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

I join the minister in acknowledging those working with the department to implement the residence determination orders for the 268 individuals who, the minister has advised, have been subject to these decisions. In particular I commend Mr Paris Aristotle, a respected and long-time adviser to governments on these difficult issues over many years.

In October last year the minister announced his intention to use the residence determination powers established by the Howard government to release children into the community. That is what those laws are for. Those laws are coalition policy and are the legacy of the Howard government’s management of these difficult issues. These powers have been available to this government from the day they were elected. It is they who chose to wait three years before using them.

In November 2007, the Howard legacy also included the fact that there were just 21 children in the detention network—15 of them in the community and the other six in alternative detention arrangements. There were none on Christmas Island. The grand total of people in the detention network who had arrived illegally by boat when the Howard Government left office in November 2007 was four. Today that same figure is a record 6,382, and there is a record 1,027 children in the detention network.

In June 2005, the Howard government removed children and families from formal detention. No child has been held behind razor wire since. I note that the Prime Minister sought to deceitfully appropriate these changes to her own government last year. It seems she was being as economical with the truth on that occasion as she has more recently been with her decision to introduce a carbon tax.

When the Howard government announced that children would be released into the community in June 2005 there were just 59 children in the detention network. Six weeks later they had all been released into the community. When the minister made his announcement last October to use the Howard government’s residence determination powers to put children into the community, there were 752 children in the detention network and only 10 of those children had been placed in the community. The other 742 were in places like the Asti Motel, Port Augusta and, of course, Christmas Island. Four months after this announcement, the minister advised today that 268 people have been subject to residence determination orders. What he did not say is what he said last Monday in an interview—that only 120 have actually been released into the community.

The minister spoke today about the special duty of care we owe to children. I have no doubt about the minister’s personal commitment and sincerity to that duty, and I share his commitment. The challenge, though, for the government is to explain why it took so long for the government to exercise the residence determination powers available to it under the act that were established and utilised by the Howard government. Why would we oppose the government’s use of such powers when we created them?

By contrast, between November 2007 and October 2010, on Labor’s watch the number of children in the community fell from 15 to 10, while the number of children in the network rose from 21 to 752. Why did it take the government so long to act? Since making their decision in October, another 275 children have entered the network after turning up on boats. Under the government’s failed policies we now have more than 1,000 children in the network who have come here by boat. There is nothing compassionate about that.

The government will use the Howard government’s powers to place children in the community but refuses to restore the Howard government’s powers and policies that stopped children getting on these boats. Our detention network is in crisis. This is a product of failed policy. The government has rolled back a successful border protection regime that reduced the number of people coming on boats to fewer than 300 people over six years. We have had more people turn up on boats in the last two months, including more than 100 last Saturday, than in the six years after the Pacific solution was introduced. Is it any wonder this government has sought an additional $290 million in operating expenses for asylum seeker management this year, more than what it cost to run the Pacific solution for almost six years?

Under Labor’s failed policies, more than 200 boats, carrying more than 10,000 people, have arrived, including the ill-fated SIEV36 that was set alight and SIEV221 that tragically crashed against the rocks at Christmas Island last December. And there was the disgraceful asylum freeze policy introduced by the government to deny refugee assessments to Afghan and Sri Lankan asylum seekers. That side of the House is the only political party and government that has introduced, while I have been in this House, a discriminatory immigration policy in this country. This asylum freeze resulted in 500 more children in the detention network and a doubling of those in detention. The government’s asylum policy is in crisis, yet it remains in denial and unrepentant of its failures. If the government wants to look after children, then my message is simple: stop pursuing these policies that have encouraged more than 1,000 children to get on boats.

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