Gary Humphries (ACT, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Citizenship) Share this | Hansard source

I am sure it was not necessary to actually gauge the level of support in the Senate, Mr Acting Deputy President, because this is an issue which concerns not just those on this side of the Senate chamber but indeed many Australians. In fact, I will go so far as to say that the government knows, the whole of the Senate knows and the Australian people know that Australia’s border protection policy at this time is in a state of free-fall.

Since the point about 18 months ago when the Australian government announced that it was dumping the previous government’s border protection policies and putting its own more relaxed policies in place, some 4,100 arrivals by boat have come to our shores and the policies that were previously in place have been discarded. The effect is that the Australian people can discern that a policy change has made something go badly wrong with Australia’s border protection policies and they want to know why. Clearly Australia’s borders in the last 18 months have become an open door, encouraging asylum seekers to undertake dangerous journeys in often unseaworthy vessels, in numbers unprecedented for at least a decade.

The government, the Senate and the Australian people also know that this chaotic situation, this deterioration in the security of Australia’s borders, this free-fall of a policy, is the direct product of a decision announced by the Rudd government to relax the previous firm policies of the Howard government. What is perhaps more disturbing is that we have seen, in the light of this evidence of a collapse of policy, a government paralysed by indecision, a government unable to determine how it will cope with this obviously failed policy, which constantly looks to effect external factors in Australia’s border protection but fails to consider or be prepared to undertake the adjustment to the internal settings to make Australia’s borders more secure. And that is a matter for which the government stands condemned.

As of yesterday, we have had 24 boats arrive illegally in our waters during the course of 2010. Almost 2,100 people have arrived by boat in just the first 10 weeks of 2010. That is an indication of a policy which has utterly and completely failed to deter people from undertaking such a hazardous journey. Under Labor, people-smugglers in our region are doing a roaring trade. We have gone from a situation where there were about three illegal boat arrivals per year, during the last six or seven years of the Howard government, to a situation where there are two or three boat arrivals per week—in fact, they have been almost a daily occurrence in recent days. It seems as though the government is trying to make the Guinness Book of Records for the most boat arrivals in a single year. Clearly, what we are seeing is an unprecedented ramping up of the numbers—and the government appears to be utterly and completely powerless to prevent that from happening.

This situation has of course been seen in Australia’s past. Back in 2001 the Howard government was facing a similar situation; it faced a surge of boat arrivals. Many thousands of people were crossing the seas in boats. The Howard government was faced with a very considerable challenge. What it did was to make changes to the Australian border protection and immigration systems so that the signals that were sent to those people who chose to undertake those journeys—and, more importantly, to those people who facilitated those journeys: the people-smugglers—were changed. As a result there was a dramatic reduction, in the years following that change of policy in 2001, in the number of boat arrivals on Australia’s shores and in Australia’s waters.

Something happened after that change of policy in 2001; in 2008 there was again a change in outlook. Again, from about August 2008 we saw a surge of boat arrivals. The question is: what caused that surge to occur? We know there has been turmoil in places such as Iraq, Afghanistan and Sri Lanka, all of which have produced asylum seekers. But each of those conflicts goes back much further than August 2008; they started many years before and were producing refugees many years before. We know that in 2001 there were, according to the UNHCR, some 12.1 million refugees around the world. In 2008 that number had fallen to under 10½ million refugees. So what is it that caused, in about August 2008, Australia to once again be targeted so heavily by those seeking asylum? This is not just a trend or a blip in the statistics; it is a surge—it is as though a faucet has been turned on which previously had been merely dripping.

Since that something—that change—in 2008, 92 boats have arrived in Australia’s waters. The obvious culprit for that change was of course the change of policy announced by Minister Evans on behalf of the government in August 2008, a change which signalled a more relaxed border protection policy. The fact is that boats have been arriving at this country’s borders at much greater rates than comparable countries around the world. The UNHCR reports that in 2009 Australia experienced a surge of 30 per cent in the number of applications made for asylum in this country. That might appear to indicate a world in which great instability was present, and perhaps it does reflect some instability in the world. But other countries in similar circumstances have not experienced that kind of change. For example, in the United Kingdom—and we heard the minister today tell the Senate that Europe is still receiving the majority of applications for asylum—we have seen not an increase but a reduction in the number of people seeking asylum, by something of the order of six per cent. Clearly, this is not simply what is going on around the world. It is not simply global push factors which are influencing the arrivals on our shores; it is something about Australia’s policy settings which is leading to that occurring. And it appears that the government is unable or unwilling to act on those settings.

We know that Australians are concerned about the security of their borders. That is very clear. And we know that from what the Prime Minister himself had to say on his last day as the Leader of the Opposition, the day before the 2007 election. As opposition leader he said: ‘I will turn back the boats.’ That was his response to the question of border security: ‘I will turn back the boats.’ And yet, as the Senate was told just last week, since his government has come to office no boat has been turned back—not one. He attempts to blame other factors for the fact that the government is faced with this surge of boat arrivals; but, unconvincingly, he fails to identify any of the factors that he himself has control over—namely, the sense of Australia having an open door with respect to such arrivals, a sense reinforced by the enormous increase in the size of the Christmas Island detention facility to accommodate those large numbers of people crossing the sea in unseaworthy vessels. So we have a very dangerous situation—a sense that Australia’s security has been diminished, that our borders are porous, that our policy is in free-fall, that we are unable to exercise any kind of influence on the policies of the people-smugglers who drive this trade. We see a government paralysed by indecision in the face of all of this. The Australian people expect better than that.

Mr Rudd, only a couple of weeks ago, said that the government needed to be apologetic about some of the things it had done. He said:

... we didn’t anticipate how hard it was going to be to deliver things, particularly given the burdens imposed on us by the global financial crisis last year. But that’s no excuse.

He went on to say:

The public expect you to honour the things that you have said.

The public were expecting that the Rudd government would hold a strong line with respect to unauthorised arrivals and the government has failed to deliver on that promise.

Christmas Island, which was once labelled a white elephant by the Labor Party when in opposition, has now become the linchpin of the government’s response to this crisis. It has become a much larger centre and is constantly being increased in size by the government, with an accompanying blow-out of $132 million, because of the extra arrivals in our waters. At the beginning of this financial year the government estimated that 200 arrivals would occur each year. The 2,100 that have already arrived this financial year indicate how badly the government has miscalculated the size of the problem it is facing. We have to act to deal with that situation and the government has failed to do that.

People recognise failure when they see it. They know that the government has dropped the ball on this issue. People-smuggling is an industry: it has entrepreneurs, customers, a product and profits. The changes that the government announced in August 2008 revved that industry to life. They gave it purpose and, in particular, they gave its entrepreneurs a product to sell. The government claim that the fact there has been a surge since then is a coincidence. They claim it just so happens that international factors have generated extra people coming to our shores. The Australian people know that it is no coincidence. They know full well that the unprecedented number of arrivals on our shores is the result of a government which has lost its bottle; is unable to control its own policies; has left Australia’s borders vulnerable and has, incidentally, put at risk the lives of many people who get on boats to cross the sea in perilous circumstances—in some cases never to arrive at their destination. We need to make sure that the government acknowledges its failure and does something about it. Australians expect no less in a crisis of this dimension.