Julia Gillard (Lalor, Australian Labor Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

I hope I get the opportunity now to explain to the House what I would have thought was a fairly simple concept. People around the globe get on the move for all sorts of reasons. Some of them come from source countries that are within our region; some do not. They transit through our region and people are aware of the common stopping-off points as they move through our region seeking forward transit and ultimately transit to Australia. The aim of the regional processing centre is to take away the incentive to engage in that forward transit to Australia. It is to take away from people smugglers the very product that they sell. It is to take away from people an incentive to keep moving, and it is certainly there to take away an incentive for people to undertake a difficult and dangerous journey at sea. For the opposition to try and create some nonsense campaign that somehow this is about creating a processing centre for everyone who is on the move around the world is obviously laughable and absurd.

Anybody who has engaged even in the most cursory examination of this issue would know that people move in an irregular fashion around our globe. They go to Europe; obviously they go to Canada—we have just talked about that; some engage in transit in our region; and a far smaller number engage in forward transit to Australia. The aim of the regional processing centre is to take away the incentive for that continued forward transit and to take away from people smugglers the very product that they sell. I understand that this area of policy is complex and it requires determination, but what I can definitely say to this House is that it will never be solved by a three-word slogan. It will never be solved by the Leader of the Opposition’s boat-phone idea, and I doubt it will ever be solved by the Deputy Leader of the Opposition, who stood next to the foreign minister of Nauru, talked about the Nauru detention centre and then said the people of Vanuatu had been very generous in assisting the Australian people. From lessons in geography, let me tell you that Nauru is not a subset of Vanuatu. I would suggest to the Deputy Leader of the Opposition she gets out a map of the region and has a good look.

See this speech in context