Laurie Ferguson (Reid, Australian Labor Party, Parliamentary Secretary for Multicultural Affairs and Settlement Services) Share this | Hansard source

I think you have been ridiculed by a number of speakers in regard to your repudiation of your own report.

As I said earlier, it is difficult to determine whether the member’s inconsistency is symptomatic of incompetence or by design. Perhaps one or two backflips could be described as purely incompetent. Simple incompetence can generally be forgiven but not tolerated. However, the litany of misrepresentations, unexplained backflips and inflammatory statements outlined here, which have become the hallmark of the member, signal something far more troublesome. They signal three things. Firstly, it is a coalition without principles determined to use immigration policy for its own nefarious political purposes—nothing particularly new there. Secondly, it is a coalition without direction—nothing you couldn’t have read in every press report this week. Thirdly and most worryingly for the Australian public, they signal it is a coalition without any immigration policy other than the policy of division, a topic that those opposite are well versed in.

I want to briefly turn to one person who had the courage to stand totally behind the previous government. Firstly, I note the shadow spokesperson equivocates. She disassociates herself from some policies and then she crawls back, having put them forward. But the member for Mitchell was more courageous in this debate. He defended rigorously all the policies of the previous government. He justified, by implication and sometimes categorically, the detention of Cornelia Rau and that of Australian citizen Vivian Alvarez Solon and that of Tony Tran, the husband of an Australian citizen wrongfully detained for five years and assaulted while in detention. The Commonwealth Ombudsman identified, during this glorious decade-long policy position, 247 cases where people were detained who were ‘not unlawful’. The Rudd government are currently going through the process of compensating those people. We know that $311 million-plus was spent on the offshore processing of asylum seekers on Nauru and on Manus Island. Despite the rhetoric of ‘we are going to decide who goes where’, we know that essentially in total 60 per cent of those people came to this country afterwards. I support the bill before the House. (Time expired)

Question agreed to.

Bill read a second time.

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