Brett Mason (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Universities and Research) Share this | Hansard source

There has been a lot of talk about what is Labor's greatest policy failure, and there have certainly been plenty of policy failures to choose from. I used to think the carbon tax was Labor's greatest policy failure. Who else except Labor and the Greens could think that it was a good idea to unilaterally impose a tax on our most successful sector of the economy, a tax more severe than any other major economy has inflicted on its citizens, a tax that everyone now knows will have no effect on temperature or climate? I thought that was Labor's greatest policy failure. We were told how much the rest of the world was doing to address the issue of climate change. Remember when we were told that? But none of our trading competitors were doing too much at all. Brazil, Russia, India and China were not doing too much at all, let alone the United States and Canada. They are in fact doing very little. China, we always hear about. We are still hearing from the government today about how much China is doing with respect to climate change. But we now know they are building three new coal-fired power stations a week and their emissions increase every year by the same amount that Australia emits every year. With the collapse of the price of carbon in the European Union, Labor's carbon tax has again been exposed as a millstone around Australia's neck. How anyone could seriously think that by tying its own hands and going on its own Australia could do anything for the climate in the absence of a genuine global agreement involving the world's economies and major emitters is literally beyond me.

There are arguments that have been canvassed so often in this parliament I have to repeat them because clearly that is a huge policy failure. In the end, you cannot believe that Labor and the Greens would instil a policy across this nation and our economy, but they did it; always style over substance. Labor and the Greens did it, which is a shocking policy failure. Others, less generously than me, say that Labor's greatest policy failure was its mining tax. Once again, Labor homed in on the strongest sector of the economy, our minerals export industry—the only industry that was saving Australia from a recession—and decided it would be a good idea to start killing the goose that was laying the golden egg. That was Labor's idea. In the end, what an appalling policy failure it was, because it turned out that the mining tax was not raising any money. That, even for Labor, was a first. It was another shocking policy failure.

Others still say that Labor's debt and deficit are their greatest policy failure. The carbon tax, the mining tax and shocking public debt from Labor's obsession with spending, with splashing the cash around, with throwing money at every problem with little to show for it at the end have resulted in five record budget deficits in a row. They have also resulted in a record net debt of over $190 billion and the prospect of the $300 billion debt ceiling being breached within the next few years. That is on the cards. Labor's debt remains the greatest threat to the livelihoods of young Australians and those yet to be born. In their social democratic drive to make Australia more like western Europe, the Labor Party and the Greens have saddled our country with a structural debt that never ever goes away. Does anyone believe that this lot would ever pay back public debt? Does anyone in the world believe that? They have not done it in western Europe or in the United States. If this lot had their way, there would never be a repayment of public debt.

The Australian Labor Party always likes to talk about social justice—'social justice' being the key words. Is it socially just for this generation to live on the largesse of Australia's young people and those yet to be born? Is it fair for young people to pay the debt for our generation? Is that socially just? You should ask a Greek teenager what they think about their politicians, about their parents' and their grandparents' generations. They are disgusted. The same would happen in this country if the Labor Party and the Greens got away with it. Public debt remains the greatest potential crisis. Maybe neither carbon tax nor the mining tax nor even public debt are Labor's greatest policy failures. Maybe when historians in the future look at this bizarre interlude called the Gillard-Rudd prime ministerships, they will conclude that Labor's greatest and most tragic failure was its trashing of Australia's immigration system.

Labor's failure to secure our borders and stop the boats might not be as costly as Labor's other failures. It is expensive, as Senator Cash points out, though it may not be as costly as some of the other ones, like the carbon tax, the mining tax and certainly public debt. But what distinguishes this policy from all the others is this: its sheer pointlessness and hubris. That is what makes this policy about how to deal with the boat people very, very different. This was not an issue that Labor had to address. There was no problem when Labor came to power in 2007. John Howard had largely fixed the problem after the spike in boat arrivals in 2001 and in 2002. The Pacific solution, temporary protection visas and strong enforcement have worked. As Senator Cash pointed out, in 2008 only eight boats bearing 179 asylum seekers arrived in our country. That is all.

