Malcolm Turnbull (Wentworth, Liberal Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the Leader of the Opposition for his question, and I can assure him and all honourable members that the government is determined to deal with those people on Manus and Nauru that arrived during the period of the Labor government's abandoning the very effective border protection policies of the Howard era.

The Labor government, of which he was part, consciously abandoned policies that had worked—that had ensured that, at the time John Howard ceased to be Prime Minister, there was not one child in detention; that had ensured that the people smugglers' business model had been broken. In this chamber in 2009, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd argued that the Howard government's policies should be abandoned, and he said that the Howard government's policies—our domestic border protection arrangements—were irrelevant. He said the only thing that drove the rate of people smugglers—the only thing that drove the rate of unauthorised arrivals—was the push factors; the external factors in the Middle East, in Central Asia, in Africa and so forth. And we argued back in our turn that the push factors were doubtless very significant but they were always enormous, and that the real issue, the real factor, the critical element, was whether we had a secure policy to protect our borders. And, well, we lost that argument. Labor had the numbers. And then we saw what happened—50,000 arrivals, over 1,200 people drowned at sea who we know about; doubtless there were more whose tragedies are unknown, at least to us. And so we came back into office—

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