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

It is my pleasure to rise in support of the Migration Amendment (Protection and Other Measures) Bill 2014 today. I thank Senator Back and other senators for their contributions to this debate. Before I go into the detail of this bill and the necessity of this bill being passed, I want to go into the context in which this debate exists in this country, and that includes the shocking mess that we have inherited, the absolute disastrous humanitarian outcomes of previous policies implemented by the Labor government, supported by the Greens—and talk about some of the dangers that still exist in what some in the Labor Party before the last election were claiming was a consensus. Unfortunately, that was not the case.

Firstly, I will go to the context and the success of the policy that we have implemented. The border protection policy that the coalition government implemented has led to a dramatic change in the way that border protection occurs in this country. It was only a couple of years ago that we had a situation where it was out of control, where the Australian government no longer actually controlled the number of people who were coming to this country nor the circumstances in which they were coming. The former government had completely lost control, leading to 50,000 unlawful arrivals.

Just a couple of years ago we had 50,000 unlawful arrivals, over 1,000 deaths at sea and around 2,000 children in detention. Cast forward, and, in a relatively short space of time, we have seen virtually no arrivals and we have seen the boats over the last 12 months basically stop. There have been no deaths at sea that we are aware of. When it comes to children in detention, we have gone from the high of around 2,000 children in detention under Labor and many thousands going through detention to under 120 as it stands.

I think that should be a cause for success, for congratulations of a policy that has been well implemented and where the outcomes that we promised are for the good of all Australians, for the good of an orderly migration program, for the good of asylum seekers who are no longer being lured to their deaths, for the good of children who have been released from detention, for the good of our budget and of course for the good of those who are languishing overseas camps, who previously were being denied the opportunity to be given asylum by those who had greater means than those in the camps—those who had the money to pay people smugglers. That is a dramatic change and it has all been done with no assistance whatsoever from the Labor Party or from the Greens. That is a record that I am proud of and that is a record that all Australians should be proud of both from an orderly migration point of view but also, importantly, from a humanitarian point of view—we would never want to go back.

I have touched on the Labor-Greens record. In fact confusion that still exists when it comes to the Labor Party's policy and some aspects of this bill that the Labor Party is not supporting. It seemed that the Labor Party, when in government, right at the end, having completely lost control of this issue, in the lead-up to the election and as a last-gasp pitch to voters tried to claim that it had learnt and that it was now going to implement sensible policies that would actually stop the flow of asylum seeker boats, stop the deaths at sea. That was certainly the message that we heard from Bob Carr. That was the message we heard subsequent to the election from Richard Marles, but I will go to Richard Marles in a minute.