is in the process of ratifying it at the moment. We were told that Nauru did not previously work because most people, it was asserted, who were sent to Nauru ended up in Australia as permanent residents anyway. We know that is also not true. We know that assertion excludes those people who were sent to Nauru but were found not to be refugees. That is one of the reasons for sending people to Nauru: so it is easier to ensure that you can process people and exclude from consideration those who are not found to be genuine refugees. Others who were found to be refugees were not sent to Australia. So in fact the total percentage of those who were sent to Nauru who came to Australia as permanent residents was something in the order of 43 per cent.

Whether that figure is high or low enough to satisfy the critics of the Nauru policy is irrelevant because it succeeded at another much more important level. It succeeded because it discouraged the people smugglers. It prevented the people smugglers from being able to offer a product. We know that for a fact because from 2001, when the Pacific solution was implemented, the boat numbers plummeted. As many people arrived in the succeeding six years under the Howard government under this so-called unsuccessful Nauru policy as have arrived in a single month under the failed Rudd-Gillard policy. That is in my view a very clear success. We were told that Nauru was a very expensive option and that it would cost us a lot of money. Towards the end of the period of the Howard government when it was possible to close the Manus Island centre—there were so few boats arriving it was not necessary any longer and there were very few people in Nauru—this policy was costing something in the order of $200 million a year. Today, the policy of this government is costing more than $1 billion a year—$1 billion to handle the government's policy of failure.

I ask honourable senators to put the question to themselves: how much better could Australia do if it spent that $1 billion on other things in relation to the plight of refugees around the world? Imagine if we, by returning to a policy that was not so expensive, could invest that $1 billion in improving conditions in refugee camps, in improving education and health in those places and in dealing with the extreme needs of people in those places, rather than catering exclusively to the clients of people smugglers. Perhaps we could even increase our own humanitarian resettlement program. We would have the support of the Australian public to do that because they would see that we were in control of that policy; we were not victims of circumstance. That is another very important point about why this policy has failed. With that 17 per cent figure attached to the government's policy on asylum seekers, we have seen a collapse in public confidence in the ability of government to handle these issues properly. That sometimes can feed intolerance on the part of Australians towards asylum seekers. That is a very serious concern. It is important for the government to recover control of this system and confidence in its handling of it. The fact that the people of Australia are not confident in this government's handling of this policy is contributing to the problem we see in the Australian community with intolerance towards refugees.

We could measure the extent of the government's failure by those opinion polls, but there is another much more sobering and sadder way of measuring the failure of this government's policy—that is, by the extent of the deaths this policy has led to. It has been reasonably estimated, on the basis of the minister's own estimate of failed journeys from Indonesia and other places, that at least 400 people have died on the seas between Australia and the rest of the world attempting unsuccessfully to reach these shores. We saw some of those people die on our television screens last December when an asylum seeker vessel that was approaching Christmas Island crashed on its shores and 50 lives were lost. As sad as the loss of those lives were, they were not the full extent of the lives lost under this government's policies. There must have been at least another 350 people—probably more—in that category. That is a compelling, powerful reason to end this failed policy.

The Australian people are now hearing the government claim that, for all its different versions of what the right policy is, it has now got it correct. But the more Australians hear about the horrendous implications of sending asylum seekers to Malaysia, the clearer it is that this policy is also not going to work, quite apart from the fact that, under the swap arranged with Malaysia, the 800 people whom we are to send to Malaysia have already arrived in Australia. The quota which justifies Malaysia sending 4,000 people has already been met. So people smugglers who follow these issues would realise that more asylum seekers after that 800 will not be affected by the arrangement. It cannot work; it is doomed to failure. But I do not need to tell the government that. It is smart enough to realise that the Australian public knows that as well. The Australian public knows that this policy is falling apart in front of us. Give it a decent burial is my advice. Put it to rest. Go back to a policy which works and is more humane. It is galling, I know, to have to say that from your own lips, but it is true. It is more humane, it will fix the problem, and it is time that you went back to a policy that works.