Laurie Ferguson (Werriwa, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

The previous speaker well knows that this is going to be totally ineffective. This is a guise from an opposition who is not prepared to support the government in defending Australian jobs with regard to a long overdue attempt to bring in further stipulations on 457 visas, an opposition whose total dereliction of duty led to the worst abuse in the Australian immigration system: the blow-out of the international student intake led to racist attacks in this country and more extreme elements of the Indian media because a person stabbed his wife to death; because a friend of a family in Melbourne was responsible for the death of a child; and because Indian nationals in the Riverina were seemingly murdered by their employers in a dispute over wages. This country was ostracised, attacked and hailed as racist in India because of the mess created by the previous government.

They will not take responsibility for the that dereliction of duties but what they are trying to do is increase wariness in the Australian population, to increase a sense of worry and terror: that we cannot trust people coming into this country by boat. We saw this more recently with regard to the rather flamboyant suggestions that whenever an asylum claimant is released into society the local police should be told. The local community should be advised, despite the fact that the statistics, the real world, says that the level of criminality committed by asylum seekers in this country is far lower than the general population.

What we are seeing today is a rather perverse attempt to give some cover to a policy they know will fail. The previous speaker spoke about the numbers of people in recent years who have entered by boat. He said 'It's a fact that the boats stopped' because of their policies. In the year of the introduction of the temporary protection visa measure and the two years after that, 12,000 people came by boat. Yes, the number of boats eventually declined; but, if it is to be connected with this policy, it would seem to have had a very long term impact, as it was not traceable in any measure for about two years afterwards. One would have thought, from his account, that these people sitting around the coffee shops in Jakarta would have picked up the message earlier.

This is again an indication that the level of boats coming to this country is very much to do with what is happening in countries overseas in regards to human rights abuses, racism, discrimination, torture and murder, than it does to do with the policies within this country itself. I attended a function on the weekend related to the 20,000 Pakistani Shia that have been murdered by bombings and direct assassinations over the last few years. This is the kind of reality that drives the boat arrivals. It has very little to do with these so-called cure-all policies that the opposition come forward with. Yes, they have a problem with the large numbers of boats coming to this country, but they do not have the solution. Temporary protection visas are another example of when they did not have a policy.

One of the brilliant outcomes of their policy—and the member for Cook did refer to those boats, and I talked about the boats that kept coming after the introduction of this policy—was to stop family reunions. What did we see as a result of that? In 1999, 12 per cent of claimants coming here by boat from Iraq and Afghanistan were women and children. It was a magnificent accomplishment on their part because, two years later, the number of children and women coming by boats increased from 12 to 42 per cent. It was augmented. Because people were not allowed to bring their families here, they started to come by boat, endangering themselves and leading to tragic events such as SIEVX in October 2001, where three-quarters of the 353 people who drowned—dead because of those policies—were women and children.

This is just a guise, a pretence: they are so brilliant and know so much about this policy area that they alone in the world can stop the movement of people. Europe faces it, North America faces it, but they alone in international leadership are going to accomplish the end of this. They know it is not true and they know that, in reality, the arrival of people by boats and in planes is related to what is happening in their homeland. It is not traceable to the level of poverty and socioeconomic problems in the country, although that is a factor. Clearly, people coming here in these boats, as I said the other day, originate from countries where there are very real and continuing human rights abuses.

We have seen in the last week a degree of truthfulness from the opposition. They are confident that they will win the next election, so they have to soften up the electorate for the reality of their election. Up to now it has been unquestionable: 'We will stop the boats coming. No problems; we will do it within weeks.' While the Leader of the Opposition previously said that he would stop the boats within months, last week we saw the him suddenly retreat from that comment, saying that he would only be able to 'make a difference'. He said:

We can make a difference from the first few weeks.

He was going to stop them despite the advice from the Navy, despite the dangers to Australian service personnel and reservists in those boats. He was above that. He knew everything. They were wrong—just like Angus Houston, former Chief of the Defence Force, was wrong in regards to his expert advice! The naval personnel who commented on this issue were wrong, and he was going to stop the boats! However, the shadow minister commented on Andrew Bolt's program—a friendly interview, as usual—on 2GB on 13 March that he could not confirm the length of time a coalition government would take to stop the boats.

So it is 'we're going to have some impact within a period of time' from the opposition leader, and 'we basically won't confirm the length of time' from the shadow spokesperson. He said that, rather, they would be aiming to stop the boats; they would be aiming to move them back to the levels of Howard government, and we know the levels under the Howard government varied at different times. When he was pressed a bit more—because Andrew Bolt is very enthusiastic about stopping the boats—the member for Cook said that the coalition government would reduce the number of boats to Howard levels in its first term, and he commented, 'I am not making any forecasts.'

He is making such forecasts. He is 'not putting time frames on it'.