Mr Rudd, Australia's second worst Prime Minister and the man who wants to be Prime Minister again, I am told, by the end of next week, made a decision to change all that. He decided to soften the rules. In doing so he sent all the wrong signals to countless thousands of people out there—many of whom, I agree, are no doubt genuine refugees; I think we would accept that—who wanted to reach Australia and live in our country, and, of course, to people smugglers, who want to help them achieve those very goals. He sent all the wrong signals and the results are here for all to see. My friend Senator Cash, who knows far more about these issues, has pointed these out. They are worth remembering.

There have been 725 boats since Labor came to power, with over 44,000 people seeking asylum. Two thousand have arrived just this month so far, at 100 people a day on average. Recall that in the whole year of 2008 only 179 people arrived by boat. In June this year, it would take less than two days to reach that entire total. It is an extraordinary change. We have seen $6.6 billion in cost blow-outs, so it is expensive—over $6½ billion in cost blow-outs. Asylum seekers are spilling out over Christmas Island and into mainland Australia because infrastructure cannot house them all. We now know that as well. We know the farce of the Indonesian solution and then the Malaysian solution, which were not solutions at all. There have been numerous other attempts by Labor to fix the problem they created, without acknowledging that there is a problem and without acknowledging that the system put in place by the coalition government had actually worked. That is never acknowledged. Everyone knows it, but it is never acknowledged. Last, but definitely not least, some 1,000 people drowned in the sea while trying to reach Australia. As my friend Senator Cash reminded me, that is 1,000 people that we know of.

So why did we have to go through hundreds of boats, tens of thousands of arrivals, billions of dollars and thousands of lives wasted—all the upheaval, all the embarrassment, all the debate and all the horror? Why did we have to go through it? After all, you would think: if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Why did Labor, Mr Rudd and Ms Gillard decide to fix something that was not broken? The answer is actually quite simple, and I have raised this before. This is the problem with social democratic governments: moral vanity—the vain belief that Labor and the Greens and the left know best and are the conscience of the world and the democratic world. That was the problem with Mr Rudd.

The left, the Labor Party, the Greens, all their cheerleaders in the universities and in the media—the media all backed the Labor Party, as always—and all those people in the arts and the not-for-profit sector backed the Labor Party. They are running away now, but they all backed the Labor Party and the Greens. They thought: 'How caring! How sharing! What a great idea!' No-one says that anymore, do they? You cannot find anyone who says it now. There is this sort of insider crowd—those who have a sort of moral conscience that, apparently, we, most Australians, do not have! These are the people that Nick Cater in his recent book Lucky Culture talks about: the insider crowd, those with a well-developed conscience—none of whom, of course, vote for the coalition! That is the argument of Mr Rudd.

In the Labor Party's view of the world, in the left's view of the world, people who disagree with them, who do not share their views or their methods, people on the centre-right of politics, are heartless. We are heartless, our side of politics! We are morally blind; we lack compassion, decency and humanity—that is what they say. That is why Mr Rudd changed the policy and weakened it. That is what Mr Rudd did—because we lack compassion! We lack ethics; we lack a common morality! The left, on the other hand—the Labor Party—of course, as Mr Rudd used to remind us, is enlightened, compassionate, humane, smarter, better, more understanding and more caring than we are! That was always the argument from Mr Rudd. As someone once observed, the left always thinks that the right is not simply wrong but evil.

So, for the Labor Party and for the left in this country, for the insider crowd, Australia's immigration policy became another opportunity to engage in this sort of political psychodrama, another opportunity to show the world how good—oh, how good; oh, how compassionate; oh, how enlightened—we are, and to receive the cheers of the crowd at the United Nations in New York. Oh, how wonderful! It did not matter to them that the immigration policy was working and that the refugee policy was working smoothly, achieving its objective of offering protection for asylum seekers from right around the world, without confronting Australia's government and society with the challenge of a flood of asylum seekers dying—literally dying—to reach our shores. It is all this political psychodrama for the left—sacrificing everyone and everything else for the sake of that warm feeling that they are right and that everyone else is not only wrong but immoral, dangerous and deluded. It is this sort of self-referencing morality that, I have to say, people in the coalition cannot stand. Mr Rudd is playing out a psychodrama right now for the leadership. But far worse is the hubris that attended his weakness on the policy protecting our borders.

