Arthur Sinodinos (NSW, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I found the speech by the previous speaker quite an important speech because she made many points about our humanity and about how this is a complex issue, and she is absolutely right. The art of government has always been how you balance the various competing considerations. This is the dilemma we have always faced. In this particular issue, over the years we have tried to find a way to we meet our obligations to the international community through our membership of the refugee convention while not allowing the perception that compared to other countries with similar obligations we are somehow a soft touch; therefore, more likely to be a place where people should go and therefore on the basis of which an industry can spring up, people smuggling, which seeks to feed on the fears and concerns of asylum seekers.

All of us want Australia to play its role as a global citizen. There is no doubt about that. That is why we have one of the most generous refugee and humanitarian programs in the world, particularly on a per capita basis, and there have been discussions over time in the context of legislation about how the intake might be lifted and all the rest of it. One of the issues we face in this debate is that, if we want to be infinitely compassionate, doesn’t that mean that you just allow anybody who wants to to come here? If there are 20 million refugees in the world, why should we cap our program at 20,000 or 50,000 or 100,000? In other words, what are the limits on our compassion? Should there be limits on our compassion? As a society, we have to balance a lot of concerns. We cannot take everybody. We have to have a rules based society, and we have to have some rules by which we determine who comes here and who does not.

It is one of the fundamental tenets of good government that the government has to observe the laws and the laws have to be enforced, not have this idea that we can somehow give a wink and a nod to people smugglers, reinforce their business model and put money in their pockets—and that is not money coming from us; that is the money being put together by people overseas who are concerned to try and find, in many cases, a bolthole, somewhere to get to. Many of them are genuine refugees; there are others who, quite conspicuously, are economic refugees. But the fact of the matter is that if we want our community to consent to a generous refugee program and, even more importantly, a large immigration program, we need to show that we are in control of what happens.

These are the sorts of considerations that real people, real governments, have to deal with. It is fantastic when we come in here and display our morality and live up to the highest ideals of our conscience, but we all have to live in the real world as well. When the Tampa was steaming on its way to Indonesia and was diverted to Australia, no respectable Australian government was going to sit by and just say, 'We'll put out the welcome mat and in you come.' That is not how you run a country. No country runs like that. We have to have a policy. We have to be generous but it has to be on our terms, because this is our country. We make the rules. We make them in a way that is consistent with our global responsibilities.

I have heard talk over time about the impact of the measures that we have taken on people's mental health. I think that is a real issue. We should try and do whatever we can to address those sorts of issues, but it is people like the people smugglers who are putting people at risk on the sea and at risk of mental problems in these facilities. I never hear condemnation from some of the speakers in this chamber of the people smugglers, the ones who are battening on the wretchedness and misery of others. We are trying to find better pathways, but we are not in favour of an open pathway. If we say we will process whoever gets to Malaysia or Indonesia, it is an open door policy. No respectable government can have that. That has never been the Australian way. It will not be the Australian way. We are in control and we will remain in control.

I hear myths perpetrated around this chamber around the perfidy of previous governments in potentially allowing people to die at sea. There is no Australian government, Labor or coalition, that, with the possession of information about the risk to people at sea, would knowingly say, 'Let them sink.' That is a myth. That would not happen in our system. There are too many people in our system with access to the right information and, more importantly, with the conscience to do something about it—on both sides of politics. It is a myth that people would not take action in circumstances where they have a capacity to do so.

May I say that there is no monopoly on morality or wisdom in these matters, but there are some in this chamber for whom there seems almost to be a monopoly on sanctimony—a holier than thou attitude. Well, I can tell you, when you are in government you have to make choices. People on the other side of this chamber know that all too well. You have to make choices and you have to be responsible for those choices. We cannot have an open door. We must make those choices and often it is making the best of a bad lot of choices. Today we are in that position because we should have made these choices a few years ago when the problem started to reoccur. We had a certain policy which appeared at one stage to be a bipartisan policy all the way up until after the 2007 election and then it started to unravel. That started to send mixed signals to people overseas and it allowed us to get into the situation we are in today. Senator Wright is right when she said we have gone backwards: we have gone backwards.

We need a full suite of policies and we can do that while exhibiting compassion in terms of our refugee and overall immigration intake. I would like to see the Greens address the issue of a higher overall immigration intake because that is one way we can make sure as many people around the world have the capacity to come to Australia, always subject to the caveat of what is our absorption capacity, our carrying capacity as a country. If we want to be generous, why aren't we going down that route? That is something I think the Greens should address in terms of the general immigration program.

Finally, let me conclude by saying this. The Houston report is welcome by the coalition because it verified on an evidence basis many of the propositions we had put. Yes, it is a nuanced report and there are things in there that we have to grapple with as well as the coalition but the point is finally an independent report verified that what we have said for years was not based merely on ideology, prejudice or crass political pointscoring. There are real policy issues in this area and, for too long, they have been treated as a basis for political pointscoring. Hopefully, we are getting to a better basis for policy. I call on the government to adopt the comprehensive suite of measures that we have said are necessary in order to provide effective deterrents in this very sad and sorry situation we find ourselves in.