Scott Ryan (Victoria, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is during debates like this that I am tempted to put in a request for one of those ticker screens to go up on the wall of the Senate chamber next to the clock so that when we hear phrases like ‘playing politics’ and ‘fear campaign’ they can be translated from Labor spin for the benefit of the rest of the Senate into what they really mean. It is Labor code that means: ‘We have failed and we want to try to declare this debate off-limits. We don’t want to discuss this issue, so we will play the man. We will make ad hominem attacks on the opposition in order to somehow try to make discussion of this issue off-limits.’

This is because Labor knows that its policies have been a failure. There is a very easy way to tell this. Labor retains its commitment to tough language, as it always has, but its actions do not measure up and neither do the results. Senators Crossin and Wortley spoke of race and fear campaigns. It is the government that has targeted people of a particular nation. It is the government that has effectively targeted people of particular races by specifically suspending claims by Sri Lankans and Afghans. The only party to have spoken about something like that is indeed the Labor Party, so its hypocrisy knows no bounds.

Consistent with its past, as we have heard all afternoon today, the Labor Party spends more time talking about the opposition than government. It is as if it never left this side of the chamber. It cannot get past the discussion here today, just as there is in the community, of the Labor Party’s record in government—what it has done, the results of its policies and how it will be held accountable.

I say to you, Mr Acting Deputy President, that with its constant attempts to water down the mandatory detention policies—introduced as we all know by Gerry Hand, who I think was the leader of the left faction from my home state of Victoria—I can see that the Labor Party in five or 10 years will want to mount the case that mandatory detention is not working and therefore we can get rid of it. This is merely the first stage in a longer campaign. The government wants to appear to be tough, but tough language aimed at a domestic audience will not deliver the desired policy outcomes. It will not send a signal to the people overseas who market the product of people smuggling, who say to people, ‘Give me thousands of dollars and we will get you on an unsafe boat to Australia.’

The Labor Party has its policy the wrong way around. It is talking tough domestically and sending all the wrong signals overseas, whereas the appropriate measure would be to say to the people approved by the UNHCR waiting in various facilities and countries around the world, ‘We are a humanitarian nation and we have a generous resettlement program,’ but also to make it clear to people who wish to bypass that system that we are not going to tolerate our immigration policies being determined by the actions of people smugglers. But the Labor Party wants to talk tough domestically for political purposes. It throws around big numbers, as we have heard today. The cost next year has blown out to $327 million. It brags about $1.2 billion, but this is nothing but an illusion of activity. The money being spent next year is a reflection of its failure this year. On a test of this policy, it is more expensive, there are more boats arriving and there are more people arriving in unsafe circumstances. That is the result of the Labor Party’s policy and a sign of its failure.

We have only to recite the facts to show that Labor’s policy in this regard is a complete failure. The management of Australia’s borders has slipped markedly since Labor came to office. When the coalition left office in November 2007, the flow of unlawful arrivals was at a trickle, but we still had an active resettlement program for refugees from around the world. Fewer than 50 people were arriving at an average of only a handful of boats per year. Now, rather than an average of three a year, we are having three a week. Since Labor abolished temporary protection visas, the green light has effectively been given to people smugglers because, in the end, the people smugglers market a product. The promise of permanent residency in Australia is a product they have sold and it is a product they are continuing to sell overseas.

As well as the increase in the number of boats, we have a substantial increase in the number of people in detention, and this is continuing to skyrocket. When we left office, there were under 500 people in detention. There are now more than 3,500—seven times as many. On Christmas Island when the coalition left office, there were two detainees left, I understand. Now the detention centre is overflowing. The detention centre is being expanded by a tent city and it is overflowing. Two hundred and fifty detainees are living in tents, with over 2,500 people on the island. The Curtin detention centre is mooted for reopening to accommodate the surge in unlawful arrivals that have occurred on this government’s watch.

The Prime Minister is a man who likes to think he is supremely moral—more so than the average Australian. Climate change was once the greatest moral challenge of our time, but that was postponed because of political inconvenience. It is the same again with border security. Labor’s attempt to discriminate between asylum seekers based on whether they come from Afghanistan and Sri Lanka is unprecedented. They are subject to a processing freeze that effectively detains them, if not indefinitely, for a substantially longer period. Labor promised the contrary to this. They promised an end to indefinite detention and they abolished the temporary protection visas in 2008. But it is just another broken promise from Labor, just as their promise to stem the flow of boats has been. Despite the rhetoric and commitment to honouring our international human rights obligations, it is very hard to conceive of a way where suspending the processing of applicants from two nations is in any way compliant with these.

Time is short. The coalition does not have a debate with those seeking freedom; it has a debate with the government because there are always others who could come to Australia as well. The government constantly relies on push factors, but the truth is that in our world today push factors will never disappear. The coalition government faced push factors. What domestic Australian politics can address and what we can address in this place is pull factors. The government seeks to disregard pull factors and the results of its own policies in order to avoid responsibility.

We now know the abolition of temporary protection visas has been a failure; the numbers tell us so. On top of that, we had the Prime Minister’s special deal on the Oceanic Viking, a deal which he made sure he was not present for and has done everything he can to avoid answering for. As Labor seeks to define the coalition record in a statistically convenient way, the numbers cannot be fudged this much. Yes, the coalition faced a surge, but it introduced measures that ensured that surge did not continue. By the time we had left office, they were at a record low.

I am a strong supporter of our refugee and humanitarian resettlement program. Public support for it is critical to maintaining its continuance. I do not think it is an unreasonable expectation on behalf of the people of Australia that the Australian government will control who comes to our country and the circumstances in which they do. This public acceptance and this commitment by the Australian government underpin a very generous program of which Australia can quite rightly be proud.

I recently went to an anniversary celebration for the first arrivals of the Vietnamese refugees in Australia following the Vietnam War. This program in particular, a Liberal program, is something of which this country can be proud. It has benefited our own nation immensely, at least as much as it has benefited those who have resettled. One important thing: this most successful of resettlement programs happened with offshore processing. To say that offshore processing somehow has no place in Australian policy is to deny the success of that program only 30 year ago. The Labor Party stands condemned for trying to avoid accountability, for trying to prevent debate on this very important issue, and indeed for the failure of its policies combined with that attempt to stifle debate effectively leading to a long-term undermining of public faith in this very important component of our immigration program.