Tony Abbott (Warringah, Liberal Party, Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

I accept the admonition of the member for Hume. Had this government not changed the policies that were working, the Prime Minister's statement would have been correct: we would not have been doing it today—because the boats had stopped and they would have stayed stopped. But nine years after the Prime Minister made that statement, that is precisely what this government now wants us to do to try to clean up the mess that this government itself created.

Let us be absolutely crystal clear—this is a mess of the government's own creation. In 2008, the then Minister for Immigration and Citizenship said:

Labor committed to abolishing the Pacific Solution and this was one of the first things the Rudd Labor Government did on taking office. It was also one of my greatest pleasures in politics.

Twenty-two thousand illegal arrivals, 1,000 deaths and $4.7 billion later, the Pacific solution is being put in place.

Now, to his credit, the then minister for immigration, Senator Evans, accepts that he got it wrong. He had the decency to tell the Senate that he had got it wrong. And I suspect the current minister for immigration, sitting opposite, has the decency to admit that he got it wrong, because that is what he said to the cabinet back in October last year—that they had got it wrong. So, since October of last year, the minister for immigration has wanted to change policy. All that has stopped the government doing so from that day to this—10,000 illegal boat arrivals and some 338 deaths at sea later—has been the stubbornness and the pig-headedness of this Prime Minister.

As late as last year, the Prime Minister was saying asylum seekers who went to Nauru to have their claims processed ended up being refugees who came to Australia, so it was a detour, not a solution. As late as six weeks ago, the Prime Minister was saying that the experts had looked the Leader of the Opposition in the eye and said to him, 'Nauru will not work.' Now the Prime Minister, in an extraordinarily brazen performance, comes in here and says, 'Nauru will work.' Well, of course it will work. It will work in conjunction with temporary protection visas and the willingness to turn boats around where it is safe to do so. Why didn't this Prime Minister have the decency to come to this obvious conclusion a long, long time ago? What we can say about this Prime Minister is that there is a judgment problem, there is an integrity problem and there is a consistency problem—and a character problem, because even today the Prime Minister did not want to accept that she got it wrong.

This is a monumental change of policy. Let us be under no illusions about the magnitude of the policy change that this government has suddenly, in the last 24 hours, embraced. This is a massive backflip, and, frankly, in the Westminster tradition, a minister or a prime minister who in effect repudiates his or her old policy to embrace a policy that he or she had always rejected would resign as a matter of honour. As a matter of honour, this government should resign. But we do not expect honour from this government. We do not expect consistency and we do not expect competence. I regret to say that a government that could not competently put pink batts into people's roofs is unlikely to successfully put illegal boat people on Nauru. But they will get their legislation, and, if it fails, this Prime Minister, finally, will have no-one to blame but herself.

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