Gerard Rennick (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise today to wholeheartedly support the Migration Amendment (Repairing Medical Transfers) Bill 2019. One Saturday evening a few years ago, I called my mother as I always have every weekend for the last 25 years. Little was I to know that this would be the last time I would do it. I mentioned to Mum that my son was looking forward to his third birthday, and Mum was confused as to who I was talking about. She then mentioned that there was a party going on up the road and she didn't know what the fuss was all about. I quickly realised she was talking about the Chinchilla Melon Festival, and that Mum didn't sound right. I got off the phone and asked my sister to call her, just to make sure I wasn't overreacting. She had the same thoughts and called an ambulance, which took her to the Chinchilla Hospital that evening. We left Brisbane the next morning at 3.30 am, arriving at Chinchilla Hospital early in the morning. Mum had been vomiting throughout the night. As I was to later find out, she had been having multiple strokes.

I wish I could say we could have gotten her an ambulance to Brisbane, 280 kilometres away. We couldn't. The best we could do was get her an ambulance to Dalby, 80 kilometres up the road, where she would have to wait for another ambulance to take her to Toowoomba, another 80 kilometres up the road, where she would have to wait again for another ambulance to get her to Brisbane. At all of these places, it was not known how long it could take to get the ambulance. Because of this, we decided to drive Mum ourselves, on the condition that she was up to it, which, of course, she said she was. The doctors gave us some blood thinners and we took off. At Jondaryan, halfway between Dalby and Toowoomba, she had another stroke, vomiting for five to 10 minutes on the side of the road. We managed to get her to emergency at St Vincent's in Toowoomba by about two in the afternoon, where we waited for about seven hours to get an ambulance to Brisbane. She arrived in Brisbane at 10.30 and had to wait another 90 minutes before seeing a doctor. All up, it took about 18 hours to get Mum to Brisbane, a road trip of around 280 kilometres.

A few weeks ago, it was reported that an asylum seeker who injected his pecker with palm oil was flown from PNG to Australia at taxpayers expense under the medevac laws. Can someone tell me why my mother, who herself was a nurse for 40 years, couldn't get an ambulance, let alone a flight to Brisbane, yet a foreigner can get a flight from PNG for self-harm? Shouldn't we be looking after Australians first? Why is it that asylum seekers, many of whom could afford to pay people smugglers thousands of dollars, get better medical treatment than people in Australia? Why is there a higher ratio of medical staff to asylum seekers than there is in many parts of Australia, especially regional Australia? It is the first duty of any responsible government to keep its citizens safe and to defend the nation's sovereignty and borders. The coalition understands this.

This government has a strong and consistent record when it comes to ensuring the integrity of our borders and in fixing Labor's disastrous failure in this area. When it comes to sound judgement, operational resilience and saving lives, it's the coalition and only the coalition that gets the job done. We stopped the boats the first time, during the Howard government, and then the current Prime Minister stopped them again as the responsible minister when we returned to government in 2013—and so on. This government, ever vigilant, continues to stop leaky boats from making the same perilous journeys that tragically claimed 1,200 lives under the weak border protection policies of the last Labor government. Any attempt to weaken our current suite of stronger border protection policies, policies that have successfully stopped the boats, should rightly be called out as careless, reckless, and potentially disastrous for the poor hapless victims of the inevitable policy fails that will come from a clueless Labor on this issue.

Our policies, including offshore processing, temporary protection visas and boat turnbacks are all critical parts of ensuring that our borders are respected and the boats stay stopped. Only the coalition truly believes that we should control our borders with a resolute, uncompromising strength of purpose. To put it plainly, and despite what they may say from time to time, Labor simply does not believe in strong borders. It's self-evident that the Leader of the Opposition doesn't believe in strong borders and it's doubtful if the Greens even believe in borders at all. You will recall that under Labor's weak border policies, policies that they branded as heartfelt and compassionate at the time, we saw 50,000 people arrive on over 800 boats, 1,200 deaths at sea, 8,000 children in detention and 17 new detention centres rushed into operation. Labor's management of our borders was in no way humane, compassionate, or anything other than an irresponsible moral crusade that quickly became a bloody disaster. Labor's border protection policies did not work. They cost over 1,000 lives, created a long-term legacy of people in offshore detention, and blew a $16 billion hole in the federal budget. No wonder the Australian people said 'Thanks, but no thanks,' to Labor at the last election. This one horrendous failure alone should be sufficient to effectively ban Labor from government for the rest of the century. What is the coalition's record since we returned to government and established Operation Sovereign Borders, under then Minister Morrison and, since, under Minister Dutton? We have seen successful boat arrivals drop to zero and the closure of 19 immigration detention centres.

