Barry O'Sullivan (Queensland, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

It's often not what the Greens say when they speak; it is about the things that they ignore. The Greens often come into this place and argue that laws should be broken. In this case, the good senator forgot to mention that these events are as a result of a ruling of the Supreme Court of Papua New Guinea, so it was an order. For the entire time that I have been here, these people have called for the closing of this detention centre, and, when the Supreme Court of Papua New Guinea ruled accordingly that it ought to be closed, of course overnight their voice changed. So it is not just hypocrisy; it is a concerted effort on their part to mislead the people of Australia with respect to these circumstances.

Senator McKim—can I say to you, Acting Deputy President—continued to refer to these events as a policy of the government. This is not the policy of the government. This is the government respecting the sovereignty of a foreign nation and indeed a partner in the Pacific, in Papua New Guinea, and fulfilling its wishes as ordered by the Supreme Court.

But let's just get back to the beginning. Come back to the beginning. What happened here was not the making of the government of the day. Fifty thousand people arrived illegally on over 800 boats over a period of time. It was an issue that the government inherited. The policy to put these people on Manus Island was a Greens-Labor policy, and our government had to arrive in government with a mop in one hand and a bucket in the other to clean up this mess.

You would've noted, colleagues, that not once—not once, ever—have the Greens protested about the 1,200 souls being lost at sea. Not once did they ever mention it. They want to talk about a calamity. Twelve hundred men, women and children—people whose names we don't know, in many circumstances—perished at sea, under a policy that the Greens supported in this place for many years. There were over 8,000 children detained, not under this government, but under a Labor government, and it took this government to get these children out of detention. We were able to do that, despite resistance. We're all well aware of the famous evidence by the Human Rights Commission President, who admitted, virtually, to colluding with the Labor Party, while the government was in a transitional phase, to bring criticism and to bring an inquiry onto the incoming government about children in detention. That was despite the fact that, in the early periods of this government, we removed hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of children out of detention and got them to the smallest numbers.

These people on Manus Island have choices. They have an opportunity, many of them, to go to the United States. But we have, particularly, Senator McKim up there, falsely misleading these people, so that they are resisting the opportunities that they have. They can settle in Papua New Guinea. They can move to—