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

I move:

That this bill be now read a second time.

Deborah O'Neill (Robertson, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Is the motion seconded?

Bert Van Manen (Forde, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I second the motion.

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

I am pleased to be part of the second reading of this private member's bill to restore temporary protection visas to the suite of measures that are necessary to bring to a halt the historic level of failure on our borders that has characterised, and been experienced under, the governance of the current government. Prior to the 2007 election, the member for Kingsford Smith said to Steve Price, then with 2UE:

… we'll change it all …

He later sought to distance himself from those comments. But, when it comes to border protection, there was no truer statement issued by any member of the now government than that. This government has changed it all when it comes to border protection in this country. It has changed all of it, every last little bit of it.

Those changes started with the abolition of the Pacific solution back on 8 February 2008, described by the then minister for immigration, Senator Evans, as his proudest moment: the abolition of the Pacific solution. They broke their promise to turn back boats, a promise made just days before the election in 2007. Prime Minister Rudd walked away from that commitment. They abolished temporary protection visas, putting permanent residency back on the table for people smugglers to sell. They did that, interestingly, on my birthday, on 13 May 2008. They abolished temporary protection visas. They abolished turning back the boats. They abolished the Pacific solution. They abolished at all. They changed at all.

But they did not stop there. They abolished the single officer review process for decisions made in the process of determining whether someone is a refugee. Now, that is the process adopted by the UNHCR all around the world. Abolishing that process and putting in place a series of subsequent appeals mechanisms have revealed again today, as have previous figures, that if at first they do not succeed, an asylum seeker coming by boat will certainly try and try again, because they have a 75 per cent chance of that 'no' decision being overturned. So noes are routinely turned into yeses if you come by boat.

They restored full access to the courts when they took their decision to effectively abolish any of the legal protections for Australia that existed in having excised offshore places. The notion that this government have moved on excising the entire Australian mainland when it comes to whether people have access to the courts is a complete nonsense, because the government had already moved to give them full access to the courts. So they abolished that as well.

This government also, in effect, abolished mandatory detention. But they did not do it because they thought it was wrong; they did it because the detention centres were full. The detention centres had become so overwhelmed due to the scale of arrivals that has occurred under this government's failed border policies that they just had to let people out. They had run out of options. They had blown the budget. People who were in centres burnt them down and those involved in riots and all sorts of outrageous behaviour got away scot-free—except for maybe one, possibly two, who were actually convicted for their roles in those offensive and outrageous acts that took place, as Australians looked on and watched detention centres burn to the ground.

They abolished mandatory detention and in late 2011 they released people into the community with work rights. I remember warning at the time that this was basically giving those who were seeking to come by boat everything they were looking for—straight off the boat, straight into the community and straight into the opportunity to have work rights, they were getting and continue to get what they paid for.

This was the complete removal of every last brick in the wall that John Howard built up as former Prime Minister of this country to ensure we had strong borders. They have knocked that wall down in its entirety. It is all gone. Lately, they have made attempts to try to rebuild what they destroyed but in the rebuilding, having been dragged kicking and screaming, they have shown neither the conviction nor the competence to put those measures back in place, at least in terms of the Pacific solution.

I briefly mention again this government abolishing mandatory detention. They have now embarked on a system of release into the community that has no safeguards, no guidelines and no protocols to not only protect those who are released into the community but also provide appropriate protections for the community itself. A few weeks ago, I made the point that the government's lack of guidelines and processes around their community release program needed to be addressed—it does need to be addressed and it still needs to be addressed. This government will not address it. Their policy now on community release is 'out of sight, out of mind'. Their policy on community release is 'no care, no responsibility'. So we have seen every last brick in John Howard's wall of border protection knocked down by this government. What has been the result of all this?

We know that former Prime Minister Rudd started the boats and we know that Prime Minister Gillard has been unable to stop them, and she will never be able to, because this Prime Minister and her government lack both the policy and the resolve to address this issue, as has been demonstrated. The result has been chaos, cost and tragedy. The result has been more that more than 30,000 people have arrived illegally by boat, on over 580 boats, ever since this government was elected; over 1,000 people are dead in the water; over $5 billion in budget blow-outs since the last election alone and over $6 billion since they were elected; and 8,100 people who would have otherwise got a permanent protection visa under our refugee and humanitarian program, our offshore program, did not get those visas. They were left out—out of sight, out of mind. No visas for those who are waiting in places around the world in desperate situations that, frankly, none of us could really imagine unless you have physically been to some of those places—and I have seen some of those places firsthand.

