Kristina Keneally (NSW, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Leader of the Opposition in the Senate) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answer given by the Minister for Finance (Senator Birmingham) to a question without notice asked by the Leader of the Opposition in the Senate (Senator Wong) today relating to public statements made by the Prime Minister.

Senator Wong raised with Senator Birmingham the fact that, yesterday in question time, the Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, in the other place stated a falsehood. This is often the way with this Prime Minister: on his feet in question time just throwing out accusations without basis and without foundation. What did he claim? He claimed that former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd had been going in and out of Australia, taking up quarantine spaces from stranded Australians. No such thing ever happened. Former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has been in Queensland since March. He has not left the country. He has not taken up a quarantine space from a stranded Australian. But I will tell you which former Prime Minister is taking up quarantine spaces that stranded Australians are not being able to use—

Raff Ciccone (Victoria, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Which one?

Kristina Keneally (NSW, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Leader of the Opposition in the Senate) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Senator Ciccone asks, 'Which one?' It's former Prime Minister Tony Abbott. Former Prime Minister Tony Abbott is travelling overseas, not on Australian government business, on UK government business. He's going overseas, coming back, taking up a quarantine space, going overseas again, coming back, taking up a quarantine space. That means two stranded Australians will not spend Christmas with their families because of former Prime Minister Tony Abbott—not former Prime Minister Rudd, as Scott Morrison falsely claimed. We haven't heard about that from Scott Morrison. Two spaces—you might think, 'What's two spaces?' Let me tell you something: the number of stranded Australians has grown and grown.

On 18 September the Prime Minister promised the 26,000 stranded Australians on DFAT's list would be home by Christmas. Only 17,000 have made it back. There are some 9,000 people who are on that DFAT list of 18 September who literally have two days to make it back to Australia, go through quarantine and get out to be able to celebrate Christmas with their families. Of course they have a hope of celebrating Christmas with their families; the Prime Minister promised it would happen. When the Prime Minister makes a promise, maybe the people of Australia should be able to rely on it. As a citizen of Australia, you should be able to rely on your Prime Minister's promises. When he looks down the barrel of a camera and he says, 'I'm going to get all those stranded Australians home by Christmas,' of course stranded Australians think they can rely on that. But what do we know about this Prime Minister, Scott Morrison? He has trouble telling the truth. He's all about the headline, never about the delivery. He's always there for the photo op, never there for the follow-up. It is cruel. In this circumstance, it is cruel.

As Senator Gallagher, Senator Watt and I on the COVID committee have heard, there are stranded Australians who have been trying to come back to this country since March. They have had flights cancelled. They have spent tens of thousands of dollars—$50,000, $60,000, $70,000—trying to get flights back to Australia. They have lost their homes. They have lost their jobs. They are being sent to homeless shelters. They are living off food banks and charities. They are running afoul of visa conditions in other countries. They are facing a Northern Hemisphere winter in the middle of a global pandemic. It is un-Australian to leave your mates behind, but that is precisely what the Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, is doing. He is leaving Australians behind. He has made them a promise and he is breaking that promise. He is breaking their hearts.

When you see photos of the Prime Minister on his social media putting up his Christmas tree and sitting around his Christmas lunch with his family, well, good for him! I am happy, and I wish the Prime Minister and his family a merry Christmas. But when we see those photos let us not forget that there are now 40,000 stranded Australians stuck overseas, barred from coming back to their country by this Prime Minister. You know what? He has a COVID-safe way to bring them back. Jane Halton, his hand picked expert, handed him a report that's told him how to increase quarantine capacity, told him that the federal government should take responsibility, told him that the federal government should open up a quarantine facility with a human health response zone and told him that they had a responsibility to bring these stranded Australians home in the middle of a global pandemic. This Prime Minister has such a problem with the truth. This Prime Minister is letting people down and leaving Australians behind.

Alex Antic (SA, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I have to say, I enjoyed that. I enjoyed it for the following reasons: that was the very, very definition of the sound of straws being clutched at. You could actually hear them hitting the ground, as you would expect. There are a number of fairly flowery statements that were made. I did like—and I have to pay tribute to this one—bringing back the spectre of former Prime Minister Tony Abbott, who gets a run. It's good to see the Australian Labor Party finding a way to bring him back, even into this debate. I could bring back a few issues myself; I've still got an issue with Gough Whitlam and Blue Poles. We can always go back and run over that.

