Mark Bishop (WA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you, Mr Deputy President, and welcome back into the chair. I think over the last week or so we have missed your sense of balance in the carrying out of those duties of the chair as similarly we have missed a sense of proportion and a sense of balance from the opposition in their contribution today in this take note of answers debate. Today the opposition asked some five or six questions of government ministers. I think four went to Senator Wong on matters related to her portfolio and general matters of economic interest and one question in the middle went to Senator Lundy on matters related to refugee processing. Today's theme is: why don't we shift the biff, shift the bash? All last week and yesterday the opposition have been engaged in a raging torrent of attacks on public sector workers in Queensland and New South Wales—they couldn't get out of the race quick enough to do that. Also, in South Australia, when the Leader of the Opposition, Ms Redmond, saw her counterparts in New South Wales and Queensland hopping into the public sector and public sector workers, she immediately said she could beat them, double their odds and go for 25,000. That has only worked for the last six days, so today they cast about for something else to talk about in this debate. They asked four or five questions on economic matters to Senator Wong. She batted them off—whack, six; whack, four, whack, six! They can't ask questions on that, so they reach down into the satchel and find an old friend, an old faithful. They have only had two in the last three years. One has been the carbon tax and we know that is a patent failure, with all of their attacks wasted for 18 months to two years. The second ground of attack they have had against the government has been our alleged failure on refugee processing and on asylum seekers coming into this country.

They fail to mention that as the legislation went through both houses of parliament, the House and the Senate, some short time ago at relatively short notice and after relatively brief discussion in both places, the opposition and the government were sitting on the same side and voting for the bill to address the issues arising out of refugees and asylum seekers seeking entry into this country. The government does not in any way knock the support of the opposition. We welcome it and appreciate their change of heart after two or three years to finally see sense and give the government support in the passage of legislation to achieve some peace in this difficult area of policy. We welcome their support; we noted it at the time and I refer to it again today. The three-person report chaired by former Chief of the Defence Force, Mr Houston, was not about who won or who lost the politics of that debate. We have taken action, supported by the opposition, to implement the 25 or 27 recommendations of the Houston report. One of the key recommendations was to increase the intake to 25,000 people a year.

The opposition today introduced a new concept, put out there by Senator Scullion. I must concede at the outset that he did a bit of a backtrack about three sentences later because he had only mentioned half of their new policy. But the policy outlined by Senator Scullion, and presumably endorsed by the opposition front bench because we have heard no suggestion of going back on it, is to turn around the boats at sea and allow all of the people in those boats to drown. Some three or four sentences after he outlined that, Senator Scullion found a caveat, because he appreciated the horror and brutality of what he had said, by saying it was subject to the boats being safe. How one determines that boats are going to be safe or not at a distance of some miles or hundreds of metres one does not know, but we now have a new policy leg. The three legs have turned into four, and the fourth one is now to turn around the boats at sea and hang the consequences.

That is a different position to what the government seeks. Our solution, our approach, is much broader. We seek engagement with all of our near neighbours—PNG, Nauru, Malaysia and others. Some of those places, which of course are the passage points— (Time expired)