So what are the costs of Labor's moral vanity? Firstly, there are the lives lost because of Labor's moral vanity. Softening our border protection policy has sent tens of thousands on a mad dash to reach our shores across dangerous seas and often in unseaworthy boats. Already, at least 1,000 men and women have drowned in the Indian Ocean. Moral vanity actually kills. It is not trendy, it is not sexy, it is not pretty; it actually kills.

Secondly, there is the financial cost of Labor's moral vanity. The budget blowout is about $6.6 billion. Every new boat is costing Australian taxpayers about $13 million. Our refugee infrastructure cannot cope; it is bursting at the seams. And there is no end in sight. How many more boat arrivals can we accommodate? Clearly, tens of thousands more want to come to our country. And why wouldn't they? Just this morning my Brisbane office received a phone call from a gentleman who wanted me to know that a plane full of asylum seekers from Christmas Island and elsewhere now arrives at the Brisbane Airport every night at 2 am, where they are transferred onto minibuses and taken to various locations throughout Brisbane, including a backpackers hostel in West End which has been cleared of tourists for that purpose.

This is now policy on the run. This simply is not sustainable. Perhaps the farthest reaching cost of Labor's moral vanity is the damage to our immigration policy, the point we discussed before. For some time now, there has been a bipartisan as well as a social consensus in Australia about immigration—and that is a good thing. Immigration has been seen as a good thing, something that benefits our country, that enriches us in many tangible and indeed intangible ways. We are rightly proud that Australia has accepted millions of migrants who have helped to build our country. We are rightly proud of our refugee program and the fact that our intake of refugees is the second highest per capita in the world. Both the migrant intake and the refugee intake have steadily increased under John Howard and then under the Labor government—and Australians have accepted that, there has been no argument with that.

But this is now at risk because, in their attempt to demonstrate how much more compassionate and humane they are than the coalition, Labor have thrown open the doors and lost control of our borders. They have outsourced our generous humanitarian migration program to the people smugglers and to the criminals. That is the problem. They have made a joke of our refugee program and our migration policy. Labor's monumental failure in handling the refugee program is now sapping public confidence in our immigration program and destroying that important public consensus on immigration.

Sadly, you cannot blame the average person in the street who feels this way, having been exposed to all the incompetence, hypocrisy and vain moral posturing of this government. The Left does not like the concept of user pays. They are wary of private health and they are wary of private education. They bristle at the concept that a person's wealth and ability to pay should determine the treatment they get or the services they receive. 'It's not egalitarian, it's not fair, it's not just,' they say; Labor does not like that idea. Yet this hostility to user pays disappears when it comes to the refugee program—because what is our refugee program under Labor other than a system whereby those who can afford it are the ones who get to Australia?

What Labor has in effect said to the refugees around the world is this: 'You are welcome in Australia. We will accept you as a refugee, as long as you can afford to fly to Indonesia from the Middle East or from Africa or from wherever you are and then pay another $10,000 to a people smuggler to ship you across the sea to Australia.' That is what Labor is telling the world. What Labor and the Greens have created is a business class refugee program—and this is supposed to be fairer and more compassionate than the coalition's policy. How is that fairer to some penniless widow with three children, rotting in a refugee camp somewhere in Kenya or in Pakistan or in Asia, who will miss out on places in our refugee intake because their spots have been taken by somebody who has been able to pay their way to Australia? How is that fair? Over the past three years 8,000 people in camps, seeking out protection, have been denied a place because those places have gone to boat people. The recent increase in the refugee intake has all gone to boat people. How is Labor's refugee policy more compassionate than before, with the 1,000 people who drowned on the way to Australia? Labor has turned our refugee policy into some sort of reality TV show: The Amazing Race meets Survivor! Somehow if you get here it is all okay. It is not good enough.

Apparently the Prime Minister is off to Jakarta, and she will solve the problem. The certain thing is this: there was not a problem when Labor went into government. It is time they got over their moral vanity and finally conceded that they have to return to coalition policies.