Anne Ruston (SA, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I too rise to speak on the Migration Amendment (Visa Maximum Numbers Determinations) Bill 2013. Before I go into explaining why I am not able to support this bill put forward by the Greens, I would like to comment on some of the comments made by previous speakers. Senator Lundy has accused the coalition of playing politics with a very serious issue of migration. She also took Senator Seselja to task for saying that we are seeking to optimise the pathways for migration to this country. It is a really tough thing for them to be making those sorts of comments when you look at why we are even debating this bill today. One thing that is absolutely sure is that no member of this chamber—whether from the Labor Party, the National Party, the Liberal Party or the Greens or either of the two independent crossbenchers—would not say that we want to stop the boats and we want to stop people dying at sea. I do not think anybody in this House or in the green House down below would be able say that those are not goals we are all trying to achieve. I think we all agree to a large extent on what the actual problem is. Nobody, but nobody, wants to see a fellow human being persecuted or suffering in their country. Nobody likes to see women or children being discriminated against and nobody likes to think that they cannot be safe in their home. I do not think there is any question at all that we all agree that there is a problem that requires solving. To suggest that we have playing politics with something as serious as this quite demeans the whole debate.

Just because we have some differing views about how we should address this problem does not mean that we are playing politics. If we all agree that we need to find a solution, it is about time that we put some facts on the table about what has occurred in the past and about the things that have proved to work in the past. I know Senator Hanson-Young has long stood in this place advocating that we should open our borders and let everybody come in. She is entirely entitled to her opinion in that regard, but my view is that the one thing we must do is to stop encouraging people who are making money out of the poor and vulnerable by making them pay money to put them on boats. We have to target our actions and policies towards ensuring people smugglers are the ones who are prevented from continuing this hideous trade of trafficking in people. We went to the election with the very clear intention of reintroducing a multifaceted policy package to prevent more people putting themselves on rickety boats and sailing off into the wide blue ocean only to risk their lives and the lives of their wives and their children. All that really achieved was putting money into smugglers pockets. On the basis of an overwhelming mandate to introduce our package of measures, it seems a little odd that we are debating once again another action from the other side—from the teams that lost the election, that did not win the election. Every time we try to introduce something that we have gone to the Australian people with and they have given us the mandate to implement, it seems a little odd that the other parties will attempt to undertake some action in this chamber to prevent us from implementing the policies that we have been asked by the Australian people to implement.

I wonder where this whole exercise is going to end. Every time the Greens do not like something that a coalition government or minister does, are they going to introduce an instrument into this chamber to prevent us from actually governing this country? There has to come a point where they stop doing it and accept the fact that they lost the election, that the coalition overwhelmingly won the election, that we have the right to govern and that we must be given the opportunity to govern.

This particular bill we are debating today is quite clear about what we were trying to do in last week's temporary protection visas policy that we tried to implement and that was kiboshed in this place. We all have to realise the implications of that when it comes to our ability to do what we said we were going to do and that is stop people getting on rickety boats and coming to Australia. By preventing us reintroducing temporary protection visas last week—which, I might say, would have enabled the visa holders to access 100 per cent of any relevant benefits they could have in Australia—those opposite have denied them that possibility as well as the capacity to be able to work. They are now trying to prevent the 33,000 people, I believe, who arrived in Australia as irregular maritime arrivals under the Labor government staying in Australia indefinitely.

What we are talking about here is migration—immigration into Australia. There are so many positive stories that we could be telling in this place about migration in Australia over the years. It was only yesterday that we had the pleasure of sitting here and listening to our two new senators, Senator Dastyari and Senator Tillem, telling of their experiences when they came to Australia as migrants a number of years ago. They were fantastic stories, but they still came by sensible and proper channels and means. If you look at the millions of people around the world who are seeking to flee from the countries they were born in, I think you have to realise that, unless Australia has the intention of doubling its population overnight, we have to have a sensible, properly managed, consistent and fair migration policy in place.

I look at the community that I live in and the marvellous migrants who have come to Australia by all sorts of different means and for all sorts of different reasons. They have made a wonderful culture in my community. We have a huge component of Italians, a huge component of Greeks, many Turks, Vietnamese and Indians, and that has turned my local community into a really rich tapestry of all the sorts of things that these cultures are able to bring. So I do not think that anybody can say that we, as a government and as a country over the years, have not been a very proactive and welcoming country for migrants from all over the world.

If we want to have an ongoing and sensible migration platform and program, we have to put some fairness and some equity back into it. Looking over the last six years, 50,000 or so people have arrived in this country by irregular means. Those 50,000 people obviously end up ahead of the people who, having put in their applications, are sitting somewhere else in the world and waiting for them to be processed. They are sitting there waiting while these irregular maritime arrivals are jumping the queue.

I would like to quickly tell a story. Like Senator Wright, we all have stories of people around the world who we have had some involvement with or knowledge of and who have had a pretty tough time, but I can tell an alternative story. There are two young boys whose auntie and cousin live in Adelaide. I have had the pleasure of spending some time with Marbor Tut and his family in Australia. They are wonderful people and they came here by a proper migration channel as refugees from the Sudan. Marbor's mother had a sister, and her sister and her husband both unfortunately contracted AIDS in the Sudan. They had two very young boys. The mother and father have subsequently died and left these two young boys as orphans. Keny and Awakeer Majur are currently in a Sudanese refugee camp waiting for the opportunity to have their applications to come to Australia under a family reunion program processed. Over the last six years, I have tried to help the Tuts get these two young boys to Australia. Every time we went to the immigration department, they were so overwhelmed and so swamped with dealing with the massive number of irregular maritime arrivals they were required to process that there was no time for these two young boys.

