Nigel Scullion (NT, Country Liberal Party, Deputy Leader of the Nationals) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

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I move:

That the Senate take note of answers given by Senator Lundy to questions asked by Senator Cash.

We get to another day where those opposite would have some sort of celebration. The number is a big number—25,000. Sadly, that is not the number of doctors we have produced in Australia; sadly, that is not the number of new manufacturers that have opened around Australia; it is not the number of people who have done something particularly wonderful in our defence forces or industry more generally. The 25,000, which is a particularly excruciating number for those opposite, we are celebrating today is the number of people—25,000 souls—who have arrived unlawfully on this country's shore since they have come into power. Every person is another failed policy. You have 25,000 of them. Those opposite seem to be living in deep denial. The house is on fire and there is a bit of smoke, but those opposite are looking around, saying, 'No, no—it's all okay. Next financial year we are still budgeting for no arrivals.' Great! Then of course there are flames as the house starts to fill up with smoke. 'No, no, there is no fire. It's quite okay.' So you wonder why, after making a prediction in the budget this year that there would be only 5,400 places required, in the first quarter 5,100 have already arrived. No wonder you scream out of the building with your pants on fire! You have not got an iota of a clue on how to manage any sort of policy, let alone a policy that is as sophisticated as this one requires. It is a wreck, your border protection failure, and those on the other side should be deeply ashamed.

Eventually they adopted reasonable policy, and we have all tried very hard to get there. Because they are in denial—it is like the three-legged stool where each of the legs of the stool is a part of a policy framework. They've said: 'Nauru—we'll have a one-legged stool. Don't worry about the others. It'll be right; it won't be wobbly; it won't fall over.' So why is it that we keep hearing from those on the other side that it is all okay, that everything is fine, no-one is arriving, there are no boats, everything is fantastic? It is because they are in complete denial. That is what happens when you take your hands off the wheel. That is one of the alternatives to being good at what you do; you just go into denial and pretend that you are good at what you do. Sadly, that has become the mantra across the policy spectrum for those on the other side.

There are more important legs to the stool. The most important leg that you have missed out on is turning the boats around where it is safe to do so.

Mark Bishop (WA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Drown a few!

Nigel Scullion (NT, Country Liberal Party, Deputy Leader of the Nationals) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Absolutely not! I will take that interjection: 'Drown a few'. I tell you what: if they do not leave and we give a clear signal, Senator Bishop, saying 'If you don't move then you're not putting the lives of your family in danger', then that is what we should do. That is what we have done in the past. You have accepted half of our policy that sends that same signal, but you would be best advised to accept a further leg to ensure we turn the boats around where it is safe to do so because we know that is sending a signal, 'Don't leave and it will be okay.'

Senator Bishop is very interested in humanity. He is always very interested in the impact of policy. So 25,000 souls, Senator Bishop, and let me tell you who they are: 25,000 people who have come here, each one of those coming from a specific list. That list is the list provided by the UNHCR, and on it are the names of people for the family reunification demographic that are attached to our refugee humanitarian intake. There are 25,000 of them. That is 25,000 men, women, children, sisters, brothers, friends, husbands and wives who will not be rejoining those refugees who are currently in Australia. That is a consequence of your policy. So when you are preaching to me that it is all about the lives of the people in the boats, you should have a look at your own policy and come to terms with what an abject failure it really is in relation to the compassion that you so ably talk about, but are quite incapable of delivering. There are 25,000 people who should have been reunified with their refugee demographic in Australia, but thanks directly to the policy failure on the other side those families will not be reunited. Shame!

Mark Furner (Queensland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It is no surprise that the coalition is still harping on this issue given its position on particular parts of its policy. I think the Senate and the public should be reminded that we made several attempts to fix this issue over a space of time and it took some consideration, it took a compromise by the government—a mature compromise—after the coalition had sided with the Greens and voted against our policy to stop boats arriving on our shores. In doing so, they stopped us from stopping boats arriving on our shores; they stopped us from stopping those drownings of those hundreds and hundreds of refugees escaping their countries to have a better life in this country. I am certainly proud to be an Australian and I know that a lot of the migrants that I confer with in my constituency are also so proud to be Australians; they are so proud that they are here and feel so fortunate. They express to me how lucky they are to be in Australia, how lucky they are to be in this country.

I wonder at times, I truly wonder, whether the coalition has some sort of desire or some sort of issue with migrants. It always seems to want to attack migrants. It always seems to want to attack their passage of coming to this country. It is not refugees' fault for wanting to come to this wonderful country of ours. We should all be reminded that it is the fault of those terrible people smugglers who have set up cartels over in Indonesia and other parts of our neighbourhood in the north. They are using these opportunities to bring people to this country for their own benefit, to make money out of others' misfortunes. Those cartels, those pirates, do not care whether the refugees end up at the bottom of the ocean; they do not give a damn about the fact that they are putting people on leaky boats. This is why we cannot allow a policy like turning the boats back.

