Barnaby Joyce (Queensland, National Party, Leader of The Nationals in the Senate) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answers given by Senators Evans, Ludwig and Carr to questions without notice asked in question time today.

It is an interesting day today because, to be honest, very few people are going to be watching us; they have got other things on. But people stopped listening to the Labor Party long ago. I came to parliament this week thinking that maybe things would settle down, and then all of a sudden we had what would have to be one of the most peculiar decisions that has ever been foisted on this nation—the so-called Malaysian deal.

To throw further light on the Malaysian deal today, we had Senator Carr's response to the 'little bomb' issue. They had a little fire and they found a little bomb and they got a little inkling that something was going on. They found a little bomb at one of the detention centres. But don't worry—it was not a big problem; it was only a little problem as it was only a little bomb. There was a little fire going at the same time. There was a much bigger fire earlier on—a really big fire. That was a big problem, but then they had a little problem. Unfortunately, the peptic ulcer inside the government's stomach started to give a bit of a twitch and they realised that they had to do something. So the thought police, the brains trust, of the Labor Party got together and worked out this deal. They got on the blower and started ringing people all around the world to see if they could come up with a deal to cover up for the fact that the budget was going to be a disaster and that they also had a bit of a problem because people keep burning down buildings in the middle of Sydney—burning them down, mind you, when Australians are sleeping on the street merely miles away. That is the more sobering side of the problem that they have.

Apparently we are sending to Malaysia 800 people and then they are sending back to us 4,000 people. There is logic in that somewhere, apparently. It started off as a one-to-one deal, but it has somehow changed while Julia Gillard was negotiating. She cannot say it and she cannot do it, but she decided that she was going to negotiate her way out of the problem and this is how she would do it. Not only are we sending Malaysia 800 people and getting 4,000 in return but we are also sending them about $292 million. This sounds like the deal of the century. This is Labor Party politics. Now we also find that there will be a trail fee, a sort of trail commission, on this and apparently we are going to have to pay them another lazy $200 million to look after the problem. So it is about half a billion dollars and rising for this complete and utter fiasco.

On a deal like this, I expect the phones to be running hot in Julia Gillard's office. We will have Hugo Chavez on the phone saying, 'Mate, I can do a better deal for you. How about you send me 50 and I will send you 10,000. And I'll cut the price: I'll do it for a lazy 100 mill.' President Koroma of Sierra Leone—another country that is not a party to the United Nations refugee convention—will be on the phone: 'Don't worry, Julia; I'll help you out. I've got a few refugees here. How about we park a couple of hundred thousand over there. We could send you a couple of hundred thousand refugees, because we've got them in bulk. We've got a civil war on; we can park them over there.' Maybe we could go to the former Prime Minister of Somalia, Haji Hussein. He has probably got a few refugees. He should be in the market. It could be one of their biggest exports—exporting refugees to Australia. It is just so bizarre. You have become so bizarre. You have become so strange that if you did not laugh you would cry. And we get all this for the lazy sum of $292 million.

It should be noted just before the budget that a good bloke called Kenneth Rogoff from Harvard University has been listing the countries that have had the greatest cumulative increase in real public debt since 2007. I will go through the top three because we do not want to mention every country in the world: No.1, Iceland—we all know about Iceland; No. 2, Ireland; and No. 3, Australia. You get yourself into debt like that when you come up with ludicrous, mind-numbing solutions such as spending half a billion dollars on making your problem of 3,200 people bigger. We pay them half a billion dollars and the net effect in Australia is that we are 3,200 people worse off.

Who thought that up? Who is the plant from the Liberal Party or the National Party in Julia Gillard's office giving her this advice? Own up—who are you? Stop giving her this advice. Stop making it easy for us, please. We do not need any more help. This is what is happening. This is the manic world of the Labor Party. (Time expired)

Louise Pratt (WA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

On rising to speak on the motion to take note of answers, I am very proud of the fact that this government believes in real regional cooperation on asylum seekers. We know that, ultimately, that is the best way to manage this issue. It is also the best humanitarian outcome, something the Howard government, frankly, was never interested in. I, like most Australians, feel strongly about honouring our international protection obligations, and it is sad to me that Senator Joyce does not seem to take that obligation seriously. I do not shy away from the fact that we must find a better way to support vulnerable refugees. Our resolve to end the dangerous transport of so many vulnerable lives in shonky boats is one that I support. You need look no further than at the loss of nearly 30 lives before last Christmas off Christmas Island.

Malaysia has taken a much greater burden on it as a nation in terms of managing asylum seekers, with an estimated 100,000 people seeking refuge there. A funda­mentally important part of this arrangement is that the UNHCR, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, will be working to process the 800 refugees that Australia will send to be processed in Malaysia and will work closely with us to resettle the 4,000 that will come here as part of this increased humanitarian intake.

In my mind, this is no small thing. I am but one of thousands of Australians who make a small monthly donation to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees fund, which works to support, resettle and process refugees. The UNHCR has a very difficult job and has been encouraging of Australia and other countries seeking to work together to find regional solutions on this issue, to support vulnerable people who need our protection.