Sadly, even today, these two young boys are still stuck in a Sudanese refugee camp. We are working very hard with the minister to see if we can get them to Australia, basically, before they die. The life expectancy of a child in a Sudanese refugee camp is very short. Very few of them ever leave the refugee camp or survive to a time where they would reach adulthood. I think we can all be terribly sympathetic—I am too; I have heard some terrible stories and the stories that Senator Wright informed this house of a moment ago about the people that she had had the privilege of being involved with. There are some terrible stories; there is no question that there are some terrible stories, but we have to remember that there are terrible stories all over the world, not just of those people arriving by boat.

In the hearings of the expert panel on asylum seekers that the previous government put together, Mr Aristotle, Mr Houston and Mr L'Estrange all made the very clear point that we needed to have a migration policy of no advantage. What we see with this bill is that it really seeks to create advantage. It is really saying that, if you can somehow—no matter how desperate you are to undertake the process—manage to get yourself from Indonesia, Malaysia or wherever you might be coming from, onto a rickety boat somewhere in international waters and rescued by an Australian Navy vessel, then you are going to have a better chance and be given an advantage over and above my two little boys who are sitting in a Sudanese refugee camp.

I think we need to recognise that it is not just the people in this place but also the expert panel that was put together by the previous government who came out and said that we need to be very careful that we do not apply an advantage rule for one lot of people that discriminates against another lot of people. I put that on the record because I think that nobody around here would question the strength and the experience of the three eminent gentlemen who made up that panel or the fact that they come up with that particular decision.

Senator Wright also made the comment that punitive measures cannot work. I suppose the question that Senator Wright probably needs to answer is about punitive measures not working. I do not necessarily agree that they do not. I think the fact that we saw such an extraordinary decrease in the number of boats arriving in Australia immediately following the election of this coalition government probably does suggest that punitive measures do have some meaning—but the punitive measures need to have real actions on the other end of them. We all know that if you think you are going to get away with something you are more inclined to try and do it—that is just human nature. So I think to say that punitive measures do not work is probably something of an oversimplification. I think that they do work.

But in the sense of saying that these punitive measures do not work the only thing that we can really refer back to in arguing this case are the facts of the matter, that the day after the coalition government was elected to this place the boats started to stop coming. By introducing measures like this particular bill to which we are referring today we seek to prevent the minister from having an instrument in his cabinet of things that he is able to use to govern this country. What we would be doing is simply encouraging the problem to continue by taking away another of the measures by which the minister has the capacity to be able to control the problem that he is trying to deal with on behalf of the Australian people. I agree with some of the stuff that Senator Wright said—the tragedy that is occurring out there in the wider world—but I certainly cannot agree that punitive measures do not work, because in the past obviously it has been proven that they do.

Just for the record, it is really worth pointing out that since the abolition of temporary protection visas in August 2008 more than 50,000 people arrived in Australia—some would say by illegal means, but certainly by irregular means and not by the normal migration channels that we have discussed already. That was more than 800 boats, and the cost to the budget in migration was $11 billion. That is the blow-out to the budget—$11 billion. Imagine what good we could have done in Australia over that period of time if that $11 billion had been able to go into other programs instead of just rescuing people from the sea? I imagine that a large component of that $11 billion was the diversion of our Navy, which should have been out there doing other things rather than running around the oceans and plucking people out of the sea. Basically, the previous government just said to the people smugglers over there, 'Well, come on guys, come on down; we're happy for you to come,' and in the process of doing that wasted $11 billion of Australian taxpayers' hard-earned money.

But definitely more tragic than the $11 billion are the 1,100 who lost their lives during that period. There is no price that you can put on a human life, although some overseas seek to do so. So we have a situation where in a very short period of time we had 50,000 arrivals, $11 billion and 800 boats, and 1,100 people have died in the process. That is a record that no government wants to have, and I can assure you that when this coalition government went to the people of Australia it was for the very reason that we did not want to have a record that said that. We said that we were going to put an integrated package of measures together to allow the minister the ability to do what he needed to do to stop those boats coming and to prevent our coalition government from having the terrible record of excessive cost, chaos and absolute tragedy that the previous government will always have to wear as its legacy for its time in government.

When we came into government we had a problem. Obviously, we had a very big problem. We had a legacy caseload of 32,000 people who had arrived irregularly by boat, and more than 20,000 of those people were out in the community. I might say that of those 50,000 people who arrived in Australia by this irregular means during the term of the previous government, 8,300 of them are children. You really do have to question how we could be doing anything to encourage people who would be prepared to put the lives of 8,300 children at risk by putting them in boats that are totally unseaworthy.

I think that whilst the debate will continue, I think we need to be very clear that this is not a political debate. This is a humanitarian debate, and I think it is time that we all accepted that we have a problem and that we worked together to solve it. These kinds of kneejerk, 'I-know-better-than-you-do' types of things that we are getting from the Greens by changing legislation every time they do not like something I think are an abuse of what the Australian people sought for this place to do. I think it is about time those opposite realised the Australian people elected the coalition to govern this country and it is about time you let us govern the country.