Scott Morrison (Cook, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Immigration and Citizenship) Share this | Hansard source

Members of parliament have many great privileges in this place, but none is greater than the privilege that is bestowed on each of us when we are elected to this place and when we are returned to this place. It is a great delight to return to this place. I am pleased to be back and I am pleased to be returned by the constituents of Cook, who have been very generous. I sincerely thank all of them for the trust they have again put in me to represent them. While members of parliament have many responsibilities in this place, there is none greater than the responsibility we have to our constituents—and that will always be my No. 1 priority while ever I remain in this place according to their grace and favour.

The local campaign in Cook, in Sydney’s Sutherland Shire, addressed many issues and there were many topics of concern. Many of these topics of concern were also shared with the neighbouring electorate of Hughes. I am particularly pleased to be joined in the parliament by the new member for Hughes, Mr Craig Kelly, who was elected to this place for the first time on the occasion of the last election. The member for Hughes gave an outstanding maiden speech to the parliament just this week and I commend him for it. I look forward to us working closely together as Liberal federal MPs for the shire. I worked closely with the former member for Hughes, Danna Vale, who retired at the last election. I pay tribute to her. She was a role model as a member of parliament, a role model as a local member and a role model as a human being. Her heart was full of compassion for the people she represented and for those much further afield. I pay tribute to Danna Vale in this place.

The local agenda of issues are matters that are close to my heart. The issues that particularly caught attention were largely about ensuring that we can preserve the lifestyle that we enjoy in the shire. The shire is a magic place to live and raise a family, and it has always been my primary commitment in this place to keep it that way and preserve it for future generations. The F6 remains on the drawing board, as it has been since the early fifties, and I hope we are going to have a government at some time that will finally build this road. That is primarily the responsibility of the New South Wales government. I am sure the member for Bradfield would join with me in looking forward to March next year, when we will finally put the Labor government in New South Wales out of its misery and, more importantly, end the misery that the people of New South Wales have had to endure. Of all the bad Labor governments, this one is truly a Rolls-Royce achiever. Mind you, the federal government here in Canberra is already showing early signs of being a worthy competitor to Carr, Iemma—I am starting to lose count of how many premiers there have been. I am sure that in history the Gillard government will be up there with, if not exceeding, the incompetence we have seen in New South Wales.

But the issue of the F6 is an important one, because it goes to the missing link in Sydney’s road system. That is not just important for the shire. It is important for the St George area. It is important for inner south-western Sydney. It is important for the Illawarra. It is the missing link that needs to be filled. At the last election, the coalition, once again, took a pledge to the people of Cook, Hughes, Gilmore and other places, that we would fund an appropriate alignment study and a feasibility study to ensure that this project could finally get to shovel-ready stage.

One of the great indictments of the Rudd and Gillard governments’ economic stimulus package is that, of all the billions that they have spent on infrastructure, only one in seven of those dollars was spent on economic infrastructure and projects such as the one that I am calling for here with the F6. It will be a tunnel under the shire that will connect the Illawarra to the city without heavy traffic spewing out its fumes on the families who live in the shire. Not only will those families not have that heavy traffic on their roads, but also they will be able to enjoy the economic benefits of the project itself—the benefits that will come from the project having been completed and providing the economic advantages that will come from the linking of the Illawarra to the city and the shire to the city. So we remain committed, as the Liberal Party in this federal parliament, to that objective.

Aircraft noise is a topic that spans the political horizon. It is a topic in Sydney which members both Labor and Liberal—and, I suspect, at some time in the future, Green—will contend with because of the nature of the operations of Sydney airport. I commend Sydney airport for the way it handles matters, but I remain continually concerned at some of the practices of Airservices Australia. Most recently, during this campaign and over the last couple of years, we have been concerned in the shire about the Boree 4 standard arrival path, which has increased in use. That has increased the frequency of incidence of noise over suburbs in my electorate of Cook—and not only in my electorate but also in the electorates of the members for Banks, Barton, Watson, Grayndler and Reid—as a result of the increase in the use of this standard arrival path.

There is also the Rivet 9 standard arrival path which is used often by members when we are returning to Sydney from this place. For some mystical reason, it has been decided that planes on this path should pass over our homes rather than a national park when coming into Sydney. I am very pleased to report that, since the last election, the minister for transport—who, equally, is from an electorate which is affected by these issues—has been very constructive in taking on these issues on my behalf. We have had some positive discussions and I am looking forward to getting—at our next meeting, which he had indicated we would have before this year closes—a report on progress on those two particular issues. So aircraft noise will remain a very important issue locally and I will continue to keep it top-of-mind as I represent the constituents of Cook.

