Alan Eggleston (WA, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

As Senator Parry says, we might as well put a tunnel in. It would be so much easier than crossing the sea. Probably something like the Chunnel between England and France would do the trick, but it would be very difficult. Senator Parry, in making that statement, is pointing out that it is now very, very easy for refugees to make their way to Australia. There is no impediment at all; you just sail down to Christmas Island, you pull up at the wharf, you get put into accommodation, your claims are processed and in due course, it seems, you are allowed to stay in Australia.

Australia has a very good record of dealing with refugees. In the time after World War II Australia, along with Canada and the United States, took a lot of refugees from the displaced persons camps of Eastern Europe. We have a very fine and respectable record. But we have always had an orderly program of accepting refugees. We make sure that the refugees who come to this country have identity checks, checks of their police records to make sure that they are not kidnappers or murderers on the run and, of course, security and health checks. That is the way we should be conducting our refugee intake. But, unfortunately, rather than setting up an arrangement for the orderly processing of the people who want to come to this country as refugees, the Rudd government, it seems, has just opened the floodgates to people who are prepared to get in little boats and sail down from Indonesia and across from Sri Lanka.

I do not think that is good enough. The answer to this sort of problem is, surely, a regional solution. We need to be working with our regional neighbours: with Indonesia, with the government of Sri Lanka and with the governments of other countries in this region that the refugees are setting out from. We did have a fairly good arrangement with the Indonesians. They have always been willing and cooperative partners in combining with Australia to do their best to ensure that the number of refugees coming down here is minimised. But this program has failed. The Rudd government has unwound the fairly strict policies of the Howard government, and the people smugglers, on behalf of the refugees, see Australia as now having what amounts to an open door policy. They know that if they just put people in a boat and send them down to Christmas Island, those people will probably be given refugee status.

One must ask the cost of all this. What is the burden to the Australian taxpayer? We are told that there has already been a $132 million blow-out in the cost of processing illegal arrivals at Christmas Island and that it is going to cost a lot more to open up the Darwin detention centre. In fact, it is estimated that over the year 2009-10 the additional cost will be over $1 billion. That is quite outrageous. It is time the Rudd government got its act together to strengthen our borders and maintain the sort of security that the Howard government—(Time expired)

Question agreed to.