Gary Humphries (ACT, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Defence Materiel) Share this | Hansard source

Australians woke up one morning this week to find that their government had had an epiphany. After 10½ years of the ALP telling anyone who would listen, preaching to the Australian people, that the Pacific solution was inhumane and that Nauru and Manus Island were expensive, ineffective tools in deterring people-smuggling, they changed their minds. It will not come as a surprise to anybody here that, over those 10½ years, the Labor Party made those points with very little subtlety.

I have a wealth of examples of the ALP lording it over the then coalition government, and saying with moral superiority, 'You guys have got it wrong; we've got it right.' The then immigration spokesperson for the Labor Party, Julia Gillard, said in May 2004:

Labor will end the so-called Pacific solution—the processing and detaining of asylum seekers on Pacific islands—because it is costly, unsustainable and wrong as a matter of principle.

In 2008, Chris Evans, the immigration minister, said:

The Pacific solution was a cynical, costly and ultimately unsuccessful exercise …

Stephen Smith, the shadow minister for immigration in 2004, said:

The Pacific solution is now a ridiculously expensive farce, and the government should end it immediately.

So that was the language of the Labor Party over those 10½ or 11 years. They were full of self-righteousness. We were lectured; we were hectored by the Labor Party. Labor promised a better way. In May 2002 Senator Lundy said:

Labor is committed to developing a comprehensive and lasting solution …

Madam Acting Deputy President, six—count them—'comprehensive and lasting solutions' later under this government and this week the Australian Labor Party admitted that none of those solutions had actually worked, that none of them had been effective in turning back the boats, and that they are now back to the original solution that they had inherited but which they had dumped in 2008 because they did not like it philosophically. It was wrong as a matter of principle, Ms Gillard told us. But this week they told us—rather ungraciously—that they were wrong, that in effect they had been wrong for the past 10½ years.

Labor have had an epiphany. Of course Australians are used to the Labor Party having epiphanies from time to time. In fact, as a government they have made a career of having epiphanies. But this was one that the Australian people welcomed because rather than taking something away, removing a promise that they had made—'No carbon tax under a government I lead' et cetera—they were finally giving something back to the Australian people. They were giving back to them a solution which actually worked in preventing the arrival of unauthorised boats on our northern shores. People realised Labor had thrashed about hopelessly, aimlessly for four years with this unsustainable succession of policies—six different policies on my count—that saw the arrival of 386 boats, 22½ thousand people, 2,600 of them in this financial year—that is, the last six weeks alone! People realised that something had to change and finally, in the light of overwhelming evidence, it is changing.

But of course those 22½ thousand people who arrived were the lucky ones because the biggest toll of Labor's chaotic border policy was not the billions of dollars wasted on this incredibly expensive policy, it was not the embarrassment of Australia having to go cap in hand to nations around the region saying, 'Please, be our regional partner,' with a complete lack of success, it was not the total collapse of public confidence in Australia's humanitarian resettlement program; it was the deaths at sea. At least 500 people, it could be as many as 1,000 people, have died at sea.

And even while those deaths were occurring literally on television screens in front of Australians, Labor still were unwilling to grasp the obvious solution sitting there in front of them—the one that had worked, the one that had stopped the boats, the one that they pretended could not be applied but today they admit can be. Of course it must have been applied and was capable of being applied in the past. They could not adopt it because, horror of horrors, that would have meant saying that John Howard must have been right in applying the Pacific solution. It was worth letting people die at sea rather than make that terrible, terrible admission.

Here is the irony: we were told time and again that the Pacific solution was inhumane, but today we are returning to the Pacific solution because it is the most humane of all of the solutions that have been attempted in the last decade to prevent people making unsafe journeys in small, unseaworthy boats across the Timor Sea. It is the most humane solution, the one least likely to lead to deaths at sea.

Senator Thistlethwaite yesterday suggested that this debate was going to go away now that the government had finally adopted the obvious Nauru solution, but they have not adopted the full suite of Howard government solutions and I suspect this issue will not go away because this is not the complete solution to the boat arrival problem. Until the government accept that others have a better idea of what to do in this matter than they do, they still have this monkey well and truly around their neck.