I have spoken about this on numerous occasions in this chamber, but I have been fortunate enough to be on the parliamentary defence program. I am also fortunate enough to have with me this week an officer, a captain, from the Navy. We have spoken privately about this particular issue. He has conferred with me about the comments made by the Chief of Navy that turning the boats around will not work. It will not work. I have been up to Darwin. I went to Darwin in 2009 as part of the parliamentary defence program on Operation Resolute. We went out on an Armidale and we spent some time with the good, hard-working men and women on that boat. You get an understanding of how they operate. You get an understanding of what they do, and the professionalism they show in their roles is outstanding. They need to be commended, our men and women in the Australian Defence Force.

Furthermore, Senator Kroger and I recently went to RIMPAC and saw the good work that our men and women do on our boats over in that particular part of the world. One thing that was so stark and came home to me was this. An opposition member who is the shadow minister for health, Mr Peter Dutton, asked a question of one of the sailors on the boat—I cannot remember the name of the boat off the top of my head but it was certainly of the Armidale class being up in those waters. If you recall, this was around 2009 and it was getting close to the 2010 election and it was in the media, like it always is. He said, 'What would happen if we turned the boats back?' And this response was given by that sailor, the same response that Chief of Navy provides us time after time in estimates—and I know as I am a member of the Legal and Constitutional Affairs Legislation Committee—'It is not possible. It will not work. They will damage their motor. They will damage the hull of their boat. They will do anything to prevent a decent rescue of the people on those boats.'

So you end up in a situation where not only are you rescuing people from those leaky and damaged boats but you are also placing the lives of those hardworking professional sailors in a circumstance where their lives are at risk as a result of a policy the coalition wants to implement that will put in jeopardy the safety of our Defence personnel in those dangerous waters up in northern Australia. So that is why we cannot have a policy of turning the boats back. (Time expired)

Alan Eggleston (WA, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I also rise to take note of answers given by Senator Lundy to the questions asked by Senator Cash, who, as has been said, advised the Senate that some 25,000 boat people have arrived in Australia since the ALP came to power. Mr Deputy President, you will forgive me for sounding somewhat like a broken record but, unlike the government's toing and froing with bureaucratic bungling and misguided policies, the coalition has always maintained the same policies and successful approach to illegal boat arrivals. What the Gillard government is essentially doing as a result of the Houston report is copying one of the Howard government's most successful approaches, namely offshore processing in Nauru with Papua New Guinea to be considered in the future if the Houston report is followed. It is a turn in the right direction but it is not all that is needed.

One of the other really successful policies of the Howard government in dealing with refugees was temporary protection visas, or TPVs. The Howard government used TPVs quite extensively and under this scheme people were offered refugee status in Australia until the situation in their homelands improved. However, I think and the coalition thinks that the real answer is a regional solution, a cooperative relationship between Indonesia, Malaysia and Australia in dealing with boat borne refugees, but this will only be achieved by proper negotiations between the other regional countries, not the kind of pre-emptive announcement by former Prime Minister Rudd that East Timor would accept refugees when, in fact, there had been no consultation whatsoever with that country and in the end, of course, they did not accept refugees.

What we have seen in recent weeks is a near total about-face by the ALP against the policy they had when they first came to office of reversing the very successful coalition measures. Those measures stopped the flow of refugees and reduced to a trickle the number of people coming to Australia as refugees by unconventional means. The coalition has always argued that the full suite of measures that stopped the boats—including offshore processing in Nauru, TPVs, and turning the boats back when safe to do so—should be reimplemented if the strong tide of boats is to be stopped.

We are very pleased that at long last the ALP has seen the wisdom of our policies and has decided to reinstate at least the policy of offshore processing using Nauru. The figures speak for themselves. When the coalition left office just four people who had arrived illegally by boat were in detention. As of a few hours ago, some 40 boats carrying more than 2,500 people have arrived since only a few weeks ago Labor announced its policy of placing refugees on Nauru. It is extraordinary to think of those numbers when you compare them to the number of people who came to this country under the Howard government—very few indeed. More broadly, less than nine full months into this year there have been over 10,000 people on more than 150 boats as this government has still refused to introduce the coalition's full suite of vital border protection policies. Yet in the last five years of the Howard government just 18 boats arrived, an average of one boat every 101 days, not almost one boat a day as under the destructive and non-effective policies of this government.

Alan Ferguson (SA, Deputy-President) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I call Senator Bishop.

