Concetta Fierravanti-Wells (NSW, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Ageing) Share this | Hansard source

Clearly the parliamentary secretary has forgotten one piece of history, and that is when Ms Gillard told us that every boat arrival was a policy failure. According to her standard, since November 2007 we have had 3,600 policy failures. On her watch, 27,048 people have arrived since she became Prime Minister.

Parliamentary Secretary, let me take you back to the comments that were made at the time when I was in Senator Cash's position as shadow parliamentary secretary in this area. Senator Evans was sitting there at estimates and telling us about the changes that he was proposing, and I was taking him through those changes. He sat there and he told us that he was dismantling 26 programs in the immigration portfolio. How can you change 26 programs in the immigration portfolio and not have a consequential impact with those changes? The people smugglers listened to every word that Senator Evans told the Senate. They were tuning in wherever they were and listening to every word and thinking, 'Great, our product has just improved on the international market and we will be able to promise a lot more and deliver a lot more for a higher price. You beauty; we are going to make a lot more money.'

I would also say to you, Parliamentary Secretary, that as a former government lawyer I did my fair share of immigration law. So do not come into this chamber and sanctimoniously preach about detention. Look back into your own dark days when your predecessors, Gerry Handand the Keating government, introduced mandatory detention. If you want to go out there and preach, you should go back and look into your own history, because over my legal career I have done my fair share of immigration law. If you want to talk about throwing stones in glasshouses you ought to look back at your own history on these issues.

Today we are talking about a bill that provides for enforcement powers available to maritime officers, including boarding, obtaining information, searching, detaining, seizing and retaining things, and moving people into detention. We know that the maritime environment is a particular environment. My husband was in the Navy for 35 years, and at one stage of his career he was commanding officer of the patrol boat squadron out of Darwin at a time when we used to have boats coming in. Yes, it is a very difficult situation, but it is a situation which requires absolute flexibility in officers' ability to exercise judgement at sea and to deal very, very quickly with changing and difficult circumstances.

This bill was examined by the Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs Committee, and I refer the Senate to the dissenting report of coalition senators, who said it was their belief that this legislation represented a surreptitious attempt to remove the Commonwealth's power to turn back unauthorised boats as part of an effective national border control policy. I quote from the report:

We say 'surreptitious' because the Government, in evidence before the Committee, was unable to say categorically whether this power, used by past Federal governments as an important tool in maritime policy, is preserved in the present legislation.

That is the reason the report went on to say:

We note that the power to turn back boats has been exercised in the past and has been exercised by various agencies, in particular by the Royal Australian Navy.

Of course, turning back the boats is not new. Before the last federal election, as Senator Cash has correctly pointed out, we had Mr Rudd telling us that turning back the boats was precisely what he was going to do. We saw his quotes in the Australian, and he told everybody before the election that that was precisely what he wanted to do.

Coalition senators in their dissenting report observed that the Maritime Powers Bill 2012 purported to set out comprehensively the powers of authorised officers in a maritime setting. However, officers of the Attorney-General's Department were unable to tell the committee how, if at all, the power to turn back boats was replicated in this bill. One would have thought that the officers of the Attorney-General's Department would have been able to tell the Senate committee about a very important point in this legislation and to explain where in the legislation it is guaranteed that that power would continue. It was suggested that clause 5 of the bill preserves the prerogative powers of the Commonwealth, including the power to repel unauthorised boats. However, it seems that this bill evinces a clear intention to describe and regulate Commonwealth maritime power so that any prerogative powers must be read down by the constraining provisions of the bill—including clauses 32, 54 and 69. It is very doubtful that the present power to turn back boats is preserved by these provisions. Indeed, that is why the coalition cannot support these bills. The principle bill clearly seeks to codify the Commonwealth's maritime powers and it seems, therefore, that any prerogative powers must be read down.

Since the last federal election we have had many, many boat arrivals. As Senator Cash has correctly said, arrivals during the Howard years totalled just over 13,000—239 boats. Since the last election we have had 570 boats carrying 33,000 people, which is almost 20,000 more people and more than twice the number of boats that arrived during the entire Howard years.

Progress reported.