Perin Davey (NSW, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

If you were to listen to Labor, this government is heartless, uncaring and unfeeling towards the plight of our citizens who are overseas, but nothing can be further from the truth. Labor are very, very loose with their rhetoric and very loose with their facts when they grab at the heartstrings of Australians to paint the Morrison government as a heartless, unfeeling government that is quite happy to see our citizens languish overseas at the expense of all others. As I said, nothing can be further from the truth.

From the very get-go, at the beginning of this pandemic, as early as January we were talking about what this may mean for international travel. We closed our borders to people coming in from China very early in the piece. In March our government made people overseas aware that they should seriously consider returning home if there was no requirement for them to stay overseas, and certainly many people did so. Yes, we acknowledge that those who chose not to at the time had their reasons. They may have been in stable employment at the time, their family circumstances may not have allowed it, and we totally accept that. No-one should be derided for having made the choice to remain where there were. Some of those people now want to return home, again for a variety of reasons, and we are working very hard to facilitate that to ensure they can come home.

Since March we've returned over 420,000 Australians to our shores. They have returned home. They're back with their families. Indeed, my office has had many phone calls from people thanking our government for helping them to return home safely, without the risk of getting COVID when they get home. Let's not forget, back in March National Cabinet agreed on hotel quarantine for all arrivals. National Cabinet—all of the state governments and the federal government—agreed that hotel quarantine would be the method that we would apply to ensure that people returning to our shores can do so safely, monitored securely to protect our Australians here onshore as well as themselves. Since that time we have been doing just that.

The state governments let us know how many that they could deal with safely and effectively. Using whatever processes they chose to use the state governments identified the caps. On that note, I commend the New South Wales government for having a cap nearly three times higher than the other states. We know—and as Senator Keneally knows, because we heard it in the Senate Select Committee on COVID-19—that hotel quarantine is the reason why Australia has been so successful at controlling the spread of the virus and the virus coming into our shores. We also know, unfortunately, what happens if we push our hotel quarantining system too hard and if we don't have effective control mechanisms in place, because we've seen what happened with Victoria and their tragic second wave. Thankfully, that is over, but we don't want to see that again. So we are committed to ensuring that our hotel quarantine system—working with our state governments—is effective and managed appropriately.

We also heard, last Thursday at the Senate committee, that the result of Victoria's second wave meant that Victoria shut down their borders completely. They didn't accept any returning Australians, and that had a significant impact on our capacity to re-shore our citizens from overseas. But, fortunately, Victoria are set to handle foreign arrivals again, and hopefully this time with much-needed improvements to their hotel quarantining. This is all to ensure the safety of Australians—the safety of Australians both returning home and onshore.

The other thing that Labor says is that we should just open a national facility. Where? Where can we open this national facility? Senator Keneally, last Thursday, suggested we reopen our closed detention centres, such as Port Hedland and Baxter. I never thought I'd see the day when Labor said that we should reopen our detention centres. Believe me, our government has looked at all options, and we have looked at those closed detention centres—detention centres we're very proud to have closed because we addressed other border issues. But Port Hedland and Baxter, in particular, are not currently fit to put people into. You cannot wave a magic wand—this is my message to Senator Keneally and to Australians out there, because this is about managing expectations. You can't present emotion to this chamber and miraculously be able to manage 35,000 people pouring onto our shores with nowhere to go, nowhere to be effectively quarantined, and not risk our population. Of the arrivals that we're currently dealing with, over one per cent of them have COVID. But we are containing that because we have got effective quarantine.

The other option that Senator Keneally put forward was Christmas Island—the currently closed areas of Christmas Island. The parts of Christmas Island detention centre that are fit for use at this point in time are being used. There is no extra capacity there. We have worked with the Northern Territory government. We've reopened the Howard Springs facility, which is currently taking 500 people a week, and negotiations are ongoing to expand that. We've also now negotiated with Tasmania and the ACT, who have now, graciously, allowed incoming passengers from overseas within what they believe they can effectively manage. This government is doing all it can. We have facilitated 72 repatriation flights to date. They are flights wholly and solely committed to people who've registered with DFAT.

The other point that Labor make is that the list of Australians wanting to return home is growing, and that is true, because there are Australians overseas at this moment and their situations change, so that list will fluctuate. It will grow as people want to come home and it might decline again as things settle down overseas. But to hold to the claim that our government has failed on a key promise—even Senator Keneally's quote from the Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, wasn't a promise. He said, 'We hope to have all Australians home by Christmas.' That was those who were on the list on that day. And, yes, the list has grown. But, since that day, we have had more than 35,000 Australians return home, which was a far greater number than that was originally on the list on the day that the Prime Minister said that he hoped to have them return home.

So we are very committed to doing all we can to return Australians home in a way that is safe and in a way that ensures we maintain our very good and very strong record on containing COVID on our shores. But my message to everyone listening today is: we haven't forgotten our Australians overseas. We are doing all we can, effectively.