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

You can interrupt all you like, Senator Hanson-Young, but our record on refugees is second to nobody's. This party, this opposition, has been responsible for many tens of thousands of refugees being brought to this country and offered homes here and new lives. What I also think needs to be said at this time is a point that the Labor member for Fraser made in a debate a few weeks ago when the policy was in the first stages of being reversed. He said the Greens are hardly in a position to talk about this because it has been the Greens' policy on onshore processing which 'has been in place for the last four years'. The Greens have had their policy put in place; it has been put into effect.

Senator Hanson-Young interjecting—

I know you did not like elements of the policy; you would have liked more things in more areas. The Greens are never satisfied in these sorts of areas. You would like to spend more money on this or put more money into that—there is never enough money as far as the Greens are concerned. But your policy is the one that has been in place for the last four years and, as a result, your party has to share some of the responsibility for the 704 deaths at sea since October 2009. You wanted onshore processing, you got it under this government and you have got to share some of the blame for the consequences of that policy. You tell us now that the policy is not working. You would not know a policy that works if you saw it. You claim that the policy was not working between 2001 and 2008 under the Howard government even though the boats virtually stopped and there were virtually no deaths at sea. That was the record of the Howard government.

The record of the Rudd and Gillard governments is one where the policy has failed and the deaths have occurred. The Greens cannot pretend that they sit magnificently divorced from those actions because they supported those actions on the floor of the Senate, they buttressed the government's moves towards that end and today they have to bear some responsibility for the fact that the policy has been a failure. Notwithstanding their attempt to say it was not done the way that they wanted it done, the policy has been a failure and they share some responsibility for that failure, including the massive waste of money and the huge loss of life at sea.

It is time to acknowledge that new measures need to be put in place. The government has been brought, kicking and screaming, to the position where it is now implementing the policies which it says were not successful in the past but which it now says, miraculously, are of course the ones that have to be implemented in order to be make it work. I welcome the fact that the government has come to that position. It would be the decent thing to do if the government was to acknowledge, at least in passing, in a begrudging kind of way, that what the coalition have been saying for some time deserves a little bit of credit, that it was what we have been urging you to do for the last four years and you have only just come to the conclusion that it is the right thing to do. And don't pretend that there are differences in your approach, because if you say, 'We're not doing TPVs and we're not doing turning back the boats,' you could find yourselves embarrassed by that claim because you might yet have to come back and do it when you realise that the policies you now have in place are still not deterring the boats.

I think I am entitled to a little bit of venting today at the government for the ungracious way in which it has acknowledged that its policies need to be reversed and that it needs to come back and pick up the policies of the coalition. It is good that the parliament has the chance today to approve the instrument of designation made by the Minister for Immigration and Citizenship to put this policy firmly in place. But I warn, as both Senator Cash and Senator Brandis have done already in this debate, that you cannot get the solution to the problem which the Howard government had unless you pick up all the elements of the Howard government policy. That has not yet happened and you are therefore very far from being out of the woods yet on this question.