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

There are times during major debates of this kind when one would dearly like to see some kind of tear in the space-time continuum to allow the present to hear the future come back to educate us about what we are debating. In particular, I cannot help but wonder about the course of the debates that went on about the Pacific solution between 2001 and 2008, in particular, when it was dismantled by the Rudd government. I would just love for some of the Labor Party critics of the Howard government's solution to somehow have heard the speech that Senator Lundy gave today in the Senate, when she told us, magisterially, about how we need to reopen the Nauru detention centre to deter people smugglers and that we need to deter people-smuggling businesses by not having a system of onshore processing but rather we should process people offshore in a place such as Nauru.

How extraordinary it would be, how embarrassing it would be for those critics who lined up, week after week, to hector the Howard government and its supporters for having the audacity to suggest that we were doing refugees a favour by having offshore processing. These people went on for not months but years. Mr Bowen said, 'We closed Nauru because it was the right thing to do.' Senator Evans said, 'The Pacific solution was cynical, costly and ultimately unsuccessful.' Mr Rudd said, 'The Pacific solution is just wrong. It is a waste of taxpayers' money. It is not the right way to handle asylum seekers or others.' But today, of course, that is exactly the solution which is being reinstituted by this government. Tail between its legs, humiliated beyond belief, the government is now telling the Australian people that everything it said between 2001 and 2010 was wrong. Ms Gillard, as the then opposition spokesperson on immigration, said, 'The so-called Pacific solution is nothing more than the world's most expensive detour sign. The so-called Pacific solution is not a long-term solution.' That was in May 2003. Then she said, and this is interesting: 'Can anyone in this place really imagine that Australia will be processing asylum seeker claims on Nauru in 10 or 20 years time?' Yes, we can imagine it, because Ms Gillard's government is actually implementing a return to the processing of asylum seeker claims on Nauru—almost exactly 10 years after that claim was made. So we know that that is the case.

In contrast, we have the words that the Minister for Immigration and Citizenship, Mr Bowen, has uttered to justify the decision to reopen the Nauru detention centre:

I consider designating Nauru to be a regional processing country will discourage irregular and dangerous maritime voyages and thereby reduce the risk of the loss of life at sea;

And further:

I think that the cost of irregular maritime voyages, in terms of the loss of human life and in respect of the substantial financial and resourcing costs to the Commonwealth in dealing with such arrivals … means that it is in the national interest to attempt to reduce the number of such voyages, and to do so urgently.

He is saying those things now without the slightest sense of irony, when he said such different things in the past. The truth is that this government has finally been mugged by reality and it realises, after so much wasted money, after so much patent and obvious failure, after so many deaths at sea, that its policy just was not working and that it had to be reversed. It simply had to be reversed. The government is taking steps now, through gritted teeth, to reinstate the policy which it spent a decade systematically tearing down—from opposition and then from government—and it expects us to somehow believe that it is sincere in its conversion to this new position. The fact is that it is putting on the clothing of the Howard government—and doesn't it hurt!

The question has to be asked by the Senate, in looking at this change of position by the Gillard government: how effective will a change of policy actually be? And that leads to another question: how much does this government actually believe in what it is doing? Does it have the conviction to carry forward the policy which it reviled and denigrated for so long? The answer to that question has to be no, because this policy is based not on the government's assessment of what it needs to do; rather, it is a reaction to the opinion polls which said that its policy was not trusted by the Australian people to deliver any longer an effective policy on border control.

What is the evidence for that statement, my assertion that this government actually does not believe in what it is doing? Last year when the High Court brought down the decision striking down the Malaysia solution, Senator Lundy said on ABC radio in Canberra that she would never vote for the Nauru solution, the reopening of Nauru. But today in the Senate, Senator Lundy moved a motion for Nauru to be reopened. Only last night on Q&A, in the midst of the government implementing a policy of evacuating its opposition to the Pacific solution, Senator Evans defended the policy that had dismantled it in 2008. On ABC Radio National today Senator Cameron made it very clear that he did not support this policy and that he was rolled by the caucus. Again, he was extremely concerned about the treatment of refugees and he had opposed in caucus implementation of this policy but was bound by the caucus decision and will have to vote for it on the floor of the Senate. Are we to believe that the spirit of what Senator Evans said last night and the spirit of what Senator Cameron said this morning does not reflect the views of most members of the Australian Labor Party caucus? I do not believe that, although that is what we are told. I think those voices were the authentic voices of the Labor Party which is not implementing these changes of policy because it believes in them but because it feels it has to do this because its policies are no longer trusted by the Australian people. The Labor Party knew that its policies were spectacularly failing and, more to the point, were being seen by the Australian people to be spectacularly failing and it had to do something to change the dynamics of the debate.

This government, without any conviction in what it is doing, has taken back the position that it denigrated and opposed under the previous government and cannot be said in any sense to have its heart in what it is trying to do. It is clearly doing this with the greatest of reluctance. The Howard government opened the Nauru detention centre from scratch 19 days after deciding that we needed to put in place a more effective policy in the form of the Pacific solution. I know it is now 29 days since the Gillard government came to a similar conclusion, and we are yet to see the reopening of the centre—even though there was a centre, albeit one that had been allowed to run down, courtesy of the Rudd and Gillard governments. But there is even now a fundamental problem in the way that the government is approaching this task. It is implementing the Howard government policies without the conviction that goes behind such policies. The government is hoping that the policy it grabbed quickly off the shelf, as it were, is the policy that will get it out of this political bind, that will eliminate and cancel the pains the government has felt so obviously in the last two to three years as the policy has progressively collapsed.

Senator Thistlethwaite said a few weeks ago during the debate on the legislation that underpinned today's motion that he was glad that this was happening because now the issue was going to go away. The problem is that it is not going away: the boats are still coming. In the last 24 hours, four boats have arrived carrying 205 people, bringing the total number of arrivals this year to 10,000. The policy is not working, because the Gillard government has picked up only part of what the Howard government was doing. The Gillard government has only adopted those elements it thinks it can get away with to make it look as though there are some differences from the approach of the previous government. But the government hopes these differences are enough to make it look to the people smugglers as though the government now means business on the question of deterring their trade. But it is not working. I am sorry to disappoint Senator Thistlethwaite and others, but I think this issue will be part of a live debate for the Australian community for some time to come.

This government has so stimulated the business of people smugglers, so encouraged them to put up a shingle and open their doors to vulnerable people wanting to find a new life, that it is going to take a great deal of conviction and effort to stop the trade. Picking up only part of the elements of the previous government's policies is not going to achieve that. We have made it perfectly clear that you need at the very least to put other elements in place, such as the re-enactment of temporary protection visas and the policy of turning boats around when it is safe to do so in the waters around Australia. The government at this point is not prepared to take those steps, but how many more boats do we need to have, how many more risks to people's lives do we need to have before the government takes those other steps? Until the government takes steps of that kind, I do not think this issue is going to go away.

I turn to what the Greens have had to say in the course of this debate. They have thrown out a fairly large number of insults to other parties in the course of this debate. They have attacked the sincerity and the bona fides of the other parties in the Senate. Senator Hanson-Young, in the course of her remarks, said: 'No-one believes that the major parties will look after refugees.'