Weakness on our borders is certainly no virtue; it is a self-indulgent vice which puts lives at risk. For the 1,200 who drowned and for those who have remained in detention, true compassion would have been to do all we could to prevent them from getting on board those leaky boats in the first place. Every plank of our policy structure is necessary to provide a comprehensive deterrent to people smugglers. Make no mistake: these criminals are ruthless and they're watching. Criminal people smugglers are ready to exploit every loophole in our laws or any lapse in our resolve to get back into business. I remind fellow senators that it was our resolve in stopping the boats, taking back control of our borders and breaking the people smugglers' business model that allowed us to substantially boost our humanitarian refugee intake to be amongst the most generous in the world on a per capita basis.

Given the compelling history and the facts of these matters, and after more than five years of exceptional results, thanks to the policies and operational rigour of the coalition government and its agencies, where we didn't see any new illegal arrivals or deaths at sea, some in this place have felt the need to tinker—to remove some of the moving parts that they felt were inconsequential and served no purpose—and, in doing so, risk weakening what was working. This is precisely the risk we face today as a consequence of the passing last February of the heavily amended home affairs legislation amendment. This cynical attempt by some current and former members of this parliament to curry favour with a small but vocal community, who in the most part enjoy a life of abundance scattered across well-heeled, leafy suburbs, is a return to reckless Labor-Greens border protection policy at its very worst.

The so-called medevac bill now threatens to undermine one of the most significant planks of our border protection regime: offshore processing. Further—and, who knows, perhaps deliberately—there is no explicit return mechanism for those who have been successfully treated for illness or injury under the bill. This failure has been described by the Secretary of the Department of Home Affairs as a grievous flaw in the legislation, and rightfully so. By opening a perceived pathway into the Australian community, a sign of potential weakness has now been sent to raise the hopes of people smugglers—to once again entice desperate and misguided people to pay money and attempt to come to Australia by boat. There can be little doubt that the optics, if not the immediate consequences of the medevac bill itself, will risk breathing new life into a wicked, people-smuggling trade.

Handing effective control of our borders to activist doctors is not the abrogation of responsibility and divestiture of control that Australians expect of their government on such a critical issue. Australians voted overwhelmingly for the coalition in 2013 knowing that we would apply strong, uncompromising policies to take back control of our borders, and Australians have returned the coalition at every election since in full knowledge of those policies. Clearly, the Australian people, who we all serve, by the way, do not want to see those hard-won, highly effective policies countermanded by a few activist doctors, not to mention legions of case-hungry lawyers. The passing of the medevac bill has effectively forced the government's hand to reopen, as a cautionary measure, the Christmas Island detention centre at significant cost—a negative in anyone's mind and certainly not something the government wanted to do, after closing the same centre in 2018.

The success of our border policies is something to be proud of. History shows that this Liberal-National government closed detention centres, while Labor opened them. We removed children from detention, while Labor put them there. We saved lives, while Labor, through their policies, continued to place lives at risk. Far from saving lives, the medevac bill, which this bill aims to repair, will actually risk more lives. This is proven. It's a question no longer open to debate. The case is closed. Weaken our borders by dismantling any of the supporting structure around boat turn-backs, temporary protection visas and offshore processing—where settlement in Australia is not an available option for those who arrive illegally by boat—and you give a green light to people smugglers and, in doing so, make more deaths at sea almost certain.

