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

I withdraw, Madam Deputy President, in deference to your ruling, unlike the Greens political party, which are full of hypocrisy. They have just demonstrated this with that point of order. It's okay for Senator McKim to accuse other senators in this chamber of 'blood on their hands', but, when I call him an 'excuse for an Australian', they immediately take a point of order. The hypocrisy knows no bounds.

If people are interested in this debate—and I suspect that, apart from the five of them sitting over that side, nobody is—the people who were genuinely responsible for deaths were the Labor Party and the Greens political party, who supported the Labor Party at the time when they were encouraging criminal people smugglers to bring people illegally into this country. These were not poor refugees. These were wealthy people who were paying a large sum of money to fly to Indonesia and then paying criminal people smugglers $15,000 per person to smuggle them illegally across to Australia. And this illegal activity was then, and is now, being supported by the Greens political party. I often wonder what sorts of kickbacks there may have been to the Greens political party from the people smugglers, or others, who were making a fortune out of this vile criminal activity.

We know there is one political party that does have blood on its hands, and that is the political party that supported the then government and caused the known deaths of some 1,200 people. We suspect that there were many thousands more, but there were known deaths of at least 1,200 men, women and children, which never raised a concern from the Greens political party. They just accepted that, because their mates in the Labor Party were in government. They were encouraging them. The Greens were keeping them in power. We know there were 1,200 deaths.

Mr Acting Deputy President, I have the honour of chairing the Legal and Constitutional Affairs Legislation Committee but the misfortune to have to put up with the sorts of lies you have heard in this chamber just recently from another senator, the absolute and abject mistruths about what is happening on Manus and Nauru. These were arrangements—I might remind anyone who is interested—that were put in place by the former Labor government, with the support of the coalition, because it was really reinstating the policies that the Howard government had put in place over a period of time that had stopped the flow of illegal immigrants into Australia. The Howard government had done that. The Labor Party came to power, opened up the floodgates, caused the deaths of at least 1,200 people and had over 2,000 children in detention—and you never heard a whimper from the Greens, because it was their mates in the Labor Party who did it.

The government changed, and what happened? We stopped the deaths at sea. No longer were people losing their lives because of the actions of the Greens political party and the previous Labor Party government. But the Labor Party government put these people into Manus and Nauru, and the Greens political party supported it at the time, because their mates in the Labor Party were the ones doing it. Fortunately Mr Rudd, in his second term as Prime Minister, started the process of stopping the boats. It's a process that the coalition government has continued. I'm proud to say it has been literally years now since we've had any illegal immigrants into Australia or any deaths at sea. The Greens are so concerned about deaths, but they never whimpered about the 1,200 people who we know were killed as a result of these policies. Because I'm chair of the Legal and Constitutional Affairs Legislation Committee, this argument comes up all the time, first of all by Senator Hanson—she would always burst into tears at the appropriate time—