Luke Howarth (Petrie, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The coalition government will resettle 13,750 refugees in Australia this year. We are increasing the size of our humanitarian program to 18,750 places by 2018-19. This will allow an extra 7,500 people over the coming years to be resettled here. The 2018-19 program will represent Australia's largest offshore humanitarian intake in more than 30 years. Of course 18,750 places is really a drop in the water, in terms of the millions of people who have been displaced due to conflicts going on around the world. We could almost double this over the coming years and it would still be quite small.

The fact of the matter is that we can now be sure that those 13,750 places, this year, will go to legitimate refugees. I strongly believe that not all of the people who came to Australia by boat were refugees. By stopping the boats, by ending the disaster that happened under the Labor government, we have ensured we can give priority to those people who are most in need.

I acknowledge Vikki Routledge, from my electorate, who came to see me as a passionate voice for asylum seekers. I acknowledge Vikki's compassion and heart for people who are suffering in countries like Iraq and Syria and countries throughout the African continent, and I thank her for the work she does with her advocacy group, TEAR. I also thank a number of other women, from a book club in Redcliffe, who recently came to see me. They advocated for refugees and brought awareness to their plight. I want to assure her and others that we are increasing our refugee intake in the most sustainable way. We cannot take in every single refugee. This would be impractical. There are millions of refugees around the world. And it is not what the majority of people in my electorate of Petrie want to see. What the majority want to see is what the coalition is actually focusing on—helping nations overcome institutional issues and to help them rise out of poverty.

What is the federal coalition government doing in this area? Well, Australia has a generous aid program. It is between $4 billion and $5 billion. It is $5 billion this year in 2014-15. Next year it will go down to $4 billion because we cannot get a lot of our savings through the Senate, and we need to make savings given the fact that we are spending something like $13 billion a year on interest only—Imagine what we could do with that money if Labor had not racked that up in the six years? Australia's position as the 10th largest donor in the OECD remains unchanged. By contrast, our economy is the 12th largest in the world.

But aid alone will not help lift people and nations out of poverty. So the overarching goal of Australia's aid program is to support poverty alleviation through sustainable economic growth. Yesterday, the Foreign Minister launched a photographic exhibition to celebrate 40 years of partnership with the NGO community through the Australian NGO Cooperation Program. In her speech, the Foreign Minister noted:

We meet at a time when many of our dear friends and neighbours in the Pacific are feeling the full impact of Tropical Cyclone Pam. I am pleased that the Australian Government was able to respond rapidly to requests for assistance and in the last few days we have had eight RAAF planes filled with life-saving equipment and supplies and personnel land in Port Vila.

Australia will continue to support our friends for as long as they need our assistance. This is what our humanitarian program is about and this is what our aid program is for—to assist people in need.

The Syrian conflict has created one of the worst humanitarian crises currently facing the world. Over 200,000 people have died in the last few years, 3.8 million have fled to neighbouring countries and 7.6 million are internally displaced. At the end of the day, we want to make sure that those positions are filled with legitimate refugees and we are acting. The Australian government, the coalition, have made bold changes to border protection and to our foreign aid and we are seeing fantastic results.