Our arrangement with Malaysia is something we have been working on over the last six months as part of a regional cooperation framework. Very sadly, Mr Tony Abbott and Mr Scott Morrison have turned a blind eye to the facts when mounting their scare campaign on these issues. Frankly, I am surprised that Mr Abbott objects to an increase in the humanitarian intake. He showed he was prepared to support such an increase and in fact double the intake to win Mr Andrew Wilkie's support in the House of Representatives.

This government is committed to delivering on regional cooperation. This may be hard—it may be difficult—but ultimately it is the only path which will see better outcomes for asylum seekers throughout the region. We will see better outcomes for people who would otherwise languish in our detention centres. This arrangement is but the first step, and we need to keep talking to countries in the region. It is no easy task. We are working through the Bali process, we are talking to Papua New Guinea and we are working with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Such ap­proaches were never a real prospect under the Howard government. Mr Abbott has simple rhetoric—'Stop the boats,' he says—but he has no credible plan to enhance the capacity of refugees to get the protection to which they are entitled throughout the region in an orderly fashion.

Cory Bernardi (SA, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary Assisting the Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

May I issue an apology to all the Australian people listening to this broadcast for wasting five minutes of their lives listening to a bunch of nonsense from Senator Pratt. It was just extraordinary that Senator Pratt was interjecting on Senator Joyce during his speech, saying, 'This is not a joke,' and yet everything that Senator Pratt has said makes an absolute mockery of what the government has been saying for the last three years and the 10 years previously. During this time our discredited Prime Minister—and I say she is discredited because we cannot believe a word that comes out of her mouth now—has duped an increasingly sceptical and disillusioned public by saying that offshore processing is inhumane, it is wrong and it has no place here in Australia. The only thing she has not acknowledged in the entire thing is that offshore processing actually stops the trade in people smuggling and it stops the boats from coming.

But according to the government the boats were coming due to push factors and it had nothing whatsoever to do with the soft treatment they have received in Australia since the government changed the laws. The facts speak for themselves: since 2008, 224 boats have come to this country, entering Australian waters illegally and carrying 11,246 arrivals seeking asylum. Since the last election we have had nearly 4,500 people arrive, and still the government said that nothing was wrong and that they would not go back to the inhumane treatment of refugees. There is nothing more inhumane than having people in a detention centre who are threatening the lives of other people by setting it on fire, by having riots and by planting bombs.

The government would not acknowledge these risks, but all of a sudden it has now done a deal. It has ditched the East Timor solution, which it has been defending for months since the last election, and it has cooked up the Malaysian solution. I say 'cooked up' because it has been cobbled together, clearly at the last minute. But the government's representative, Senator Pratt, has just told us that the government has been working on this for many months. They have been negotiating with themselves, because they have talked themselves out of a one-for-one deal to a one-for-two deal, a one-for-three deal et cetera, until they got a one-for-five deal. But let me tell you: that is not all you get, and it is not all that Malaysia get. They also get hundreds of millions of Australian taxpayer dollars.

The Australian people are very sympathetic to the plight of those who are in need. That is why we have a humanitarian refugee program. What they do not like are those people who are seeking to jump the queue and bypass the system. Yet this government seem to want to encourage that. They have said that they will not deal with an offshore processing centre on Nauru because it is not a signatory to the UNHCR—and yet they go off and deal with Malaysia, which is also not a signatory to the UNHCR. Is there any wonder that the Australian public are questioning the very legitimacy of this government?

Since when have we had a circumstance where the Australian people cannot believe a word that comes out of the Prime Minister's mouth? Since when have we had a circumstance where the Australian people believe that everything their government tells them is based on spin and lies? And they have got good reason to be suspicious of everything this government says, because not only do we know that the Prime Minister is an illegitimate prime minister but we also know that this government is so bereft of any structure and of any substance that it cannot manage the most simple policy decisions. It has put at risk Australia's border security. We know that; the evidence speaks for itself.

And now the government expect the Australian public to believe that they have done a good deal on our behalf, because when we get the next 800 people arriving in this country illegally we are going to swap them for 4,000 people who are in Malaysia seeking asylum. Eight hundred for 4,000—I would love to play poker with our Prime Minister. Whatever money she has got left after squandering it on so many bad programs would soon be in my pocket, because she cannot even carry off a bluff adequately. This is the problem we have: we have a government that do not know what they believe in and we have a Prime Minister who does not believe in anything. She has put everything on the shelf—everything that she has spent her entire life defending. And you wonder why the Australian people say, 'Enough is enough; we need to go to an election'.

Annette Hurley (SA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The opposition are certainly full of sound and fury today. I think they must have spent the last few weeks listening to the more extreme radio shock jocks and reading emails from the more extreme right-wing groups. They seem very buoyed up, comparing finding a solution to the refugee issue in our region with poker games where people are swapped like betting chips; yet, in the same breath, they criticise the Australian government for their reaction to it.

