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

I rise to oppose this motion to suspend standing orders. Senator McKim brought up a number of points as to why we should not oppose this motion and why this motion should go ahead. He generally spoke of the US immigration policy and he mentioned Korea. He also mentioned Biloela, and he mentioned offshore processing on a number of occasions. It is well known in this place that contested foreign policy motions should not be debated in this way, that we should deny formality and that this is just an abuse of the process. We should not vote on this motion but we should pick up on certain points that Senator McKim has spoken about.

The first point that Senator McKim spoke about was in relation to President Trump, who has revoked his own view, his own law, that separated children. President Trump and his wife have admitted that this is no longer an issue and that the law is being changed at the moment. What President Trump has done is apply democratic rules—apply the democratic process, which he has been elected to do—to control the US borders. This is a domestic agenda which is in fact a complex foreign policy motion. Senator McKim referred to the hard line that President Trump has taken. Well, President Trump is merely applying laws. He's come out and said that he is going to apply the law which requires that people who enter the US nation illegally—not refugees; he said people who enter the US nation illegally—at other than approved border crossing points be returned immediately to their country of origin, which in most of the cases will be Mexico.

If you look around the world, you will see that this is not a unique view. Senator McKim certainly knows that this is a policy that has been applied and has resulted in lives being saved. The previous policy caused an extraordinary loss of life—1,200 people died at sea. This policy has now been applied across the world. If we look at what has happened in the Mediterranean, we can see the impact on life and death of the ridiculous migration policies of the EU. We're now seeing Hungary, Austria, Italy and Germany entirely re-evaluating—

Senator McKim interjecting—

Yes, like Germany and Italy. We're now seeing Hungary, Austria, Italy and Germany entirely re-evaluating their entire migration laws. This is very, very important because we recently saw in the Mediterranean a boat with 600 people turned away from Italy when it should have taken those people to the closest port, which was Tripoli; that is international law and that's where they should have gone back to. Spain is very happy to accept those people. Spain has accepted those people. But what is Spain going to do when it gets the same number of people as Italy has got—600,000 people entering that country as migrants?

We saw what occurred under the Labor-Greens government during the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd years, and the coalition government was required to yet again fix the appalling Greens-Labor policies that created those problems. I was honoured to be the co-author of Operation Sovereign Borders. How could we forget the 1,200 people who died and the abuse of our laws in absolutely every scenario? Of course, we didn't start offshore processing. Prime Minister Gillard and Prime Minister Rudd started offshore processing. But who actually stood up and finally moved children out of detention? We did. We closed the 17 detention centres in Australia. (Time expired)