Zed Seselja (ACT, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Richard Marles went on television and said, 'We acknowledge that they have had an impact.' And he was very quickly rebuked and brought back into line. He was speaking the truth. It was a rare moment from this Labor opposition, where he was acknowledging that the policies that we have put in place have worked, and he was very quickly undermined by others in the Labor Party, including his own leader.

The turnbacks do work. The turnbacks are part of a suite of measures that have sent a very clear message that getting on a leaky boat and paying a people smuggler is not the path to citizenship in this country. It is not. We have made that absolutely clear, and that should be reinforced. All of our policies should reinforce that, rather than undermine that as they did under the previous government.

I often have discussions, as I said, with advocates. Many of them are well intentioned, but I think those advocates forget—and what they cannot seem to reconcile—that if you are going to have a limit on the number of people you take in an immigration setting then you have to have rules. Whether you take them in the humanitarian space, in refugee places or more broadly, if you are going to limit the refugee space—and virtually all Australians would agree that we have to have a limit—then we have to set those limits in terms of how many people come to Australia. If you are going to do that then you have to have rules and you have to enforce those rules. If you do not enforce those rules then the people smugglers get to choose. They get to choose who gets to be accepted as a refugee in this country.

There are those who languish in other countries in refugee camps—and I have spoken to many of them who are now in my electorate. Many of them waited for many years. I am not saying that some of the people who have arrived here by boat do not have legitimate claims. I am saying that we should not have a policy that is set up to give favouritism and preference, and to make the test of whether you are accepted as a refugee in this country being whether you can arrive here. Under the previous government—under lax border protection policies—those who got here got preference. Those who do not have the means to get here—those who, one would argue, are the most disadvantaged; of all the displaced people, those with the least means—they are the ones who are most disadvantaged under the former policies. They will never get a look-in because there will always be someone who gets preference by paying a people smuggler and getting here. So, if you acknowledge that we have to have limits then we have to have rules, and those rules have to be enforced. That is at the heart of the difference in how we do border protection and how we manage these things.

There are other significant problems that have flowed from those failed policies. Because so much extra money was being spent we saw cutbacks in other areas—things like Customs screening were cut back significantly under the former government; they were running out money because they blew such a hole in the budget. That is also important. It is important that we screen what is coming into this country, whether it is drugs or other illegal goods. That was undermined because the whole system was in chaos.

The reintroduction of TPVs is fundamental to the government's key objectives to process the current backlog of protection claims. The government is providing temporary protection to those IMAs who are found to engage Australia's protection obligations. TPVs will be granted for a maximum of three years and will provide access to Medicare, social security benefits and work rights. This is a really important part of this legislation: it is providing work rights. The alternative from those who want to vote against this is to deny work rights so that people who have not been processed and who are waiting cannot actually work to sustain themselves. Surely, that is not a good outcome? Surely that is not something that should be advocated, yet it is. It is being advocated; whether they say it or not, that is what they are advocating with their vote.

There is a range of other aspects to this bill, but it fundamentally goes to continuing our job of fixing the problems that we inherited when it comes to border protection. We have made amazing strides in that area, because we no longer see the boats, we no longer see the deaths at sea and we are seeing the numbers of children in detention dramatically reduced. All of those things are great strides, which have come about through strong border protection policies. This is the next step; this is the next part of dealing with that legacy, and I would commend this bill to the Senate.