Jim Molan (NSW, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I thank Senator McKim because he's clarified that point. He goes on and brags about the cruelty of offshore detention and he says that I revel in trampling rights and freedoms.

We all remember the situation, unfortunately, because it's not that long ago. We've been through this a number of times before. People will remember the Howard years. They'll remember Minister Philip Ruddock. They'll remember the Tampa incident and the involvement of the military in that. They'll remember offshore processing. They'll remember Christmas Island and they'll remember John Howard, who said that we decide who comes to this country and how they come to this country. And we did decide, fundamentally, because about 70 per cent of the people supported that decision. We did decide that, and the way that we decided was that we emphasised that, to come to Australia, you had to come in through a legal entry port. The method of arrival can be illegal even if you then claim refugee status. Of course, that was the reason that we used the term 'illegal maritime arrival' or its abbreviation 'IMA'. It was quite a legitimate abbreviation and quite properly used because their method of arrival was illegal and that's what it stands for. It stands for 'illegal maritime arrival'.

When Kevin Rudd arrived, he claimed that he would maintain John Howard's border policy and defence policies. As Prime Minister, he formed a committee to actually do something. Yes, committees are great for policy, but rarely are they any good for doing things. As a result of this, he failed to do anything with 15 or 16 government departments and agencies working through a committee, none of whom had ultimate responsibility and none of whom worked in accordance with management 101. It was guaranteed to fail from day one. The actions that that government took just made the situation worse.

It was roughly at this stage that I became involved in Operation Sovereign Borders. At that stage, I was assisting the then opposition with defence policy. The Rudd-Gillard-Rudd government had, during its period of time in government, been absolutely appalling on defence. It was a legitimate function for someone with some defence knowledge to actually try to assist the opposition to oppose them. The Rudd-Gillard-Rudd government saw the Defence Force as an ATM and drove down defence spending from two per cent to 1.6 per cent. They had no ships and no subs but were very good at pink batts and school halls!

The greatest thing we saw was the arrival of a consolidated and logical management 101 based technique for actually solving this extraordinary problem. Minister Morrison at the time was good enough to call me a co-author of Operation Sovereign Borders—something I am very, very proud of. But I suspect, in fact, that there were about four co-authors of Operation Sovereign Borders, so it's not an honour that I have to myself. Why did all this occur? After everything that the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd government did had not worked, the one thing that they left us with, as we were saying before—Senator Macdonald gave you the statistics of the number of children who were held in detention over that period of time, the highest number being almost 2,000 at any one time, along with 50,000 people off 600 to 800 boats—was an appalling situation. There were something like 30,000 people left in this country who were undocumented, and 1,200 drowned. What that left us with was an extraordinary problem. I have not heard anyone who was running the government or from the Greens, who were supporting the government at that time, take responsibility in any way, shape or form for those deaths. Senator Macdonald went through all those figures.

We had to pick up after that. The only thing that we were really left with that we then had to carry on overseas was offshore processing. The matter of public importance describes the system that we have as 'Australia's offshore detention system'. It's not an offshore detention system; it is an offshore processing system that has an element of detention in it. At the moment, there are no people in detention on either of those two islands.

The Rudd-Gillard-Rudd government tried to stop the boats, but they couldn't do it. It cost us $11 billion for them to fail, so we did it for them. We did it for the people of Australia, who have consistently supported Operation Sovereign Borders and the strengthening of our borders at about 70 per cent in any poll that's been taken. We did it because this was a life-and-death issue. It is not as though we were solving an esoteric or abstract problem. This was a life-and-death problem—1,200 people had died. We did it because we are an immigrant nation and, as an immigrant nation, we must maintain confidence in our immigration system. Our people will not support 200,000 people coming to this country each year of which just less than 20,000 are under the humanitarian program. On top of that, in the last couple of years, we've brought in 12,000 Syrian refugees.

We must maintain the confidence of the people in our immigration system and we have done that. The migration system at the time that we took it over was being run by the people smugglers. That is an appalling situation. To subcontract your major migration policy to a bunch of thugs throughout the world—a bunch of criminals—is absolutely irresponsible, and we see the consequences of that every single day in the Mediterranean. The policy that we did not introduce in Australia still exists in the Mediterranean and people are dying in their thousands to this day.