George Brandis (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Attorney-General) Share this | Hansard source

I will tell you what we are doing about it, Senator Hanson-Young. What we did about it in 2001 was deprive the people smugglers of a product to sell, so they could not entrap or induce these gullible and vulnerable people to part with, in many cases no doubt, their life savings to embark on an inherently hazardous risk and put themselves and their wives and their children at risk on the high seas. That is what we did. If you want to know whether that policy worked, let the statistics answer your question, Senator Hanson-Young.

From the time that the Pacific Solution was adopted by the Howard government in September 2001 until the time when the Pacific Solution was, in a moment of folly, abandoned by the Australian Labor Party in 2008, do you know, Acting Deputy President Edwards, how many asylum seekers came to Australia, how many asylum seekers put their own lives, their families' lives and their children's lives at risk on the high seas? It was 301 people in six years. Those are the statistics. Since the Labor Party in its foolishness in late 2008 abandoned that successful policy do you know how many people have embarked on that hazardous journey, put themselves and their wives' and their children's lives at risk? As of today, 24,697 human souls have embarked on that perilous journey—in the case of the children, unbeknownst to them the risks to which they were being exposed—in less than five years.

In fact, the statistics I quoted include the first year of the Rudd government up to the time when the Pacific Solution was abandoned, so I should correct myself. It was 24,697 people since the election of the Rudd government, but almost all of those people—all bar 25 in fact—have arrived since November 2008. So in less than four years 24,697 people compared with 301 people over six years. And you say, Senator Sarah Hanson-Young, that we were not compassionate! How many lives were saved by depriving the people smugglers of a product to sell? How many lives were saved? We will never know, but this we do know: in addition to those nearly 25,000 people who arrived in Australia in the last four years, we know for certain that another 704 have drowned—men and women and boys and girls and babies have drowned. And those are only the bodies that have been recovered or accounted for. We know that an additional inestimable number as well—undoubtedly many hundreds—have also drowned. That is the price of bad policy. That is the price of giving people smugglers an incentive to entrap gullible and vulnerable people by assuring them safe passage to Australia and then loading them onto leaky vessels which have led to the deaths of more than a thousand of them. That did not happen after the Howard government reintroduced the Pacific solution.

There could not be a debate in which the issues are more serious because we are talking about the lives of innocent people. I honestly do not know how Senator Hanson-Young and her Greens collaborators can sit over there in that corner of the Senate chamber and say that a policy which led to the deaths of more than a thousand innocent people is a policy that is acceptable to them but that a policy that avoided the loss of those lives and that reduced the number of unlawful asylum seekers to a trickle—301 people in six years—was not a compassionate or an effective policy.