Penny Wong (SA, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Finance and Deregulation) Share this | Hansard source

As I was saying, this matter was traversed in great detail in the budget. The opposition would know that we did provision additional funds for asylum seeker management in the budget. The methodology for irregular maritime arrivals is set out at statement 6 of the budget papers. It is transparently heavily influenced by occupancy levels across the immigration processing network, which are determined by the number of IMAs already in Australia awaiting resolution of the protection visa applications, operational decisions, length of time taken to resolve asylum claims and so forth. So the point is: we have been transparent in the budget about the methodology associated with IMA costs.