Patrick Secker (Barker, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Mr Deputy Speaker, I take this opportunity to officially congratulate you on your honoured position in a very unusual situation and I think we are all very thankful that you have been able to take the official Deputy Speaker's position. As I said, it is my first opportunity to speak in the chamber since then and congratulate you.

I rise tonight to express my deep disappointment at the border protection mess—and it can only be described as a mess that Julia Gillard's Labor government has created for this country. The boats keep coming and coming and coming and the government is struggling to keep up, all because Julia Gillard, the Prime Minister, and her cabinet and her Labor Party members are too stubborn to admit that Labor got it wrong. The latest Customs annual report reveals that they are struggling to crew boats and planes and that they have actually had to divert patrols off the Southern Ocean to send them to northern waters. This would not happen if we actually had a border protection system that worked.

In 2010-11 the average boat contained 53 passengers. Now it is up to 73 and each illegal boat costs Australians an average of $12.8 million given all the processing and bringing them in, so it is a lot of money for each boat. What have we had this month? In October we have already seen a record for the number of boats to illegally enter Australia in a month—the third such record in three successive months. With arrivals this financial year running at an average of 2,000 people a month, it is no wonder that there has been a $1.2 billion budget blow-out for this year alone and we are only a few months into it. So $1.2 billion is the price of Labor's vanity on this issue. It is the price of Labor's lack of resolve.

John Howard found a solution; he found a problem and created a solution. Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard found a solution and created a problem and, as the boats keep coming and coming and coming, billions of dollars will continue to be wasted for no good reason. We know that John Howard's policies have worked before and we know that they will work again.

There is no point in being half-hearted about this issue. An effective border protection policy requires a full suite of effective measures to stop the boats. This includes the reintroduction of temporary protection visas and turning the boats around where it is safe to do so. The problem is that the Labor government and the Prime Minister just do not get it, and she is too proud to admit that she got it wrong. Instead of swallowing her pride and admitting that she got it wrong, the Prime Minister has resorted to the politics of smear and distraction. The only problem with this strategy is that there is no substance to back it up and the public knows that Julia Gillard simply cannot be trusted when it comes to telling the truth on this point. Remember that Julia Gillard promised to stop the boats and she has not. She promised to fix the mining tax and it has not raised a cent. And, of course, she said that 'there would be no carbon tax under the government I lead'.

The Australian people simply cannot trust the Gillard Labor government and—guess what?—Kevin Rudd could not trust Julia Gillard either. Two years ago when the faceless man took the prime ministership off Kevin Rudd, Julia Gillard said Labor had lost its way. Two years on, as Labor continues to fight its history wars, this government is still lost. The boats still keep coming, the budget is in worse shape, the debt keeps rising and the carbon tax keeps damaging the economy.

Guess what? The faceless men are at it again—just ask Penny Wong. The faceless men giveth and the faceless men taketh away. Julia Gillard absolutely depends on them to remain Prime Minister. That is why she will not take them on. This is a weak Prime Minister and a weak government. It is a government that has sold its soul to the Greens and is held captive by the faceless man.

The only way to fix the problem is to get rid of this government. The Labor Party needs a stint in opposition and, hopefully, a very long one. Australia cannot afford to have government that is at war with itself, because every day Labor spends obsessing about itself is another day that it is not focused on the real concerns of the Australian people.

The coalition have a better way. The coalition under the leadership of Tony Abbott will provide hope, reward and opportunity. We know that Australians want a government that will abolish the carbon tax. We know that Australians want a government that can stop the boats. We know that Australians want a government that keeps its word, lives within its means and helps Australia get ahead. That is what will happen should Tony Abbott become Australia's Prime Minister at the next election.

Very recently we have had this so-called misogyny debate. We know that Tony Abbott is not a misogynist. He does not hate women. He has three daughters. He has a loving wife. I have met his loving mother. He does not hate women. But this is the Labor way. They have tried to distract from their own inadequacies through this so-called misogyny debate. We all know it has been led by John McTernan, who is infamous for what he did during the Tony Blair years in the UK.

But we also know that this government is addicted to debt. That is the Labor Party history. If we look back at what happened in the first 90 years of this Federation, from 1901 to 1991, in that time we actually had to fund two world wars and a few other skirmishes in Malaysia, Korea and Vietnam—and those sorts of wars are very expensive to run and fund. We also know that we had to build a new capital city and all the bureaucracies that came with it. We had to fund the universities at a higher rate than had ever happened before, and we thank Robert Menzies for that. In those 90 years, this country accumulated $16 billion worth of debt. It was just $16 billion worth of debt in those 90 years. But for the next five years, the Hawke-Keating government actually increased that 90 years worth of debt by the same amount each year for the next five years. So we went from $16 billion in 1991 to $96 billion in 1996. So what took us 90 years to achieve, the Hawke-Keating government increased the debt by that amount every year for the next five years.

Of course, then we were elected. We had to take the hard decisions when we were elected to government in 1996, just as Campbell Newman has got to take the tough decisions in Queensland and just as New South Wales have had to take the tough decisions. We will have to do it again because not only have we passed the $96 billion that Labor left us when we took government; we have actually gone to $167 billion, and our debt is going up by about $100 million every day.

I know a lot of people get confused and do not really understand the difference between a million and a billion. We all know it has three extra noughts, but, as I like to say to people, the difference between a million and a billion can be shown by this equation: a million seconds is 12 days but a billion seconds is 34 years. That is the difference. So a billion dollars is certainly worth a lot more than a million dollars.

But this government do not seem to understand the difference. They continue to run up debt and they continue to hold out to us this idea that somehow they are going to deliver a surplus. They have not delivered a surplus in 25 years—for the last 25 years no Labor government has delivered a surplus. I have my doubts that they will do it this time around.