Mark Bishop (WA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Thank you, Mr Deputy President, and welcome back into the chair. I think over the last week or so we have missed your sense of balance in the carrying out of those duties of the chair as similarly we have missed a sense of proportion and a sense of balance from the opposition in their contribution today in this take note of answers debate. Today the opposition asked some five or six questions of government ministers. I think four went to Senator Wong on matters related to her portfolio and general matters of economic interest and one question in the middle went to Senator Lundy on matters related to refugee processing. Today's theme is: why don't we shift the biff, shift the bash? All last week and yesterday the opposition have been engaged in a raging torrent of attacks on public sector workers in Queensland and New South Wales—they couldn't get out of the race quick enough to do that. Also, in South Australia, when the Leader of the Opposition, Ms Redmond, saw her counterparts in New South Wales and Queensland hopping into the public sector and public sector workers, she immediately said she could beat them, double their odds and go for 25,000. That has only worked for the last six days, so today they cast about for something else to talk about in this debate. They asked four or five questions on economic matters to Senator Wong. She batted them off—whack, six; whack, four, whack, six! They can't ask questions on that, so they reach down into the satchel and find an old friend, an old faithful. They have only had two in the last three years. One has been the carbon tax and we know that is a patent failure, with all of their attacks wasted for 18 months to two years. The second ground of attack they have had against the government has been our alleged failure on refugee processing and on asylum seekers coming into this country.

They fail to mention that as the legislation went through both houses of parliament, the House and the Senate, some short time ago at relatively short notice and after relatively brief discussion in both places, the opposition and the government were sitting on the same side and voting for the bill to address the issues arising out of refugees and asylum seekers seeking entry into this country. The government does not in any way knock the support of the opposition. We welcome it and appreciate their change of heart after two or three years to finally see sense and give the government support in the passage of legislation to achieve some peace in this difficult area of policy. We welcome their support; we noted it at the time and I refer to it again today. The three-person report chaired by former Chief of the Defence Force, Mr Houston, was not about who won or who lost the politics of that debate. We have taken action, supported by the opposition, to implement the 25 or 27 recommendations of the Houston report. One of the key recommendations was to increase the intake to 25,000 people a year.

The opposition today introduced a new concept, put out there by Senator Scullion. I must concede at the outset that he did a bit of a backtrack about three sentences later because he had only mentioned half of their new policy. But the policy outlined by Senator Scullion, and presumably endorsed by the opposition front bench because we have heard no suggestion of going back on it, is to turn around the boats at sea and allow all of the people in those boats to drown. Some three or four sentences after he outlined that, Senator Scullion found a caveat, because he appreciated the horror and brutality of what he had said, by saying it was subject to the boats being safe. How one determines that boats are going to be safe or not at a distance of some miles or hundreds of metres one does not know, but we now have a new policy leg. The three legs have turned into four, and the fourth one is now to turn around the boats at sea and hang the consequences.

That is a different position to what the government seeks. Our solution, our approach, is much broader. We seek engagement with all of our near neighbours—PNG, Nauru, Malaysia and others. Some of those places, which of course are the passage points— (Time expired)

Helen Kroger (Victoria, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to respond and to take note of the robotic approach taken by Minister Lundy in answering the question on asylum seekers, which, I have to remind the good Senator Bishop—who clearly was missing in action during question time—was our leading question. The question directed to Minister Lundy, the Minister for Multicultural Affairs, was the first question that was asked today. But in my heart I want to go a little easy on Senator Bishop and Senator Furner, who also responded in this take note debate, because they are both from the Right within the Labor Party and they must be screaming—it must irk them something shocking—to be in alliance with the Greens. It must have cruelled their pitch something chronic. So I do feel very sorry for both Senator Bishop and Senator Furner having to endure an alliance with the Greens since the 2010 election. And the most blatant outcome of that alliance has been the adoption of what in effect has been the Greens policy for onshore processing.

Senator Bishop referred to the numerous policies, computations and permutations that the Labor government under Prime Minister Gillard has attempted in dealing with the asylum seeker issue. We have gone from the East Timor solution to the five-for-one Malaysia solution, which has created a much more catastrophic situation. That is why it was our leading question today, because now this government under Prime Minister Gillard has broken the record books overnight, with more than 25,000 people seeking asylum in Australia. The government has broken the record books, and it is not a record that anyone should be proud of.

During question time today I noted and observed 15 men and women of the Australian Defence Force who were in the public gallery to view question time. Those men and women are currently placed with various senators and members of parliament under the ADF exchange program. They reminded me of the 25 men and women from the Defence Force who have been sent to Manus Island today to prepare that detention centre for the overflow of asylum seekers that are coming here. One of the things that both Senator Furner and Senator Bishop shared today was a lack of appreciation that this government must at some time be accountable for what has happened. Let us not forget the facts, because they would like the Australian public to do so. Those listening to this broadcast know the facts. Let us go through them again.

Since Prime Minister Gillard knifed the former Prime Minister, Mr Rudd, in the back—one of the policy reasons being the flotilla of boats coming here—no fewer than 18,450 people have arrived by boat. Since she announced the opening of Nauru, we have still had 41 boats, with a sum total of 2,485 people. The issue here is the backflip that they did not want to be seen to have—and this is not political point-scoring—but you cannot institute just part of the solution; you need to implement all of the solution. The former Howard government's Pacific solution worked. Let's bring it back in its entirety.

Question agreed to.