Despite the proponents of the medevac bill arguing that the legislation was about helping those in urgent need of serious medical care, the head of Operation Sovereign Borders last month told Senate estimates that fewer than one in 10 of those who have been transferred have actually been hospitalised—just 13, in fact. This hardly passes the pub test when they say that the bill was only for serious medical and mental health emergencies. The highly compromised nature of the present medevac bill became clear earlier this month when there were widespread reports of an Iranian asylum seeker detained in PNG who was being sent to Australia because he botched a DIY penis enlargement, which involved injecting himself with palm oil. Bound as he is by the provisions of the previous medevac bill, the home affairs minister has been compelled to approve the transfer of this patient to Australia. This is ludicrous, and it's just one example of how this short-sighted legislation is working. It's working just as the activists, the people smugglers and the schools of circling lawyers all hoped it would. This individual, according to reports, had a long history of misconduct, with up to 50 separate incidents recorded during his time in detention. These include him being arrested for throwing boiling water over a guard and charges for punching another guard after he disrupted the detainee viewing pornography. The treatment for this man's self-inflicted ailment could cost taxpayers as much as $10,000. You would be hard-pressed to find a single rational person to argue that this is a worthwhile use of taxpayers' money.

This is precisely the type of dangerous, chaotic mess that Labor and the Greens attempt to pass off as compassion. It's allowing the transfer of people who fail a character test and do not qualify for entry into Australia because, among other things, they came here illegally. Morally right or in the best interests of Australia and Australians? I think not. Over 130 asylum seekers have used these laws to come to Australia. Unsurprisingly, given those who helped draft and pass the medevac bill, none of those who have been brought here under the law have so far been returned. If people want to come to Australia, they should do so legally. We should not give illegal arrivals a pathway to sneak in, because this would invariably only invite more—a lot more—with more lives put at an unacceptable risk and ultimately lost.

A significant point is that under the provisions of the medevac bill there is no mechanism to return people to offshore locations. This is, without doubt, the single biggest shortcoming in the legal framework as it stands. The bill under consideration today corrects this perverse oversight by introducing provisions to ensure that those who come to Australia for treatment are returned as soon as practical. The new provisions provide an express basis for the removal of persons brought to Australia under medical transfer provisions.

It is disappointing that, despite all the evidence, despite decades where the Australian people have consistently expressed their desire for strong borders, the Labor Party will, to a senator, vote to oppose this bill. We are coming up on two decades now where this highly emotional issue has been indulged in as an ideological experiment by progressive forces. It is shameful that Labor continues to place empty virtue-signalling to appease the left of their party and the Greens above what is right and what works. For all their talk about empathy, kindness and humanity, I put one simple proposition to Labor: actions speak louder than words. Our actions have saved thousands of lives; their words have not.

I ask those opposite to consider the 1,200 lives needlessly lost at sea and the immense grief and heartache caused. I implore them to look beyond the politics of progressive populism to fully and fairly acknowledge the greater good and to stand up for what is right. Since coming to government, this Liberal-National government has worked with tremendous resolve and self-discipline to fix Labor's appalling border security mess and ensure that the humanitarian disasters which occurred under the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd government will never be repeated.

The current medevac legislation is high risk for Australia. The irresponsible legislation that this bill aims to overturn and that Labor fully supports proves once again that after more than six years Labor still can't be trusted on border security. As sure as night follows day, Labor will always backslide on this issue. So, once again, it falls to this government, with the support of like-minded senators, to secure our borders and to ensure the dark days never return—so our sailors and border protection officers never again have to pull the lifeless bodies of little children from the sea. By some perverse logic, some may feel ideologically empowered and perhaps even morally superior in voting against this bill but ask yourselves about the consequences. Do Greens preferences really mean more to you than stopping people smuggling? I would like to believe that those opposite now realise they do not.

These issues should have been resolved years ago. I'm dismayed that government senators must stand here in a back-to-the-future moment debating the critical importance of our proven border protection policies yet again. When it comes to border protection, only with clear, unambiguous, resolute strength is there compassion. This is one of those cases where a policy that works must be defended. This bill must pass. We cannot ever go back to the tragedy of the past. I commend the bill to the Senate.