Nigel Scullion (NT, Country Liberal Party, Deputy Leader of the Nationals) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak to the matter of public importance, namely ‘the Rudd government’s inability to manage Australia’s border security’. There have been a couple of contributions to this debate today which I have found to be somewhat startling, and I will get to those in a moment. Clearly we have seen an increase in the numbers of people principally leaving ports in Indonesia and travelling to Australia. We know this is because there has been a change in policies by the current government. I remember Senator Hurley, in her contribution, saying that the government she represents was winding back policies that somehow were offensive. I would like to put that in another way. They are winding back policies that worked and prevented people from taking risks and putting their families’ lives at risk. That is not just an emotive statement. We know that many people have lost their lives. Many more that we would not even know of have lost their lives. All we know is that they have left port and simply not arrived in Australia. So those policies ensured that we minimised the opportunity of those people making that voyage. In fact, Senator Wong acknowledged in April this year that a range of asylum seekers from Afghanistan ‘intercepted in the last few days’ had left Afghanistan in the days of the Howard government.

That is the case, and I think it is important to reflect on the situation in Indonesia around that time. I remember hearing an interview with a refugee who was in Indonesia. He had been there for a number of years. He was bemoaning the fact that he had been assessed by the UNHCR, which was sponsored and paid for by the Australian government at the time to be able to assess individuals over there. He said it was taking so long that if it were possible to go to Australia directly by boat he would have done so. In the interview, they said, ‘Why haven’t you done so?’ He said, ‘Well, there are no boats going.’ The reason there were no boats going was of course the Pacific solution, and the outcome was not the outcome that the people smugglers desired as it had a real impact on the opportunities to traffic in human misery.

According to the UNHCR’s annual global trends, there are about 16 million refugees and asylum seekers around the world. As most people in this place have reflected, and nobody would disagree, many of those people are in dire circumstances. But we have had a lot of emotive discussion today about the circumstances as to whether someone is arriving lawfully or otherwise and whether or not they are queue jumpers. I think this is the most important aspect of this debate. Whilst the Greens senator who spoke previously has said that obviously we in this country are pretty small minded and small hearted, I note that per capita we take the second highest number of humanitarian refugees in the world. But the most important point is that, somehow, we are cruel.

Take people arriving by boat—for each person on that boat who will go through the process of seeking permanent residency in Australia and get it, one person will come off the humanitarian aid list. Let me talk for a moment about the sort of people who are on that list. People say there is no queue. Well, there is a queue and it is characterised by people from the Horn of Africa who have lived in a refugee camp for the last five or six years. One of them would be a woman whose day or month gets better because another one of her children dies and that is one mouth less to feed. People in those sorts of circumstances are the very highest priority and it is the responsibility of this government to prioritise who comes to this country. I think it is laughable to suggest that it be otherwise for those who come to this country in a vessel. Let me tell you that the convention of 1951 says that people shall seek refuge in the first country that they go to—so you do not leave Afghanistan and get on a plane to fly to Malaysia, then get on a ferry to get to Jakarta and then seek a fishing vessel to travel to Australia. If the very first place that you went to you were safe, that is what the convention encourages. It says that we do not encourage people to forum shop.

But for those on the other side who say we are all mean hearted on this side, just remember it is about two principal things: we do not want people to put their lives and their families’ lives at risk, and we also think that it is so important that we prioritise those 13,000-plus people who come to this country as humanitarian refugees as those who are in the most in need. And if you can envisage for a moment those circumstances, the worst possible circumstances, compared to somebody in a family who decides: ‘I can afford it. I’m going to leave. I’m safe now in another country, and in fact I travelled through several safe countries.’ Those are the sorts of issues that do need to be discouraged, and I do not think it is reasonable or fair to describe the coalition as people who are heartless and have not thought about those things.

There is a whole suite of scientific indicators that said back in 2000 that we had some 4,000 refugees. The previous government acted strongly to provide disincentives to those who wanted to come and forum shop and come around the long way to come here. We did that because we thought the people who were in refugee camps, particularly in the Horn of Africa and other places, were such a priority that they were the people who needed the most help, and so we helped those most in need. It made sense, and it was with a wide and Australian heart that we took that focused decision.

Of course as soon as those opposite came in they changed the policies. They said: ‘We’re abolishing the Pacific solution. In other words we’ll ignore the convention of 1951 and we’ll provide an end-game or an end-stop, so you can forum shop and you can come to Australia and we’ll hold you in Australia.’ Those numbers are increasing, but let me tell those who are listening: for every single person who comes that way, there is somebody in the most heinous circumstances in a refugee camp somewhere who does not come to Australia and does not get the help or the opportunities that they deserve. So all of the rhetoric from the other side about how heartless the coalition is is absolute rubbish, and it detracts from the facts of the matter—that is, that at the heart of the coalition’s policy it ensures that those most in need are helped.

Their principal policies abolished the Pacific Solution, they abolished the TPVs and they ended by returning the boats—we actually go back and pull them forward. We actually go and give them a hand to bring them in. Well that has increased the numbers of people who come to this country in a way that the convention never envisaged and never encouraged. And so the coalition stands proudly behind its policy of ensuring that those most in need of humanitarian aid get the opportunity to come to this country. (Time expired)