There are issues that we need to fact check. I know my friends on the other side of the chamber love an ABC fact check. Their mates at the ABC do a fact check; they do them all the time. I don't think they do them well. I'm going to do one well for you, because a series of facts have been overlooked. The fact of the matter here is that the Prime Minister made a statement yesterday and he has corrected it. It happens. The truth of the matter is that this government has helped numerous people to return to Australia during what has been a very, very difficult. I know that my friends opposite like to ebb and flow when it comes to understanding the very difficult nature of this COVID-19 pandemic. This is not been a run-of-the-mill operation to send a plane overseas to go and collect some people.

We've seen over 432,000 Australians return from overseas since the government recommended that people reconsidered the need to travel abroad back in March. My friends on the other side of the chamber like to make it sound like everyone's just been abandoned, the government has dropped the ball and left everyone stranded in various different hotspots. It's just not the case. The fact is the COVID-19 pandemic is still, as we speak, not over—another fact for my friends on the other side of the chamber—and the government's continuing to support Australians overseas while at the same time managing the delicate balancing act of protecting Australians' health and safety and the community at home. Since 18 September—we are talking two months ago—43,000 Australians have been returned home. Once again, that's a fact check—not an ABC fact check but a real one. Over 17,000 of these passengers have been registered with DFAT, including more than 3,700 vulnerable Australians.

What this means in real terms is that, during the pandemic, 32,000 Australian citizens and permanent residents have returned home on over 370 flights—that is, 370 flights in the middle of a pandemic. That is not just sending a Cessna to collect a couple of mates down at the RSL bowls club on Kangaroo Island. Seventy-six of these flights have been directly facilitated by the government, and they've gone into difficult locations such as Peru, South Africa, India and the UK. Let me say that the experience of negotiating access across borders with different governments has been no mean feat. The government has delivered and has done it well. Twelve commercial flights have been facilitated by the government since 23 October, returning 1,700 passengers, including a facilitated flight with Qantas from Dili to Hobart that landed this last Sunday with around 120 passengers. Once again, at the risk of repeating it, these are facts—not ABC facts, but facts.

Currently, 3,900 Australians are registered with DFAT as wishing to return home. Some may not take up the immediate option to return, while others may seek to return home at a later date due to particular circumstances. That is the nature of the ebb and flow of the situation that DFAT and the government find themselves in in the middle of this pandemic. The DFAT administered hardship program has actually distributed over $10 million to 1,900 Australians overseas to cover the cost of accommodation, subsistence and flights, as they may be. Australians have been as well catered for as can possibly be expected during this very difficult time. It is just incorrect to try to politicise this, to raise the spectre of past prime ministers or to do whatever other straw-clutching exercises we've seen. This government has allocated $60 million to support Australians to return home. Melbourne Airport, the second-largest, has been taking international arrivals since July. DFAT of course will not remove any Australians from its registration database without their consent. This program continues to bring Australians home and it continues to do so in a timely and safe manner. (Time expired)

Alex Gallacher (SA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to 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.

Paul Scarr (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I must say I agree with Senator Gallacher in relation to his observation with respect to Blue Poles. I think it was actually a great investment—and I did get an acknowledgement from Senator Gallacher as he left—and I think it's probably worth somewhere north of $350 million this current day.

This issue with respect to former prime ministers and travel, I think it was—and my wife, Louise, if she's watching would remind me—a month ago that my wife was walking our two rescued greyhounds, Chloe and Faye, when Louise actually walked past our former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, who has a family member who lives in our suburb, and had a convivial exchange with him. It's a bit of a shame that we can't bring that conviviality, with respect to former Prime Ministers, into this place, because I think all former prime ministers should be treated with the respect that their service to our country commands. I say that with respect to prime ministers from both sides of politics.

The fact of the matter is that, when our Prime Minister became aware of the fact that a statement he made in the House of Representatives in response to a personal attack against former Prime Minister Tony Abbott—let's not forget that; it was in response to a personal attack against former Prime Minister Tony Abbott—was incorrect, at the first opportunity, he wrote to the Clerk. This is what he said:

I am writing to inform you that in Question Time today, I made the following statement in response to a question from the Member for Corio in relation to Australians returning home during the pandemic, based on information I understood to be correct at the time.

I thank the member for his question and wonder why he' d want to bring personalities into this, given that Mr Rudd has done the same thing.

I have subsequently been advised that Mr Rudd has not travelled internationally during the pandemic, and was not one of the 95,525 individuals … who had been independently granted an exemption …

I also apologise to Mr Rudd for the statement and am pleased to correct the record.

What is not transparent about that? At the first opportunity, our Prime Minister corrected the record and issued an apology to former Prime Minister Rudd. I think that entirely meets the expectations of the Australian community with respect to how a prime minister should respond on such an occasion.

