Amanda Stoker (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I acknowledge that the motion we're dealing with now, which was signed by Senator Keneally, reflects a drum she's been banging for some time. I've got to say that with this motion, the pattern that I, and I'm sure many people in this chamber, have observed of Senator Keneally overreaching on matters in the Home Affairs portfolio has reached a new high. If you're a person of my vintage, and you may well be, Mr Acting Deputy President Griff, you might remember Inspector Gadget. When I was a kid I liked Inspector Gadget because he had extending arms and legs that were very handy for his adventures. But not even Inspector Gadget, with his superextending arms, could reach as far as Senator Keneally tries to do so often with her efforts in the Home Affairs portfolio. Overreach is the order of the day when it comes to Senator Keneally. In this motion her overreach is so spectacular that even with his extending 'Go, go gadget arms,' Inspector Gadget would topple over.

Let's start with the first example of her overreaching, her reference to the Halton review recommending a national quarantine facility. That's overstatement No. 1. I've got the report and the relevant pages right here and, among a range of matters canvassed in that report, there's a suggestion for the government to 'consider' a national quarantine facility 'in reserve'. The report doesn't say we must establish one now, as Senator Keneally puts it, nor does it say that the current status of demand requires it, but rather it says we should establish one if or when required, should there be a need to scale up services significantly and at short notice. That's a far, far cry from the land of overreach that Senator Keneally inhabits.

As we would perhaps expect, her overreach doesn't end there, because Labor, who protest perpetually that immigration detention is cruel, barbaric and wrong now want to reopen immigration detention facilities and put Australian citizens in these facilities. They treat the government as though the government is doing the wrong thing by refusing to reopen immigration detention centres immediately and filling them full of Australians who've been overseas. It is not wrong for the Australian government to canvass and pursue every option to avoid putting Australians in immigration detention, if at all possible. Perhaps Senator Keneally might also like to mix some Australian citizens who've been overseas in with some of the convicted criminals that we have in immigration detention waiting for deportation? Perhaps she'd like to send them in with the other people who are not criminal, but who, nevertheless, are in immigration detention because they are not entitled to be here in Australia? I mean, this is the most harebrained scheme I think Labor has ever come up with. Yet they come in here and argue it as though putting Australians in immigration detention would be some kind of supremely moral position. It truly is a bizarre thing.

Then we go to the next one of her spectacular overreaches: pretending that it's the Commonwealth government that is forcing the imposition of caps on the numbers of people who can return to Australia each week. Perhaps that's the biggest dishonesty of the lot—another overreach, with those go-go-gadget arms extending again to the point where every sensible person can see the inspector topple.

But of course the smart Australians won't be fooled. They know that the caps are driven by state governments requiring hotel quarantine. They know that that limit means that the number of people who can return has a natural ceiling associated with the number of hotel rooms available, and they know that the vast majority of the heavy lifting on bringing people back has actually been delivered by the New South Wales government, through Sydney airport.

Are there other options that could be considered for bringing more Australians home? Well, yes. And is home quarantine perhaps one of them? Perhaps. Maybe more testing and shorter quarantine periods at either end of an international flight might also be worth exploring. But those are matters that lie in the hands of state governments, and the confected outrage that we hear from those opposite is a smokescreen for the reality that the states, overwhelmingly Labor governments, hold the reins on this issue. Maybe Senator Keneally should pick up the phone to one of her Labor mates—maybe Premier Palaszczuk; maybe Premier Andrews or Premier McGowan—and start to negotiate with them a more reasonable attitude. But I'm pretty sure they don't want to throw Australian citizens into immigration detention either—not least because, under the proposition that's being put by those opposite, it would have a whole lot of Australians return to immigration detention for Christmas.

To point out the madness of what's being argued by those opposite is not to dismiss the seriousness of the situation. There are Australians overseas who want to return, and we need to do all that we sensibly can to get them back as soon as is possible. We're keenly aware that many Australians face hardship overseas because of global travel restrictions that have arisen because of the COVID-19 pandemic. So DFAT is helping vulnerable Australians. They're doing that by facilitating access to flights back to Australia. Importantly, they're providing financial assistance, where that's required, through what is called the hardship program, because we know that, at a time when the global market for aviation has taken such a big hit, it's just not as economically viable for flights to be as cheap as they were some months ago. So we're providing help for people to meet that higher cost that many are facing. And we're continuing to provide professional and responsive consular assistance to those people who are in need.

Many Australians have been able to return. Not 5,000 or 10,000 or 20,000 or 30,000—we have facilitated the return of more than 432,000 people since the government advised Australians that they needed to reconsider their plans to leave Australia for overseas travel. DFAT has helped over 31,000 Australians to return on over 370 flights, including almost 11,000 people on 74 government-facilitated flights. Ten commercial flights have been facilitated by government just since 23 October, and they've returned over 1,500 passengers—1,583, to be precise. That includes one that arrived in Darwin today from London and a Qantas flight that landed in Darwin on Saturday from Delhi. There is a steady stream of Australians being brought home, and that's happening as soon as it's practical to do so, within the limits that have been set by National Cabinet at the insistence of state governments, because they're the ones that impose this hotel quarantine requirement and they're the ones that face the management associated with imposing that rule.

Since 18 September, over 39,600 people have returned from overseas, including more than 15,300 Australians who had registered with DFAT. Of those, more than 3,400 were vulnerable people. We are taking the necessary interest in making sure that people who are in hard situations, whether that's because of their health, whether it's because of their ability to meet living costs in the place they're located or whether it's because of the cost of flights back, get the hand they need. We're doing what we need to do for vulnerable people. And while the global pandemic is far from over, and we don't know when we will return to the normal state of international travel, Australians can be assured that we do very much care about getting them home safely and that at the federal level we are doing everything within our power to make sure that the road home for them is facilitated as swiftly and as safely as possible.