Gary Humphries (ACT, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Defence Materiel) Share this | Hansard source

I did not mishear. What was the purpose of raising that rather extraordinary contribution about this conservative website except to, by implication, tar the Abbott opposition with the views put forward on that website? That is the purpose for which you engaged in that exercise, Senator Stephens, suggesting that we will revoke our membership or our participation in the refugee convention, that we will outlaw people advocating sharia law and that we will forcibly return everybody who has come from Sri Lanka. Senator, that is beneath you.

Let me make it perfectly clear that the views of that website do not represent the policies of the alternative coalition government. Secondly, the policies put forward by the Abbott opposition have been plain and clear for at least the last five years. If you do not know what we propose to do in this space, then you obviously have not been listening. Because, time and time again, the opposition has set out what it would do differently to this government and to suggest that, somehow, we have a policy vacuum in this space is utterly dishonest. We have made it clear that we will restore temporary protection visas. We have made it clear that we will have an effective offshore program, not the mishmash of policy solutions which has tumbled out of this government over the last five years and that we will turn back the boats when it is safe to do so. Those are our policies. We have made them perfectly plain for a number of years and, to suggest that there is some lack of clarity about that is a claim so disingenuous it could only have come from a government which, on this issue, is utterly desperate. It is a government which has run out of ideas, a government which has failed on every count and a government which is, frankly, no longer trusted by the Australian people. I suspect that, even on the Left, there is a lack of trust in the government to actually solve this problem.

Senator Stephens invited Mr Abbott and Mr Morrison to sit down with the government before the end of next week to talk the talk and sort out this problem. Frankly, why would Mr Abbott or Mr Morrison talk to this government, this government which has lost its way so comprehensively on this question and which has so comprehensively run out of ideas? How many different policy solutions has the Rudd-Gillard government gone through in attempting to solve this problem and stop the boats? How many has it gone through? Let us count them. First of all, when it was in opposition it announced that it was opposed to the policies of the Howard government. We had Senator Stephens making pious statements about how Kim Beazley had authorised John Howard to pursue his policies to repel the boats, as though somehow Kim Beazley had signed up to what John Howard was talking about when in fact the Beazley, Latham and Crean oppositions comprehensively opposed, at every step of the way, the policies of the Howard government in this space.

Senator McLucas interjecting—

Yes, it is true, Senator McLucas. In particular, we recall one media statement by the then shadow spokesperson on immigration, Julia Gillard, with a banner headline 'Another boat, another policy failure'. That was your policy. You opposed the offshore processing that we had executed on Nauru and Manus Island. You were opposed to it. You made political hay out of it. Yet we are getting pious statements today from the government: 'We think it's terrible that this issue is being exploited; we shouldn't make that kind of use of refugees.' You exploited refugees endlessly every day that the Howard government was in office, a government that executed a solution which actually stopped the boats. Do not lecture us on that subject.

You came to office in 2007 and then, in August 2008, you changed the policy: 'We'll have onshore processing from now on.' What happened? Steadily, in increasing numbers, the boats began to arrive—boats which had not arrived for the last six years since the Pacific solution was implemented, in 2001. The boats that had not come during those intervening six years began to return, in 2008. They began to return in increasingly large numbers. More and more people climbed aboard those boats. The shopfronts in Indonesia and elsewhere of the people smugglers were reopened. They got back into business and they began to ply their trade. It was increasingly obvious to the Australian people over that period that the government's policies were failing. The test of success that they had applied—that is, the number of people who arrive by boat; 'another boat, another policy failure,' a quote by Julia Gillard—was failing, on their own admission. Boats were arriving in increasingly large numbers.

Julia Gillard deposed Prime Minister Rudd this time three years ago, very memorably, and said, 'I will fix this problem.' So the next policy alteration came from the Labor government: 'This time we will process unauthorised arrivals on East Timor. We'll send them to Timor—got the problem solved.' That policy fell apart almost immediately, largely because they had forgotten to talk to the parliament of East Timor about processing refugees in that place. In due course, the government of East Timor said, 'No, we're not going to do that.'

So a third policy position had to be developed, in a hurry. What will it be? 'We will have a regional processing centre somewhere in South-East Asia and all the nations of the region will send their refugees to this regional centre and Australia will also be able to direct people to that place.' That policy was announced almost three years ago. When is it going to happen? When are we going to have our regional processing centre for refugees? Of course, it has not happened and it is never going to happen, for reasons that are extremely obvious if people care to give it any thought at all.

Then the government announced its notorious Malaysian solution, a solution which was so utterly inappropriate and so undermined human rights that it began to lose the support of many on the Left, dismayed by Labor's frequent and unpredictable changes of policy. Then, having previously condemned the idea of ever sending refugees to Nauru, the government announced it would send refugees to Nauru. Yet, despite all of these changes of policy, the boats keep coming and people keep dying at sea.

So the suggestion that we should sit down with this government and talk about how we can solve the problem of the boats is just laughable. There is only one way of solving this problem and that is to get a government which has a proven record of being able to deal with this issue. It has been implied or outright suggested in the course of this debate that somehow, whatever its failings in the area of policy delivery may be, it is the Labor government which brings compassion to this debate. It is the one that at least cares about and delivers better outcomes for refugees—and I have heard this claim made in the past on a number of occasions. As a member of the small 'l' wing of the Liberal Party I want to explain to the Senate tonight why I think that the only compassionate approach to dealing with the issue of illegal boat arrivals of refugees on our shores is to adopt the policies that were implemented by the former, Howard government. We can do that by looking at the arguments here in a kind of SWOT analysis, and comparing what Labor is doing with what the Howard government did and what we propose to return to. Let us look at the alternatives in that light.