These people supposedly, allegedly, have solutions to a major problem in this country that people are concerned about. In electorates like my own, people are quite concerned about the number of boats, the number of claimants. The opposition are trying to intimate to the electorate that they can solve this problem. Now, as an election gets closer, all of a sudden they are saying, 'We're going to try, we're going to make an effort; we're going to do something about it,' but with no definite position, as I said earlier.

If we look at the history of TPVs, this supposed solution to everything actually led to very few people who were given temporary protection visas getting on planes back to their homeland. Of the recipients of TPVs issued between their introduction in 1999 and 2008, when the incoming government—widely advised by experts in the field—abolished this harsh policy, 88 per cent had already been granted permanent status. Eighty-eight per cent of the people on TPVs—the supposed solution to the problem, the so-called dissuasive policy which was going to stop people paying smugglers and stop people coming on boats—had already been granted permanent status. So one wonders what kind of disincentive that really was. Of the remaining 1,000, 815 were to be granted permanent status after that.

The truth about TPVs—which the opposition have not really been too keen on putting in neon lights for the Australian public—is that only 3.4 per cent, or 379, of the people on them actually departed the country. After all the boats, all the people coming and all the claimants in this system—this process of leaving people in a limbo land of uncertainty for years—only 379 people departed the country.

The TPVs did not stop the boats. The boats kept coming at a fairly high level for another two years. They were a spectacular failure in terms of achieving the stated deterrent objective, with a successive rise in the number of unauthorised maritime arrivals after TPVs. Then, at the end of the day, a very miserly proportion of the people on TPVs actually departed the country. As I say, this legislation is just a guise, a pretence that the opposition have got a policy to be effective against these boats.

Whilst the Prime Minister of the country today will take it up to the visiting President of Burma in regard to human rights issues, particularly in relation to the Rohingya people in the Rakhine state of Burma, we cannot have any faith in the Leader of the Opposition taking up this issue with Indonesian authorities, the people that we have to get cooperation with. He has had two visits there. As I indicated last week, he might have discussed lumpia, gado gado and satay peanut sauce with the Indonesian President, but there was one issue that the Leader of the Opposition did not discuss. It is the central issue, the biggest problem in the country, according to the opposition, but he did not manage, in those discussions, to at any stage talk about the fact that Australia, under him, would send the boats back. One would have thought that the Indonesians might not be impressed with that idea, that they might have been somewhat hostile and might have given a message back to the opposition leader. One would have thought that he actually should get the cooperation of Indonesia and other countries in this region for a regional solution to the question of boat movements. But no. He went up there and he discussed everything under the roof except the central policy the opposition have, of sending the boats back. One has to doubt their sincerity about this policy, as one has to doubt their sincerity today about TPVs.

Quite frankly, I do not think we can have much faith in the shadow minister for foreign affairs taking it up. We saw the rather depressing, to put it mildly, performance that she put up in Sri Lanka recently, where she alone of international visitors, including world leaders, who have been there and commented found that basically all things are great there: 'There are no problems in Sri Lanka at the moment. It's all cool. Basically there are no reasons that these boats would be coming.' This is in contrast to the British government, which has actually been able to make some analysis of problems there.

This is a policy which is not going to succeed. It is not meant to succeed. It is not serious. But it is a policy which would bring great suffering to individuals. It is unparalleled in the Western world, a group of nations we associate with aspirations of human rights and dignity. They are saying that a person that they themselves determine to be a genuine claimant, to have grounds for protection, will only be temporarily protected and that that would be reviewed in another three years. They will have no rights to bring their family. As I say, they have been determined to have grounds, and in most cases their families are either marooned in a foreign land, unprotected from livelihood issues, or they might still be back in their homeland enduring the kinds of human rights abuses that have been found to be correct grounds by Australia. Those people will not be given permanent protection—unlike in the rest of the Western world. We can only surmise where that is going to lead: regardless of whether the family themselves will endure the same temporary visa in this country, they will seek reunion; they will seek to get together again, no matter what the laws of this country are.

This is a policy from an opposition that has been particularly derelict in protection of this country's national interest with regard to a variety of measures, including to do with international students, where their closest associates when they administered this policy were shonky migration agents in the Punjab and shonky conductors of colleges in this country. This undermined our technical education and then led to our current problem of having to do something about 457 visas because the previous government did nothing about technical education, nothing about skills shortages, nothing about spending money on infrastructure to develop industry in this country. Instead, they relied totally on short-term visa entrants.

This policy for TPVs should be rejected. It is meant to basically give some kind of wink to the Australian public that they have some solutions—solutions which failed previously. They are solutions which essentially led to only three per cent of the people—the big signal was, 'We're going to send them back'—leaving the country; the other 97 per cent of people who received TPVs under their previous regime stayed here permanently. That is no disincentive; it is just show.

Debate adjourned

Sitting suspended from 13:27 to 16:00

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