There was also the need to support our local community organisations. The shire is very much a place that likes to help itself. It is made up of tens, if not hundreds, of organisations, out there supporting our community. Whether it is sports clubs, or local charities like the Sylvanvale Foundation, Civic Disability Services or Enough is Enough with Ken Marslew, or other groups, these organisations are out there just doing the jobs that make our community function. We are truly blessed in the shire to have such a level of community engagement and spirit. It truly enriches the lives of all of the families and people who live there.

An initiative that we introduced in my last term, the Cook Community Classic—which seeks to provide support for these organisations through a series of sports carnivals, raffles, ocean swims and gala balls—is now in its third year. Last Friday evening—with the support of Jason Morrison from 2GB, who came down to host and MC the event; many other charities, in particular Caringbah Rotary; and our numerous sponsors—we raised around $40,000 net. That followed a similar effort last year. We have the ocean swim coming up this Sunday at Cronulla Beach and other activities including a beach soccer tournament for under-10s. This is a truly great community-owned initiative. I have been very pleased to work with the Bate Bay surf clubs to get it off the ground. We see it grow in success every year, and I am sure it will be a success again this weekend.

But it was these issues of advocacy on local matters which can be effected in this place together with working as a facilitator in the community that have been the model I have sought to follow in the last term and I am very pleased that the community has responded so generously at the last election in sending me here with an increased margin. But, of course, the community was also concerned about matters beyond the local ones. In particular, the waste and mismanagement of the Rudd-Gillard government was something that was very top-of-mind, and perhaps it was because of what they saw in the waste of funds going into school projects in my electorate—and I am talking about over $1 million paid in special commissions, to contractors who were not from our area, that were handled through the monolith of the New South Wales state government bureaucracy, a very secretive process. One contractor was delivering projects for the entire region while small contractors, small businesses and others were very frustrated by their inability to access any of these programs as a million dollars alone was paid just in commissions. The community was mystified by the waste and mismanagement of public money. While elements of the program might be appreciated, they have come at a heavy cost.

People in my electorate understand that because the people in the shire understand the value of a dollar. They run their own businesses. They pay their own bills. They know that every dollar matters and that you do not spend dollars unwisely in your private life, because if you do then people in your family will miss out, so the people who are close to you and whom you want to help will miss out. The people in the shire expect nothing more from this government than they expect from themselves, that the government spends its money wisely and on things that make a difference in their lives. That is why we are here. They were massively disappointed and outraged by the waste and mismanagement they saw from the Rudd-Gillard government in their first term and by the vote that was conveyed in the election—they certainly did not want to see that government returned.

The other issue is debt and deficit. The borrowing of $100 million a day was something that outraged them again. This was a key theme that ran through the course of the election and continues to run to this day as constituents continue to raise the matters with me.

At a portfolio level as the shadow minister for immigration and citizenship, I note there were many issues that were part of the national debate. I will touch on a couple of them here. The first is to do with the area of population. The coalition made a simple statement that the levels of net overseas migration that were running under the course of the previous term of government were unsustainably high, and I am sure the Deputy Speaker shares some sympathy with that view, having articulated it courageously as well. We might not agree on some of the solutions or detail but I think we certainly see one thing: unsustainable rates of population growth rob future generations of the quality of life that we enjoy today, and that is not something that we in this place can allow to happen as custodians of matters that affect those outcomes. We made this point and we made it regularly, and I would reject the point made particularly in that debate that this population growth was a function of skilled migration, because the ABS figures showed particularly most recently, with the breakdown of net overseas migration—the figure that we focused on—that only a third of net overseas migration at the high levels was actually accounted for by skilled migration. That is for both the temporary and the permanent classes. There were other factors involved, but net overseas migration was something that we believed needed to be better managed.

The government suggested that this was something that could not be managed because it was largely in the area of temporary migration. The government needs to understand one thing: temporary migration is going to be a more significant component of our immigration intake into the future so we had better get a handle on it and work out ways by which this can be better handled, better quoted and better organised; otherwise it will continue to run away from us and we will be unable to deal with the consequences that follow. We argued for a productivity and sustainability commission to advise governments on what was a sustainable band of population growth. We argued that government should set migration programs that ensured that we were able to stay within those bands that we would then set as government.

This was a responsible approach that would give the community confidence that migration programs were not pulled out of the air but subject to some real scrutiny around what was sustainable. How do we know what is sustainable? By looking at what the delivery of infrastructure is going to be on the ground. Everyone knows that we can have a greater capacity for growth if we invest in the capacity for growth, but everyone also knows that the delivery of this capacity on the ground, whether it is infrastructure or services, simply has not been happening. The punters—the Australian people—are not mugs. They are not going to accept unsustainable rates of population growth when they know that the capacity to absorb and deal with that is not being put in place on the ground.

