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

As I was just about to say on the question of processing on Nauru, the government received advice about what the impact of having a detention centre on Nauru would be if it took that step. We received that advice; the Leader of the Opposition received that advice. The advice from the Houston report takes a different approach. The advice from the Houston report does not recommend one strategy; it recommends an integrated package. The aim of the integrated package is to ensure that if people risk their lives at sea, if people give their money to a people smuggler, they get no advantage from it. So one element of that integrated package is a regional processing centre on Nauru which would operate in a different way than detention centres in Nauru have operated in the past, and, in particular, the operation in Nauru would have built into it the same amount of waiting time to get a resettlement opportunity as people would have experienced before they risked their life at sea, before they gave a people smuggler their money. That is the difference: the breadth of the package, the interlocking nature of the recommendations, and the change to the recommendations about what should happen on Nauru and on PNG.

The real question before the parliament today is not these political calibrations as they are being played out now and as they were played out yesterday by so many politicians who wanted to front a television camera to tell the TV audience who had won and who had lost. That is not what the Australian people are looking to us to do. (Time expired)

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