Richard Marles (Corio, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Immigration and Border Protection) Share this | Hansard source

The first question I would like to ask of the minister is in relation to that initial comment that he made around keeping our borders secure. It relates to the matter which has been in the public eye since last week. This time last week an extraordinary allegation was put forward by people in Indonesia that they as people smugglers had been paid by Australian officials to take the asylum seekers on board their vessels back to Indonesia. This seemed at the time an extraordinary allegation. To be honest, when it was made, I did not take it seriously. There are a lot of allegations made in this area, as I am sure the minister knows, that turn out not to be true. The minister very quickly denied the government having paid any money to people smugglers to take their passengers back to Indonesia. Again, to be honest, that made perfect sense to me. That was last Tuesday.

Last Friday, we had the Prime Minister give a pretty astounding interview with Neil Mitchell on 3AW where he seemed to allow the possibility that this may have actually occurred and, in a subsequent press conference later that day, really invited all Australians to believe that this was precisely what occurred. My question to the minister is obviously whether or not this did occur and whether he stands by the comments that he made originally that this never happened. These were comments which made sense because the idea that you would be paying people who belong to a criminal network to undertake behaviour which would, in essence, create something of a pull factor makes no sense at all. It makes no sense that you would send a message to people smugglers that it is possible to come up next to an Australian vessel and there would be a fair chance that you would get a wad of cash paid for by Australian taxpayers. This would seem to me to be creating a new business opportunity for people smugglers in the context of a set of circumstances in which I think, in all sincerity, both sides of politics have been working over the last few years to try to remove the business opportunities of people smugglers.

This is a very dangerous development, if this is in fact what has occurred. It is very much in the public interest that we get an answer to this question. I note that, in response to questions of this kind over the last 48 hours, the government has been invoking the fact that that these are operational matters and security questions and there is a long-held precedent that governments—indeed, both sides of politics—should not respond to questions on intelligence matters. Ultimately that is not good enough, because that was not invoked at the time that the minister very clearly gave an answer last week that this did not occur. It was not invoked back then. It seems to me that it is being invoked now with a view to try and make sure that this question does not need to be answered.

I also note that the government has been busily out there, talking to various media outlets and backgrounding them on the operations, in fact, of security agencies—I have to say that in my mind it is utterly appalling that that has been put into the public domain—which has then raised questions about whether or not there were any actions of this kind that occurred when Labor was in office. Of course, we would not answer questions in relation to the activities of our security agencies, and they are not the questions that I am asking of the government or the minister this evening. But I would absolutely make this point in another context: there would be security agencies and police organisations around the world who pay informants to infiltrate criminal networks. That is a very different question to one of paying a criminal network to do a particular job. That is the question that is at hand here, in terms of the conduct that occurred last week. If the allegations are true—and the Prime Minister is not ruling them out, which of itself seems to us to be a strange message to send people smugglers—then this government has been paying criminal networks to undertake a job. We need to hear from the minister now that that did not occur.

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