Murray Watt (Queensland, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry) Share this | Hansard source

The short answer is that this government complies with the law, whether it's law that's written by the parliament or law that's decided by courts. I know that is an unusual situation in Australia, because we did have a government that operated outside the boundaries of the law—for example, with robodebt—but this government takes the law seriously and complies with the law. The High Court made a decision that was about one individual and their case, but the decision that they made applied to other people in the same circumstance. If we hadn't released those people, we would be facing claims for compensation for unlawfully detaining those people. I know you've often got a lot to say about wasting taxpayers' money, and I don't think it would be a great idea to waste taxpayers' money paying compensation to people who are illegally detained. That's what we would have been doing if we had ignored the High Court ruling and continued to detain those people.

I will just respond to your comments earlier on. You seem to think that Mr Dutton and the coalition attempted to resettle these people. I don't think that has been said by anyone, so I don't know if that's right or not. Secondly, on your point about resettling people in New Zealand, you would find—and I'm happy to get you the numbers—that, since this government came to power, reached an agreement with the New Zealand government and took up the offer of the New Zealand government to resettle people who were in detention, we have successfully done that. New Zealand has accepted people who were previously detained in Australia but whose cases the former government wasn't prepared to take up.