Cory Bernardi (SA, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Today I rise to speak on the Migration Amendment (Protection and Other Measures) Bill 2014. Before I get into the particulars of the bill I want to spend some time informing the Senate and revisiting the appalling track record that has led us to the circumstances we face today in dealing with further amendments to migration in this country. And it is an appalling indictment of the history of the Green movement and the Labor Party when in government in this area of legislation.

Let's remind ourselves that when Labor came to office in 2007 there were no children in detention. But, thanks to what could only generously be described as ad hoc, erratic decisions of the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd governments, the number of children under those governments peaked at 1,992. It went from zero when they were elected in 2007 to 1,992 children in detention under Australian law. The Labor-Greens alliance that governed this country undermined Australia's border protection. It weakened our borders, it weakened our immigration program, and I put to you that it weakened our national sovereignty. They were prepared to sacrifice the right of Australia to determine its own migration and asylum seeker policies on the altar of some global refugee convention whilst ignoring the reality of the circumstances we faced. Their policies created a backlog of illegal maritime arrivals.

Let me address this furphy that keeps going around. No-one has ever said it is illegal to seek asylum. No-one in the government has ever said that, but what they have said repeatedly is that it is illegal to enter Australia's maritime or sovereign territorial waters without an appropriate visa and without permission. That is about national sovereignty. So, when we are referring to 'illegals', we are referring to illegal maritime arrivals, of which there were tens of thousands under the previous government.

When we are considering those illegal maritime arrivals, we also have to consider those who sought to enter our country's territorial waters illegally but could not get here. They could not get here because the ships they were on were leaky and they sank. Thousands of people—no-one will ever know how many—died at sea thanks to the policies of those elsewhere. When we hear the sanctimonious and pious Greens stand up in this place and say that they have a mortgage on compassion, what they ignore is that when confronted with these deaths at sea, the so-called compassionate ones, Senator Hanson-Young and her crew, say: 'Tragedies happen. Accidents happen.' Let's do a Pontius Pilate and wash our hands of a thousand deaths caused by ridiculous and dangerous policies! And they continue to pursue them today and that is what we are trying to fix. I am tired, and the Australian people are tired, of having to listen to the same nonsense, the drivel that comes out of the Green's mouths.

I had the misfortune to listen to the last three speakers and the first two of them, Senator Hanson-Young and Senator Milne, were absolutely offensive. I ask myself: at what point do we get where senators in this place are prepared to back every side in the competition except Australia? They are prepared to back the United Nations—the same group who put the late Colonel Gaddafi in charge of the human rights committee at the United Nations. They are prepared to back a guy who put forward a report claiming Australia are effectively torturing people, because we are trying to control our borders. But they do not highlight the fact that there was no critical examination of the submissions put to him by those who continue to sit and deny reality.

The reality is that we comply with our international human rights obligations. The reality is that we have a very generous humanitarian refugee intake. The reality is that we have stopped people from illegally entering Australia's territorial waters and, appropriately so, we have stopped people from dying at sea. Yet, somehow, we are supposed to not be compassionate, according to those opposite. It is an appalling indictment on the rhetoric around this debate.

The policies of the previous government, aided by the Greens alliance, incentivised thousands of people to take advantage of what they saw as a loophole and try to scam the system. There is no question about that. Senator Macdonald highlighted this and Senator Reynolds did as well, that people would travel from their homelands through one, two, three or four different countries until they could get to Indonesia, where they would pay a people smuggler thousands of dollars—more than it would have cost them in an airfare—and they would then ditch their papers. When they got into Australia's territorial waters, they would get on the satellite phone and say, 'Come and pick us up.' According to the Greens, that is okay; that is how we should be running our immigration policy in this country.

I had the misfortune to listen to Senator Milne going off about Australia being terrible custodians, that somehow we were torturing people and not honouring our international commitments. I reject that and I find it absolutely offensive. The Greens are the same group of people who will not condemn terrorists as terrorists. That is what they did with a previous bill in this place—they refused to say that people who are terrorists under Australian law were terrorists; they wanted to give them the benefit of the doubt. Where are they on these terrible regimes that are happening elsewhere? They can only diss the government here. That is the great tragedy of it.

Senator Milne talks about how there are so many more asylum seekers in Europe and that Austria took 70,000 or so—so many more than Australia. Senator Milne needs to go to Europe and look at the consequences of the failure of border protection there, where we see European sovereignty and national cohesion falling to bits because governments have refused to deal with the issues around controlling their borders and having orderly migration programs. Senator Milne referred to Italy and what they are doing to assist asylum seekers. When I went to Europe to look at this problem firsthand rather than through the prism of the green glass of the United Nations, I saw that tens of thousands of people, waves of people, were coming to Italy and that that country gave all of them tickets to France. France shut down their border because they knew they were being scammed. It is disorderly; it is chaos. The European Union is going broke at a rate of knots and it is because a great deal of this is due to the mismanagement by governments of migration and how to deal with the influx of people claiming refugee status. They do not have an orderly process for it to happen.

You can go to entire communities and suburbs from Sweden and Finland right through to southern Italy and Greece and you will find that they are populated almost entirely by people without appropriate documentation. It is a circumstance which no responsible government should be allowed to encourage. Yet what we have here is virtually the same thing coming from the Greens: 'Open the borders. Let anyone come here who wants to. We don't have to know who they are. They can make up whatever name they like. Bring them on in.'

I remember former colleague Wilson Tuckey, the former member for O'Connor, one of the great characters in this place but a man who occasionally told some startling truths, saying: 'If you want to get a criminal or a terrorist into this country, of course you would hide them amongst a boat of undocumented people because you cannot challenge who they are. They can make up whatever they like and you cannot do the research on them.' Of course, Mr Tuckey was widely condemned for that view, but he was absolutely right.