Regarding border protection, a clear difference was shown during the course of the election campaign. This issue is out of control. Six thousand people have arrived illegally by boat this year. There are 5,360 people in detention, creating a rolling crisis in our detention network. Both of these are gold-medal record accomplishments that no government should seek to achieve but that this government has filled its trophy cabinet with. This is an indictment on this government and it remains asleep. The government thought that the issue here was the debate—the debate was about the debate. Senator Evans, the former Minister for Immigration and Citizenship, confided to a group at the University of New South Wales that his great failure was that he had failed to control the debate. Apparently that was his great failure. The new Minister for Immigration and Citizenship says he wants to elevate the debate. I need to remind the government that the issue here is not the debate. We are not trying to run a talk show; we are actually trying to run a parliament which puts in place a government that will do productive things. We are not here to run a debate; we are here to put in place policies that affect the issues that the Australian people are concerned about—and they are concerned about this issue because they believe, and I think rightly so, that the integrity of our migration program is being compromised by the weak policies of this government.

We need to preserve the confidence and integrity of this program in such a way that does not create a situation where women currently at risk in places such as Africa, the Middle East, parts of Asia and Latin America—and who have family members who have come Australia as offshore applicants as part of our humanitarian program—continue to suffer. They are being crowded out of our refugee and humanitarian program because of the border protection failures of this government. There are simply no places left. While they wait in their hellholes, others come and get access to visas in far less time. The coalition believe that is fundamentally unjust, so the coalition will stand up for those women who are waiting, and we have no problem with the suggestion that others may have to wait longer to ensure that their opportunity is not denied.

We have put forward a clear policy: temporary protection visas, third-country processing, turning around boats where the circumstances permit, which are very limited, and tightening the process around what has become a ‘no-document’ entry process for illegal boat arrivals. Fewer than one in five people who were processed in the last two years actually had documentation, and for those from Afghanistan it was only 13 per cent. That compares to more than nine out of 10 people who arrive by plane and subsequently seek asylum. We said that if there was a reasonable possibility that you have discarded your documentation then we will presume against you for refugee determination. Of course, the returns policy needs to be fair dinkum. It cannot be just a donation to the International Organisation for Migration. This government needs a return policy that ensures that, if you are unsuccessful, you are returned.

In the time remaining, I would like to thank the many people who once again ensured that I was able to return to this place as the member for Cook. In particular, I want to thank Mike Douglas, who is the chairman of my campaign committee, and the many hundreds of volunteers that Mike led, enabling me to not only take up the campaign in Cook but also to support my colleagues around the country and be part of the national debate on matters that were of great importance. I also want to acknowledge Wade McInerney, the chair of the Cook FEC, and the work of the FEC, which was involved in supporting our local party. I want to thank all the supporters of the Cook Endeavour Forum, in particular our chairman, Mike Tynan, the first father of business and of the shire. Mike is an extraordinary man who is of great achievement and I thank him very much for his support. Also, Kevin Schreiber worked so hard in all of the areas supporting that forum.

I want to thank my staff and in particular those were embedded in the electorate office and worked tirelessly: Ann Duffield, my chief of staff; Julian Leembruggen, my tireless media adviser; Troy Loveday; Louise De Domenico, who recently joined the team and did an outstanding job; Latisha Wenlock, who has been with me for quite a period of time; and Matt Versi, who has done a great job in my office—he is a young man with a big future. I want to thank all of them for their great efforts as well as Julie Adams, who has led the community classic and will be busy preparing for it this weekend.

To my dear wife Jenny and my beautiful children Abbey and Lily: they provide the perspective and context and focus for my life that makes everything else relevant and makes everything else make sense. I thank God for the blessing of them in my life and I am truly grateful.

To Tony Abbott: you will forever hold a very special place in the history of the Liberal Party for what you were able to achieve at the last election. It will be surpassed only by what Tony Abbott, the member for Warringah, achieves at the next election when the coalition is elected to government.

I want to thank all my colleagues for their support and I appreciate their encouragement. I want to thank also Malcom Kerr, the state member for Cronulla, who will soon retire. He will be replaced by Mark Speakman who I look forward to being elected as the Liberal candidate next March. I particularly today want to dedicate this victory to Marg Dyson and Evelyn Thompson, two great Liberals who passed away during the campaign. I thank them for their service. (Time expired)

See this speech in context