Stephen Smith (Perth, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Foreign Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

As the Australian public well knows, boats carrying asylum seekers have been coming to Australia for many years—for 20 to 30 years, in my own memory. Of course the first ones that I personally remember are those that came in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. This was an issue that the Fraser government and subsequently the Hawke government had to deal with. So boats have been coming to Australia for many years, and governments of both political persuasions have had to deal with these issues. What do we see now? We see now very considerable numbers of displaced persons coming to our region as a result of military or civil conflict. We have seen in recent times, in the most recent period, people come to Australia or seek to come to Australia from Iraq; Iran; more recently, the Afghanistan-Pakistan border area; and, most recently, Sri Lanka as a result of the military and civil conflict there, the civil war there. These are described quite sensibly as push factors, factors that drive people away from their homes, factors that we now see cause 40 million people in the world to be displaced and about a third of those potentially in or coming to our region.

So, how do we as a government grapple with those issues? The first thing the government did was to enhance our border protection and Customs protection arrangements. In the last budget, for example, over $450 million was expended to increase our maritime surveillance and to increase our aerial surveillance. This is a very important policy to effect because, as a maritime country and continent, we need to ensure that we protect our borders as much as we can. So we added to the border protection, the border security and the Customs protection and security arrangements effected by our predecessors. We added to those quite substantially. We have seen that with the additional maritime aerial surveillance activities.

The second thing that we did, which was very important, was to understand that, fundamentally, if you want to deal with this issue you can only deal with this issue appropriately and effectively by acting in conjunction with your neighbours—by acting in our region, with our friends and partners in the region. The government reinstituted the Bali process, which is the regional institution effected in the early 2000s to be the regional institution which deals with people-smuggling, people movement and human-trafficking issues. The former Indonesian foreign minister, Hassan Wirajuda, and I convened the first ministerial-level meeting of the Bali process in three or four years. We did that in the course of this year. That was well attended and well supported in our region because it was not just Australia who had a difficulty or a problem with, for example, asylum seekers coming from Afghanistan or from the Afghanistan-Pakistan area. Indonesia had difficulties caused by the movement of Rohingya people from Myanmar, or Burma, or from Bangladesh. There are different problems created for different countries. The only way we can deal with this is by the so-called transit countries like Malaysia, Indonesia, to a lesser extent Singapore and to some extent Thailand, and the source countries, including now Sri Lanka, acting together. Only then can we seek to manage this issue and this problem.

The third thing that the government did was to say to our good friend and neighbour Indonesia that we need to enhance what we have been doing. There has been very good cooperation between Australia and Indonesia on this issue, not just in the course of this government’s time in office but in the course of our predecessor’s time in office. That assistance has included not just assistance to Indonesia—information sharing, intelligence sharing; assistance on detention facilities; assistance on processing, on settlement and on resettlement; and assistance to the two relevant international institutions, the International Organisation for Migration and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. That has been ongoing in Indonesia for a number of years, supported by governments of both political persuasions. But we said to Indonesia: given the increased difficulties that we face, given the heightened challenge that we face, in particular most recently from the aftermath of the civil conflict in Sri Lanka, we need to heighten our cooperation. In that respect you have seen not just me having discussions with my counterpart, and officials from a range of agencies having discussions with their counterparts, but the Prime Minister and President Yudhoyono having conversations to agree to enhance our cooperation. We are very hopeful that officials will be in a position to report progress to the Prime Minister and to the President of those enhanced and heightened cooperation arrangements at the APEC meeting in Singapore in the middle of November. When it comes to our relationship with Indonesia this is done not just under the structure of the Bali process but also, importantly, between Australia and Indonesia, as part of the Lombok treaty brought into effect by Hassan Wirajuda and me when we signed it in Perth in February 2008.

When it came to office the government also had a very strong view that it was possible to do these things so far as border protection was concerned but at the same time to deal with people who came to Australia’s territories and claimed asylum in a dignified and civilised manner—to treat those people in a way which, without equivocation, discharged our international legal and humanitarian obligations consistent with the refugee convention. That could be done in a civilised and dignified way and we did not have to go through the dark period that we went through in the course of the Howard government’s time in office, when our international reputation was shredded, when the community was divided and when a very dark period in our history left a stain on the reputation of Australia internationally. As a consequence of that we said that temporary protection visas should be abolished; the so-called Pacific island solution, which saw processing not take place either in a source, transit or receiving country but in Manus Island in Papua New Guinea or Nauru, countries that have no direct relationship with this difficulty or this problem, abolished; and the removal of women and children from behind razor wire. We made those changes because we believed those changes reflected a view that you could be tough, and have a system of border integrity and security, and at the same time discharge a humanitarian and an international legal obligation. We do not believe that those three major changes are the driving force behind what we now see. The clear driving force behind what we now see are the push factors that I have described.

I note the thesis of the Leader of the Opposition and the shadow minister for immigration that the cause, the sum total and entire cause of the difficulties we now face is the changes that we made.

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