If you look at some of the issues we are facing in this country today, whether it is terrorist activity, insurgent activity, extremist activity or general crime, you will find there are elements of this that can be traced back to a disorderly migration program. To say that is not being racist or anything like that; it is simply stating some facts and some truths.

This bill, the Migration Amendment (Protection and Other Measures) Bill 2014, seeks to build upon a change that went through this parliament last year—the Migration and Maritime Powers Legislation Amendment (Resolving the Asylum Legacy Caseload) Bill 2014. That bill went through on the last sitting day of last year. It took that long to get the bill through because those on the other side did not want to resolve the asylum case load issue. They were happy for people to be in detention; they were happy for people to be coming here—illegally entering our territorial waters. That bill re-created temporary protection visas, it got children out of detention on Christmas Island and it introduced, among other measures, a fast-track system. I acknowledge that getting that bill through relied on the support of the Palmer United Party and Senators Day, Leyonhjelm, Muir and Xenophon. It got that support because it was a sensible amendment, a sensible change. This bill builds upon that one. It makes a number of amendments to enhance the efficiency and integrity of Australia's determination process for onshore refugee status and complementary protection. This bill is important because it is necessary to enable the earlier bill, the one I just referred to, to work optimally. It is going to increase efficiency and it is going to enhance the integrity of the determination process for onshore refugee status and complementary protection.

It is extraordinary to think that anyone could object to the requirement that a person seeking asylum in this country has to be able to prove their identity. I find it extraordinary that, after someone makes a claim for asylum and that claim is denied on valid grounds, they can then cook up another story and we have to take it seriously. Unfortunately, under the current regime, we do have to take it seriously. Effectively they get to say, 'I will try this and, if that does not work, I will try this—and I will keep trying and trying until I get the outcome I want.' That is not how the system should be operating, yet that is precisely what the Greens are advocating in their opposition to this bill.

There will be some amendments to this bill coming through. Senator Macdonald, who is chair of the Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs Legislation Committee, has highlighted that some of the committee's recommendations will be accepted by the government. I understand that Senator Carr is also proposing to move an amendment that the government will accept as well. That gives a sense of how we can achieve sensible outcomes in this area. We do not need pious rhetoric built around fictions and half-truths, rhetoric built around melodious, emotive language designed to tug at the heartstrings. People nod their heads when they hear such rhetoric, but it does not stand up to an examination of the facts. The Senate is meant to be better than that. We are all going to have different opinions on issues, but we should be able to base our debates on facts rather than on emotion and falsehoods.

The amendment being proposed by Senator Carr on behalf of Labor is about schedule 2 of the bill. Schedule 2 of the bill deals with the more-likely-than-not threshold for complementary protection. Labor's concerns about this contain an element of: 'Do as I say not as I do'. The more-likely-than-not threshold was initially adopted by the former Labor government when the complementary protection provisions were first introduced into the Migration Act in March 2012. But this was more a statement of intent; it was not included in legislation. Labor's position is, however, undeniable—although others may attempt to so deny it in their contributions to this debate—because the Department of Immigration and Border Protection has confirmed that, between 24 March 2012 and the full Federal Court decision on 20 March 2013, the Labor government applied the more-likely-than-not test to complementary protection applicants. Labor even argued in the Federal Court that 'more likely than not' was the proper threshold, but they were unsuccessful. So the government is not, through this bill, raising the threshold; it is merely returning it to the level that was set by the then Labor government. I would therefore be surprised, and I am sure the Australian people would be surprised—I should say 'disappointed' rather than 'surprised'—if Labor in opposition were to decide to oppose something that they thought worth arguing for in the Federal Court and which was actually the test they applied over those nearly 12 months.

As I mentioned, the government has listened to the Senator Legal and Constitutional Affairs Legislation Committee and will be moving amendments sympathetic to the committee's recommendations. I think this is an example of how well the Senate can work. There is no monopoly on good ideas. Sometimes when a bill goes through the lower house it is not fully considered. Senator Macdonald made the point that it has been many months—I think it was June last year—since this bill has been considered. It has been with the parliament or a Senate committee now for nine months. That is why it is now time to fix this—to more fully and rigorously apply Australia's migration legislation to ensure that our migration program retains its proud place in the world. I think that it is a very proud thing for us. As a country we have a great history of migration, but it has worked because appropriate processes have been followed. People apply to come to our country, and they go through an appropriate process; where they are seeking refuge, that is an appropriate process as well. Where people are waiting in United Nations camps for placement in other countries, which Australia has signed up to, that is the appropriate place for people to be assessed and then allocated to a country.

People who say that there is no queue should go to some of these United Nations refugee camps—in Sudan, Indonesia and elsewhere—and have a look at the thousands and thousands of people who are trying to do the right thing, who say, 'I am seeking asylum,' and who go through the process and wait for an appropriate place to open up. It is not just about coming to Australia; it is about going to other countries around the world that have humanitarian refugee intakes. These people are not country-shopping and they are not looking for the best deal for themselves; they are looking for a deal. That, I think, says lots about their integrity and the strength of their character compared to those who simply can afford to pay their way via an illegal people smuggler.

I read the other day that these illegal people smugglers are now in the business of smuggling jihadis out of Australia and into Syria and Iraq. They are not fussed about where they get their business from. They do not care who is on their boats. It is all about the money for them. The Greens do not care who is on the people smugglers' boats. They do not care who comes into this country. They do not care about the integrity of our migration system. They do not care about Australia. It is the only conclusion one can draw. They do not care. They care about some sort of political advantage for themselves. (Time expired)