And then, when that issue is raised by Senator Keneally, she reverts back to attacking former Prime Minister Tony Abbott. She can't resist it; Senator Keneally can't resist the personal attack. She can't resist it. She reverts back to the personal attack on former Prime Minister Tony Abbott, who is not in a position to defend himself in this place. And then Senator Kennelly makes quite a demeaning, sneering comment about the Morrison family celebrating Christmas lunch on Christmas Day. It was totally gratuitous and totally unnecessary and does nothing to advance public debate in this nation—absolutely nothing. It represents everything about that type of politics that Australians are absolutely fed up with.

Let's absolutely talk about the priority of getting Australians home. I've spoken to Australians trying to get home; I've spoken to their families. I've done everything in my office to facilitate that. I actually give my congratulations to our staff and personnel within DFAT with respect to everything they've done in response to this one-in-100-year pandemic. I think they have been extraordinary, in very difficult cases and in very extreme circumstances. Let us not forget that Melbourne international airport, our second-largest international airport in this country, has been closed for months and months and months because of the debacle in Victoria. But you never hear that mentioned. You never hear that mentioned on the other side. You don't hear any mention of the impact that has had in terms of logistics for bringing Australians home. I wish all my fellow Australians well as we lead up to Christmas and hope as many of them get home as possible. (Time expired)

Raff Ciccone (Victoria, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I think it's a bit unfair today that we're hearing the government try to blame the opposition for trying to raise what I think is a very valid point, which is: why did the government go out publicly and make the promise that they would be bringing all these Aussies home? Then they tried to, quite frankly, slur and put words in Senator Keneally's mouth that somehow it was her fault for raising this as a matter of importance today. I mean, come on! If we want to start to talk about the facts, Senator Keneally has been right from day one in setting the record straight. Why was it that the Prime Minister promised families and gave them hope that they would have their loved ones in Australia around the kitchen table by Christmas? That's not going to happen for 40,000 Australians, and we know that. The attitude from government senators today has been quite disappointing—in fact, it's been very dismissive and has lacked any acknowledgement that there is a problem. Is this the standard we have to accept going into Christmas and the year 2021?

Senator Antic earlier on talked about facts. The fact is that DFAT released the details of 2,700 Aussies, but you don't hear that fact coming across from the government side, do you? I know that DFAT staff are doing a great job and trying their best to get everyone back home, but the reality is that there are stuff-ups on the other side, and those opposite need to acknowledge them. They can't come into this place, or into the other place, and promise that they will bring Aussies home by Christmas. I'll give you another fact: to bring all the Aussies back home by Christmas—so by Friday, so they can have their 14-day quarantine—we need 82 A380s. Unfortunately, Qantas has only 12 of them, but I'm sure the Prime Minister could pick up the phone, ring up the CEO of Qantas and say, 'Let's get at least 12 of those out right now.' Instead of sacking 2,000 workers, we could give more than 2,000 workers—thousands of other people—their jobs back. Pick up the phone to Virgin. Pick up the phone to other international carriers. I'm sure we'd get a good rate, a good discount.

This is the type of attitude we have to expect from the government. It's their attitude whether it's JobKeeper, JobSeeker or other government policies leading up to Christmas, and, quite frankly, it stinks. All we want is for this government to do the right thing by Australians. That's what Australians expect. I had the personal circumstance of a constituent reaching out to me. His daughter had been stuck in Scandinavia. She finally returned to Sydney only a few days ago. The point he raised with me was that she'd tried 12 times to get back to Australia. It's cost them tens of thousands of dollars. As Senator Keneally pointed out, people are having to raid their savings; in fact, I think some have even had to take money out of their superannuation accounts. This is not the type of attitude that we would expect from any government. Governments are there to help their citizens abroad in times of great need. It is why we all pay our taxes—to make sure that we have services, whether here in Australia or abroad—yet the government do not seem to care. They would rather attack Senator Keneally and others on this side for somehow wasting the Senate's time. Again, it's a very dismissive attitude.

In the one minute I have left I'll say that, from my point of view, we have to make sure, going forward, that there are mechanisms in place for how we go about handling the pandemic. Senator Scarr mentioned the hotel quarantine situation in my home state of Victoria. We had two passengers come off a plane in Sydney and make their way to Victoria. It sounds like the Ruby Princess all over again. Those opposite are happy to blame the states, because somehow it is the states that look after the borders! If that's the case, what's the point of federation? What's the point of us being in this place? This is the federal parliament. In the Constitution it is crystal clear that the federal government has responsibility for our borders. Those guys opposite have lost all control.

Question agreed to.