Linda Reynolds (WA, Liberal Party, Assistant Minister for Home Affairs) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

This is going to be the hardest and most personal speech I will ever make in this place. This morning, when I saw my colleagues here in this chamber cheering and high-fiving each other on the passage of Labor's amendments, I felt physically ill. In this chamber, MPs from the other place and this place cheered for a political victory, one that I know from personal experience will inevitably come at the cost of the lives of others. For those who cloak themselves in moral virtue, there is nothing compassionate or moral in the bill. I say to each and every one of you: you will be knowingly complicit in what happens next.

I know what will happen, as I said, because I have experienced this. It is neither hypothetical nor a scare campaign. I know from experience that, to terrorists, human traffickers and people smugglers, people are simply commodities to be exploited and profited from. There is not a shred of compassion or humanity in their trade. Few other senators or members in this place have a lived experience of this; I do. As chief of staff to the Minister for Justice and Customs, I had to deal with the outcomes of the Bali bombings, the boat arrivals and the drownings. For two years, I saw the many faces and the consequences of evil, cloaked in the perversion of religion, and the commodification and exploitation of people. I saw, I heard and I smelt the consequences of this commodification of human lives. It nearly broke me and it will stay with me for the rest of my life. Fifteen years later, it still weighs heavily in my heart and on my conscience. It was then, 15 years ago, that I came to truly understand that great evil exists in this world and what it takes to protect us from it. This evil exploits compassion; it does not respect it. There is neither grace nor dignity in the exploitation and death of their victims. There is nothing to high-five or, tonight, pop the champagne corks over.

In 2011, after 200 boatpeople were lured to their deaths, a senator in this place is reported to have said, 'Of course not—tragedies happen; accidents happen.' But these deaths, like the other 1,000 at least, were no accident and there is no doubt whatsoever in my mind that the people smugglers out there today are advising hundreds and probably thousands of people who've paid to come to Australia that they can now jump on a boat. Not a single one of these people smugglers who have taken these peoples' money and who have transited them through to countries to our north will be explaining to these people who have paid them the niceties of the contrived technicality in this bill. Of course they won't; they'll want to get them here so they can start earning some more money.

Let me say to everybody here: it won't be the senators in this place who have to recover the bloated corpses of babies and women mauled by the sharks; it will be the men and women of the Australian Border Force and the Australian Defence Force, who have had to do it twice before. It won't be journalists having to deal with the lifelong trauma of survivors. It won't be members of the House of Representatives who will be comforting our Defence and Border Force personnel who years later still wake with night terrors, reliving the horrors we knowingly inflicted on them.

I say to all senators and members who voted for this today and their cheer squads: when the inevitable happens, don't you dare come into this place justifying your actions on the basis you did not know it could happen again. Fifteen years ago we learnt the lessons from the consequences of reopening things in 2007. You reopened our borders and the consequences and the deaths were just as foreseeable then as they are today. You can attempt to justify your actions to assuage your conscience that there was some technicality or that somehow these people smugglers were going to tell the people out there waiting to come here. I'm sorry to say that we will go through it again and you will all be equally culpable.