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

I am sure it is very distressing for many Australians and certainly disappointing for those of us in this chamber that the senator chooses to treat such a difficult policy issue in the way that she did. I am very happy to have a policy discussion about irregular maritime arrivals. I am very happy to do that. It is a complex policy area. There are 46 million people displaced worldwide, and the world has changed, when it comes to people smuggling, since 2000. The world has changed in many ways, as Senator Carr in part alluded to in an earlier answer. I do not think that we serve the Australian people well to use something as tragic as drownings in the way that they were used in that question—to talk about 'rolling out the carpet' or whatever the phrase was in such a flippant way. We are talking about people's lives, and we are talking about a complicated policy issue—