David Feeney (Victoria, Australian Labor Party, Parliamentary Secretary for Defence) Share this | Hansard source

Senator Ryan talked about how unwinding this legislation was a disgrace. I think it is a fascinating thing to recall that both of those good senators were referring to legislation that they had both voted for. Both of them voted for that legislation.

I think it is worth going back through the chronology of this issue and how we have arrived at the point where we are now—and, I would contend, how the coalition has, again and again, disgraced itself by pursuing politics to the detriment of good policy. In terms of more recent history, Mr Acting Deputy President, you will recall that the decision of the High Court had a profound effect on how this debate moved forward. The High Court found that the various provisions and arrangements that were reached—the so-called Malaysia solution—were not able to be supported through the legislation and that amendments to the legislation were required in order to facilitate the Malaysia solution. Critically, that decision of the High Court also meant that previous activities undertaken by the Howard government, such as its operations on Nauru in previous years, would have been made impossible. So both the coalition and the Labor government found themselves, at that moment, in a very interesting place. They found themselves in a place where both required amendments to the legislation in order for each to make possible their own policy.

Given the state of the parliament—the fact that no one party has clear control over the House of Representatives—it was obvious that an agreement had to be reached immediately between the two parties. One would have thought that if there were one field of endeavour where agreement might be possible, even in the current stalemated conditions we are in—even with the 'no-alition' having long embedded itself in blind and stubborn oppositionalism for month after month—this might be the one where both parties could in fact reach an agreement. Each party needed such amendments in order to make their own policies possible and, of course, there was the urgent nature of the conundrums confronting us: unauthorised boat arrivals and people dying at sea. Alas, that proved to be a naive hope. Our attempts to reach out to the opposition and say, 'This is a moment when we should both be supporting amendments in the House' were rejected. Even when the government put to the opposition that amendments could be made to the legislation that would make Malaysia, Nauru and Manus Island all possible, they refused it. Of course, they did so because the coalition ultimately did not want a fix to this problem; they wanted a crisis—and the longer, the deeper and the darker that crisis, the happier they would be. Mindless arguments about push and pull factors, the fact that there are some 40 million refugees in the world at the moment, the reality that this is going to be a challenge that confronts every government for the foreseeable future—none of that mattered a jot to those opposite. What mattered to those opposite was that a feeling of crisis and angst could be manufactured in the broader community, that the broader community could come to believe that the government was unable to fix the problem, and that the only change would be a change of government. That is their mantra and that is where they have remained.

To the lasting tribute of Angus Houston and the team that he led, we were able to create a situation in public life where the position of the opposition—their absolute refusal to confront the need for bipartisanship and real policy change—was bowled over. Nonetheless, all is not well and we continue to see the opposition referring to this nonsensical policy of turning back the boats. And, of course, we continue to see this arrogance on the other side where they say on the one hand that they will not support— (Time expired)