In the latest statistics which have been released by the department for the year 2011-12, 10,384 Afghans made applications under our offshore refugee humanitarian program. Of those, 712 received a visa—just seven per cent. Of the 2,058 people from Afghanistan who arrived illegally by boat and had their claims assessed in that same year, 96 per cent of them received permanent visas. So under Labor's policies if you are an Afghan seeking asylum you are 13.7 times more likely to get a permanent visa if you get on a boat rather than apply offshore. Why wouldn't you get on a boat under this government, frankly? If they are the odds—13.7 times more likely—then that is called a people smugglers' product. It is in high demand and will continue to be if it is 13.7 times more likely.

The number of permanent visas given to Afghans who arrived illegally by boat was three times higher than the number given to offshore applicants from Afghanistan. Three times more visas, in absolute numbers, were given to those who came here illegally by boat than to those who had applied offshore. That is despite the fact that there were five times the number of applicants offshore. But they are out of sight, out of mind. This government is favouring those who have come by boat, through their process, their decisions and their abolition of the measures that worked under the Howard government. According to the most recent stats from the Department of Immigration and Citizenship for the 2011-12 year, 40,000 offshore applicants were rejected and did not get visas last year. That is 85 per cent. That is compared to nine per cent of rejections for those who turned up on boats.

Under Labor's policy, people coming on boats are getting what they paid for. There is nothing that will underpin a business model better than that. They are guaranteeing the result through the evidence I have put before you. For those who seek to come on a boat, under this government it makes eminent sense, even at the risk to their own lives. The odds of getting that permanent visa are significant. They are significantly greater than if you apply offshore through the more regular process, as tens of thousands do. It is often put to me: 'But they can't apply offshore.' Over 10,000 Afghans applied offshore in 2011-12. Seven per cent of those got a visa.

This bill is designed to take permanent residence off the table for those who come to Australia illegally by boat. This bill is about putting back in place this key measure—while I hope the government would adopt all the measures, I know that is a forlorn hope—and ensuring that permanent residence is not something that will go on the table.

The measures are twofold. The first of those measures enables those who have come directly and have entered Australia illegally by boat or otherwise to be eligible for only a temporary protection visa, and that temporary protection visa would have attached to it certain rights. Those rights would include things like the ability to work. The difference between a temporary protection visa and a bridging visa is that a temporary protection visa is exactly that—temporary. It is given at the end of the process where someone has been found by the process to be a refugee. A bridging visa is given to someone who has not been found to be a refugee as yet. In fact, no-one who has arrived since 13 August last year and is out there in the community today has had their claim even assessed, let alone determined.

A temporary protection visa would go to those who had completed the process. A temporary protection visa would be given to someone not at the expense of someone who has come through the proper method through an offshore application. The coalition's policy delinks the two programs. Not one permanent protection visa offered under our system will be given to someone who has directly arrived by boat. The government system takes those visas out of the same pool, so everyone who continues to come by boat will continue to take a visa from someone who has applied offshore. That is the government's policy.

Our policy of temporary protection visas does not do that. Our policy separates the two. The other thing our policy does, which is encapsulated in this bill, is that it puts a statutory bar on permanent residence for anyone who has come through a country where they could have made application to have their refugee status assessed—a secondary mover as it is known. So someone who had that opportunity, in Indonesia or Malaysia, for example, if they were found to be a refugee if they arrived in Australia and were in the position of gaining a temporary protection visa, there would be a statutory bar against that person going onto permanent residence and, therefore, obviously citizenship as well.

These are the sorts of measures you need that we had in place last time that were part of the overall package of measures that ensured that the boats stopped coming as they did—it is a fact; they did. It was the result. It was the purpose of those measures, and those measures achieved that purpose. I contrast that to the measures that the government has put in place—measures that abolished it all, changed it all, removed it all—and the consequences have been chaos, cost and tragedy.

The government should today, I think, be as boisterous in talking up their abolition of all these measures as they were in 2007, if they really believe it, if they thought that was the right idea. But if they do that then they need to take responsibility for the results: 33,962 people turning up on 582 boats; more than a thousand people dead in the water; more than 8,000 people denied permanent visas who are waiting offshore and languishing in camps around the world and other places; and more than $5 billion in budget blow-outs as a result of their failures. The government should be accountable for those failures. (Time expired)

Laurie Ferguson (Werriwa, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to 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