Christopher Back (WA, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to reject out of hand the assertion that there has been a failure of the Abbott government to respond adequately to the tragic incident on Manus Island as has been described by the first speaker. And I will place on record, if I may—as others in the coalition have done—that any event that causes the loss and death of any person and injury to others is entirely regrettable. There is no question about that. But, as is usual in the case of the particular senator who preceded me, she has rushed to conclusions long before she ever should have done in this circumstance.

Acting responsibly, the Abbott government has of course deferred to the Papua New Guinean authorities—the Papua New Guinea police and coroner. But, in addition to that, the PNG and Australian governments have both commissioned reviews into the events surrounding 16 and 17 February at the Manus offshore processing centre. The Australian government, of course, has directed that its review will be led by Mr Robert Cornall AO, a former secretary of the Attorney-General's Department and a very highly regarded bureaucrat in this country. He has been tasked to determine exactly what the facts are, to ensure that the facts are available to any authorities who will be called upon to take any action that might be required as a result, and to ensure that the department is provided with a clear recommendation on any improvements that are to be made—three very sound procedures that should take place.

I want to draw the attention of the chamber to the coalition's long-held policy in this whole area of which we speak. One need only go back to the previous coalition Prime Minister, Mr Howard, when he made the comment—which resounded around this country and still holds today—that:

We will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come.

One thing I will agree on with Senator Hanson-Young is that the coalition has been harsh. But the harshness has been and will continue to be on the people smugglers. We will continue to close down this evil trade in the movement of human beings. But we will also act—as has been the case for some years, when the coalition was previously in government and now that it is in government again—on the basis that the best way to protect these people is to make sure that they do not get on boats in the first place.

Regrettably, as we all know, since 2007-08 some 1,100 people have lost their lives in their attempts to come by boat to our shores. They are the ones we know about; it is probable that there are more. It is about one every second day. And, as has been said in this place, I think it has now been 71 or 72 days since we last had an asylum seeker vessel land on Australia's shores. If you average out those 1,100 people over that period of time, you could safely say that anything up to 35 people have avoided losing their lives under these circumstances.

What is of enormous concern to me in this whole debate is the fact that we conveniently ignore and overlook those genuine refugees who we know have been rotting for years in refugee camps approved by UNHCR to come to this country. I have had advice from an interested person in Western Australia about the corruption that goes on at the management level of those refugee camps. People who have been there for a long time in fact never get to the top of the queue, because payments are made to ensure that others jump that queue. That of course is where our concern needs to be, in my view. But, if we have a look at the evil trade these people smugglers have engaged in, we can see that in the life of the last government some 50,000 people arrived in over 800 boats.

In the last period of the Howard coalition government we had, I believe, four people in detention in 2007—and yet, at the time the coalition came back into government, we were dealing with some 30,000 people. We were looking at arrivals of two people per month in the last five years of the coalition government. Contrast that with some 3,000 people per month at the time we came back into government.

I will conclude with the observations of a young person, well known to me, who was on Christmas Island just prior to Christmas on the occasion of the arrival of yet another of these asylum seeker vessels. The point he made to me very strongly, as he watched these people come off the boats, was the obvious wealth of these people—from the clothing they were wearing, the sunglasses et cetera. He said of a group of Afghani men, whom he said certainly appeared to him to be of military bearing and military standing, that these were not your poor asylum seekers; they were quite clearly people who were coming to this place illegally— (Time expired)