Ian Macdonald (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

You make a very good point, Senator O'Sullivan. We will do everything possible to stop children from drowning, unlike the Greens and the Labor Party who presided over the deaths at sea of hundreds and hundreds of children and nary a word of condemnation. I hope someone will be able to apologise on behalf of the Greens later in this debate.

Senator Hanson-Young uses words like 'the minister is a bully and a coward and he bullies children in detention camps'. Those of you who know Mr Morrison and Senator Cash know that you would not find any more humane people than those two people. They are there trying to do a job. I might say the Australian people asked us at the last election to stop the boats. Had they been stopped during the Labor regime, there would not have been 30,000 people in immigration detention at the moment, there would not have been 30,000 people wanting to have their cases dealt with. Not in this particular bill but in other bills before the parliament the minister is trying to give certainty to those people who are in Australia at the moment. If Senator Hanson-Young and the Greens political party wanted to have a look at the bill they would see that the bill before us is particularly beneficial. Temporary protection visas will be granted for a period of up to three years. Senator Hanson-Young would have told you in her speech—if anyone who listened believed it—that nobody was going to get a temporary protection visa. Temporary protection visas will be granted for a period of up to three years. On the expiration, a person's circumstances will be reassessed. Those who are found to still be owed protection will be granted a further temporary protection visa or what is called a SHEV. I want to talk about the safe haven enterprise visa because I think it is a very good initiative of the government. I congratulate Senator Cash and Mr Morrison for doing this.

Consistent with the Abbott government's principles of rewarding enterprise and its belief in a strong regional Australia, a new visa called the safe haven enterprise visa will be created. The safe haven enterprise visa will be open to applications from those who have been processed under the legacy case load and those who are found to engage Australia's protection obligations. The SHEV will be an alternative temporary visa to the temporary protection visa and will encourage enterprise through earning and learning. That is a great initiative. Perhaps the minister can elaborate in her speech on how it is going to be introduced. I think it will be introduced by regulation very shortly. The visa will be valid for five years and, like a temporary protection visa, it will not include family reunion or a right to re-enter Australia.

The SHEV holders who have worked in regional Australia without requiring access to income support for 3½ years will be able to apply for and, if they meet eligibility requirements, will be granted other onshore visas—for example, family and skilled visas as well as temporary, skilled and student visas. So contrary to what Senator Hanson-Young would have you believe, this bill contains a lot of protections and it starts to bring some order to the chaotic situation left to us by the Labor and Green government of the last six years, a government which presided over many deaths at sea, including the deaths of children.

I would hope Senator Hanson-Young might rise at some time during the day and apologise for misleading the Senate about those statistics on the children. She should because she was at the estimates committee just last Thursday when all of these figures were explained by officials. There were zero children in detention when the Howard government was defeated. When the Abbott government came to power, there were 1,743 children in detention, with not a word from the Greens and not a word from the Human Rights Commission. Since that time, in a short 12 months, over 1,000 of those children have been released and by June next year, according to officials—this is their hope, if they are given the authority to do this—there will be no children left in immigration detention. One would have thought that, if the Greens had any care at all, if they had any compassion, if they cared about children in detention they would be the first ones here supporting this bill.

It is my honour and pleasure to chair the Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs Committee, which looks into these bills very carefully. Senator Hanson-Young would tell you, I think she said, that there were 5,000 submitters to this inquiry. Well, sorry; there was a petition—the sort of petition you leave at the coffee shop and everyone signs it without knowing what is in it—but the number of submitters is clearly shown in the committee's report and, I am sorry, Senator Hanson-Young, they do not reach 5,000 or 2,000 or whatever other exaggerated number you might have said. There were the usual witnesses at the hearings; a lot of them are refugee advocates. I might say that I think the government's decision not to have taxpayer funding for these migration agents has caused some concern in the migration agents industry. We do get a number of people who, I concede and I congratulate them, do have some expertise in this area; however, they come from a particular view. We on this side come from the view that Australia has an ordered immigration system. We take around 14,000 refugees every year. But if you jump the queue, and if you are wealthy enough to pay the people smugglers—I often wonder whether the people smugglers are donors to the Greens political party; you would think there might be some other reason why the Greens are so in favour of the people smugglers—