Alex Gallacher (SA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I look forward to the time when Senator Antic's training wheels come off and he can get through five minutes without a heap of notes. But I've got to take exception to one thing he said. Blue Poles, for goodness sake, is worth $350 million; it had to be a good decision 40 years ago to buy that. Anyway, let's get back to the basics here. We have a Prime Minister who misled on the activities of a former prime minister. Obviously, he did that on advice of his department, which clearly was errant advice. But instead of coming out, looking down the camera and saying, 'I stuffed up. I made an awful mistake there and I apologise for that mistake,' and moving on, I hear that he tables a letter in the parliament. He doesn't address the issue directly, as Australians like to see: when you make a mistake, fess up, own up, apologise and move on. No, he tables a letter. He tries to avoid the scrutiny of it.

All of this angst on these Australians who are stranded far away in difficult circumstances could be avoided, as I said earlier this week, if they allocated one-tenth of the political will and finances that they did when they set up a regional processing facility in Nauru to take care of 657 people. They spent approaching $500 million in a year. We don't expect $500 million to be disbursed around the globe to bring people home. They'd probably stay there if you did that—they'd take the million each and stay there!

The problem is there's no acceptance that human quarantine is a federal responsibility. When the history of this pandemic is written, it'll be one of the failures of this government—they didn't set the responsibility at the appropriate place, take charge, set the standard all around the country and, as their own expert said, if necessary, set up a processing facility. They did it in the irregular maritime arrivals area and stopped the boats. Here they have the availability of aircraft. They could just lease them, sell the seats in them or whatever, get people to appropriate places, process them and, in 14 days, allow them to get home.

As Senator Keneally and others have said, there are an immense number of Australians who are not going to see their family at Christmas, and I think that's to the Prime Minister's enduring shame. Don't promise if you can't deliver. I have no problem if he'd said it's too difficult to do it for Christmas, if it's logistically impossible, or if he was cautious. But, no, he had bravado and said: 'I'll have them all home for Christmas. And, by the way, that former Labor Prime Minister's buggering up the system up taking up extra spaces.' It's all erroneous, and he's not going to get people home for Christmas.

If I had relatives and family stranded overseas, I'd be beside myself, because some of the places they're stranded in are not good spaces. I have cousins in England and the United Kingdom, and some of those cousins haven't seen their grandchildren for months—newborn grandchildren in the same country. Can you imagine what it's like for a parent to have a child, a son or a daughter, or an aged parent overseas that can't get home?

I met someone in the parliament very recently. Their wife went to visit an ill relative in the United Kingdom, and now it looks like March before she'll get a flight home. They're mature people and they can conquer that distance, but it's not good. We have a prime minister who promised, and we have a prime minister who says things which are totally wrong. Then, avoiding scrutiny by tabling a letter is a very disturbing way for a prime minister to act.

If you look at what's happened with the honourable Mathias Cormann: 'Take a plane, mate. Take a plane. Just go and fly around all the places. You'll get COVID, so you better take a private plane.' And it's a private job. I don't think it's a job that is obligated to Australia; I think it's his position. So why would he get a $4,300 an hour plane to go and get a private position? That's got to be stood against the test of someone who's ill and wants to get home to their family for Christmas. When Australians look at that, it'll be a fail, a total fail.

I don't say Prime Minister Morrison does everything badly, but he's obviously taken some really poor advice in respect to the former Labor Prime Minister, and the way he handled that I think is pretty low. Australians expect a higher standard. If that was Bob Hawke or someone else, they'd get up and say: 'Look, I stuffed up. I'm really sorry. I made a mistake, and I won't do it again,' and off they go. But to table a letter saying, 'I might have misled the parliament,' is a very low standard.