The thing that the opposition clearly does not understand is this concept of a regional framework. I understand that the Howard government rhetoric was framed in these terms. It is not just about Australia and the refugees who make it to our shores; it is about the number of refugees coming to our region. It is not solely our problem; refugees are also coming to our neighbours in the area. They come to Malaysia, they come to Indonesia and they come to other countries in the region.It is a proposal that rather than deal separately and inefficiently with this issue we look at it as a region and try to develop a framework that will begin to address the problem; deal with refugees with dignity and humanity—not compare them to poker chips; look at decent solutions in conjunction with the UNHCR and the office of the International Organisation for Migration; and find a way to talk about the overall problem and how we can sort it out among ourselves and assist genuine refugees who are fleeing from countries—and there are a number of such countries around the world—where there is severe repression and threats to people's lives. We are dealing with increased numbers of refugees around the world.

As part of that solution, we have agreed to take an extra number of refugees. Clearly, there are some in the community that are going to dislike that. But what is the alternative? We leave refugees to pile up in Malaysia or Indonesia under very poor conditions? What is the serious proposal of other parties in this discussion? It is to go back to a solution that they found useful a decade ago. It is no longer useful. It is important now to look at the current situation and look at a way to address the situation that gives due respect to other countries in the region that are also experiencing an increase in the number of refugees and gives due respect to those refugees. It is, in the end, a practical solution to the problem. This is what the Gillard government has attempted to do. This arrangement will provide a method by which the refugee cases will be processed according to the UNHCR, which, as has been pointed out by the opposition, Malaysia has never been a party to. It now will be. Surely that is an advance which should get some recognition from the opposition. But no, they go onto these fantastic flights of fantasy about other countries joining in. This ignorance stems from a refusal to listen or to give good analysis to a situation.

No government would expect an opposition party not to critique its policy, but a nation would expect an opposition to be able to seriously address the issues and come up with a reasonable, sensible alternative proposal if necessary. It is clear, from today anyway, that the opposition has got nowhere near that state of affairs.

Christopher Back (WA, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

To paraphrase the now Prime Minister: another 224 boats, another 224 policy failures. When Ms Gillard was the shadow minister for immigration, not often did she have to come up with that line 'Another boat, another policy failure'. Regrettably, there have been 83 boats since she became Prime Minister on 24 June and 69 since the election of last year when Labor reversed what was a successful policy of the last coalition government, handed to them on a plate and rejected. That equates since 2008 to no less than 11,246 asylum seekers who have arrived on these shores. What we see yet again today is failure by an incompetent Prime Minister and an incompetent Minister for Immigration and Citizenship in this latest effort—that is, to try and strike a deal with Malaysia.

It was in March of this year that the asylum seekers rioted on Christmas Island. What was the reward after the first night of riots for those who led it? They in fact got their wish and they were air-transported to Darwin on the mainland. So what happened the next night on Christmas Island? The riots naturally extended and expanded to where others in detention, staff and people on the island were at risk. We now move forward to April this year, a continuing policy of a failed incompetent minister, to Villawood. As others have said, we saw not only firefighters, staff and others in Villawood put at risk but the destruction of Australian government property in this effort led by the allowance of an incompetent minister. What action have we seen taken? As spelt out here this afternoon, 11 days it took for the Federal Police to get these people down off the roof of that detention centre. Australians are heartily sick and tired.

We now see the latest knee-jerk reaction. Nobody believed that East Timor was going to participate in this so-called regional solution. There has now been a suggestion of Manus Island. That is probably a smart one because it is a return to the Howard govern­ment solution. We have just heard Senator Hurley, the previous speaker, making reference to involving and including those in the region. We now know, of course, that Nauru itself is willing to sign up to the UNHCR. We already have the assets available to us in that country. It only requires the Prime Minister and her incompetent minister to swallow their pride, pick up the phone and get on with what worked in the past.

We have seen a billion dollar blowout in the budget for immigration during the current financial year—budgeted at $200 million but will cost over $1 billion. One can only wonder what we are going to see this evening.

I have spent much time in Malaysia. I have even spent a brief time as a guest of the corrective services department in Malaysian detention centres. I can assure you they are not a place you would want to spend more time than is necessary. For those who do not believe that, they need to consult nobody else other than Anwar Ibrahim. But we have also now learnt that the Malaysians quite correctly will reserve for themselves the right to actually determine who of the 800 come to this country. So let us see the scene: the asylum seekers leave their home country, they go through Malaysia—incidentally, they have a passport when they go through Malaysia—they get on a boat, they come down here, they are processed, nobody likes them, so what happens? They go back to Malaysia and guess what happens to the people smugglers: they get to sell a second ticket, because they will leave that detention and once again return to Australia. The merry-go-round created by this incompetent government will only continue. The people smugglers are the ones who probably are smiling the most. Naturally those who do end up coming down on the boats a second time will destroy their identification papers and their passports, which gives us more work to do.

I conclude my comments with the observation that when the Howard government stopped the boats they continued the level of migration by genuine refugees, those who had been waiting for years and continue to wait for years in camps and who are currently being put further to the back of the queue because of these queue jumpers, most of them well-heeled, who are making a mockery of this country and its citizens.

Question agreed to.