So where do the strengths of Labor's approach lie? Is it that Australia, by engaging in this policy, essentially, of open borders, obtains a result where more refugees are settled in Australia? Of course the answer to that is no. Many people imagine that, if the boats are arriving, we are at least accepting refugees who would not otherwise get a place in Australia. As has been made clear in this debate, that is not true. Australia has long had a policy of accepting refugees. A target of 13,800 humanitarian resettlements has long been Australia's policy, and that target was met even during the years under the Howard government when the boats stopped coming. So, in fact, there is no link between the number of refugees that are accepted by Australia and resettled on a humanitarian basis, and the number of illegal boat arrivals. However, I note that the government, in an attempt to buy back some of the support that it was losing from the Left previously, has recently announced that it is increasing that target to 20,000, albeit at huge extra cost. So we do not actually accept and process more refugees under the approach adopted by Labor; we simply do so at a much greater cost.

As to which is better on cost, Labor's approach or ours, the cost of processing refugees who arrive by irregular means and dealing with border protection issues this financial year has now climbed to $2.2 billion. That is $2,200 million being spent every year on dealing with this issue, which is four or five times what it was costing Australian taxpayers under the previous, Howard government. That is a blow-out of $10 billion under this government—bearing in mind that that is without one single extra refugee being resettled in Australia as a result of the change of policy. We are not buying another $10 billion worth of humanitarian resettlements by spending this extra money; we are simply resettling people on a much more expensive basis because the thrust of our program is being put into the irregular maritime arrival context rather than into the planned resettlement through organisations such as the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees or the International Organization for Migration. So, again, on the question of cost, Labor's policy is a fiasco, a total failure.

As for public confidence, what can I say? Public confidence in this government's ability to handle border protection has all but disappeared. I think you would be hard-pressed to find even a dyed-in-the-wool Labor voter who is prepared to say they think the government has got that right. It is clearly an utter collapse of public policy, and the public sees that.

On one measure, one extremely important measure, in my SWOT analysis, there is a very, very telling black mark against this government's border protection policies, and that is the cost in human lives. Whatever the supposed lack of compassion that might have been at work under the Howard government in its extended detention of people in places like Nauru—but let us not forget that at the end of the Howard government there were four, not 40 or 400 but four, people still in detention on Nauru—and even if you think that that is a high price to pay for a policy to deter the boats, you cannot possibly argue that that cost is too high if you contrast that with the cost of this government's policy: the 1,000 souls who have died at sea, encouraged by Labor hanging out the shingle saying, 'Come by boat and you will find a place in Australia.' Those are 1,000 deaths which did not happen under the previous six years of the Howard government's policy, and those deaths at sea will continue unless we have a change of policy. If this government cannot execute that change of policy, it should step aside and let another government do just that.

So, on that analysis, there is nothing to recommend this government's approach—absolutely nothing. It is, on every criterion you care to name, a failure, and it has to change.

I mentioned that Senator Stephens, in her contribution, made some extraordinary remarks. She seemed to be implying that it was a lack of bipartisanship, compared to what has happened in the past, that was the problem. This is a government that has had failure after failure after failure in this area, but it wants us to believe that if only it could get the Malaysian solution in place it would solve the problem. At some point we have to be able to say: 'You don't have the capacity to solve this problem. You have a demonstrated lack of performance here. Let's pretend for the moment that you can't produce a solution with the Malaysian solution.' But Senator Stephens, in suggesting that it is all going to be all right as long as we can get the Malaysian solution in place, said that the government of the day needs the power to resolve this problem. I think she was effectively saying: 'Well, just let the government do it. The parliament shouldn't be able to stop this. The government should be able to make this decision unilaterally.' I have to say it is a very strange principle. She went on to say that at least Kim Beazley gave John Howard the authority to deal with the problem when he was in government, implying again, I think, that somehow Labor had waved through the Pacific solution and given its blessing to allow the Howard government to get on with the job.

I was in the parliament at that time, and I know that Senator Mason, Senator McLucas and a number of others in the chamber were also. I do not remember ever having the blessing of the Labor Party for anything that the Howard government was doing in that space whatever—nothing. We were ruthlessly attacked every day on this policy, evidence of which is that notorious headline under the opposition's immigration spokesperson's name: 'Another boat, another policy failure'. Senator Stephens, in her suggestion that many people around the world were fleeing their homes because disruption, civil unrest and so on, seemed again rather coyly to be implying that the push factors were really to blame for the boats coming across the sea. I do not believe that anybody believes that anymore. I think the evidence of the way the boats stopped in 2001 when new policy was applied and the way they started again in 2008 when that policy was reversed makes it amply clear that it is pull factors which are determining the flow of numbers. If anyone has any doubt about that, I suspect they only need to wait until the new government comes to office and changes those policies to see just how true that actually is.

We have a government with a policy in total free fall—a government whose credibility on this issue has been utterly shredded. It has demonstrated through repeated policy failure that it simply cannot solve this problem, and it is urgent and important that we do so. I want Australia to stand as a beacon to other countries of the way we can compassionately and fairly offer people the chance for resettlement here—to deal with what, sadly, is an international problem of people who are refugees and who desperately need a home. I want Australia to be seen as a place which offers people that refuge under a planned humanitarian resettlement program, where all or almost all of our refugees are resettled here by virtue of a decision consciously made by the elected government of Australia that it will identify this group of people in this refugee settlement centre in this part of the world to be the beneficiaries of Australia's largesse and bring them here for resettlement. That is an honourable program and a program that Australians will have confidence in, if we can return to that. We do not have that program now. We have a program which is utterly failing and which Australians almost universally acknowledge as such. It is time this government, which can't even start such a program, got out of the way and let a new government do just that.