Alan Eggleston (WA, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

This is a very important debate. What we have seen in the last day or so is a complete backflip by the ALP government against the policy they had when they came to office of reversing the very successful coalition measures which stopped the flow of refugees and reduced to a trickle the number of people coming to Australia by unconventional means. Those measures were the provision of temporary protection visas and, of course, the Nauru solution, under which people who came to Australia by boat were taken to Nauru, where they were offered the opportunity of assessment and, in due course, relocation to a recipient country if they proved to be genuine refugees.

The coalition has always argued that the full suite of measures that stopped the boats, including offshore processing in Nauru and temporary protection visas, should be reimplemented if the flood of boats was to be stopped, and we are very pleased that at long last the ALP has seen the wisdom of our policies and has decided to reinstate at least the policy of relocating people to Nauru. I am quite sure that within a short period of time, if common sense prevails, we will see that temporary protection visas are also put in place. Under these, people are offered a temporary protection visa—literally—which means they can stay in Australia while there is a problem at home and, when and if that problem is resolved, they are sent back to where they have come from. That practice was used in the case of the Kosovar problem, when the Kosovar refugees came here. It was also used in the case of East Timor when a large number of East Timorese came to Darwin and, in due course, when the situation East Timor was resolved, they were sent back to East Timor.

The most important point to make about what has happened in the last 24 hours is that the Howard government's highly successful asylum seeker policy, developed over 11 long years in power, has at long last been seen by the ALP to be a reasonable and respectable policy that was in fact very effective. When the coalition left office, just four people who had arrived illegally by boat were in detention—just four people. In a joint media release by parliamentary colleagues last Thursday, Scott Morrison and Michael Keenan pointed out that the largest single boatload of illegal asylum seekers had arrived the night before. It brought to 379 the total number of boats that have come to Australia since the Labor government came to office and the total number of people to more than 22,000. Some 7,500 refugees have come to our shores on boats this year alone. That amounts to one boat a day under the ALP government. Yet, in the last five years of the Howard government, just 18 boats arrived—one boat every 101 days, not one boat a day. That is an important statistic to dwell on.

When the Pacific solution was in place, between 2001 and 2008, 1,637 boat people were processed on Nauru and Manus islands, and I am pleased that, at long last, the Gillard has seen the value of this approach—albeit belatedly and on the advice of the Houston committee. I was very surprised that the government accepted the findings and advice of the Houston committee so willingly. I suspected that they would find flaws in whatever it was that Houston recommended. I think it just shows that at last they have looked back at the Howard years, have seen how successful the Howard policies were, have decided that common sense should prevail and that policies that worked under the government of John Howard should work again so that this terrible saga of people coming across the seas from Java to Christmas and Cocos islands and to Ashmore reef—with sometimes whole boatloads of people dying when the boats sink—will come to an end.