Ian Macdonald (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you, Mr President. I know you do not mean it in this way, but if they did listen to me in silence they might actually learn something and understand. The honourable senator who spoke before me, Senator Gallacher, wants us to do something about it. There are a lot of countries around the world that I think are deficient in the way they run their parliaments or their police, but what do we do? Do we send in Australia's army to overrun them? We will teach them how to do it properly, Senator Gallacher. We do not like the way they are running their government, but what can we do? Is that what you want us to do—invade the country? 'We'll show them a thing or two. We'll teach them how to run a democracy! We'll teach them how to run a police force.' How ludicrous! This is an independent country. They are carrying out an agreement with another sovereign nation, Australia—an agreement made by the Rudd Labor government, of which Senator Conroy was a senior member. They are discharging the agreement and the promises that were made at that time.

Since then there have been problems, but every person in the know who gave evidence agreed that the reason for the problems was that the deal done by Mr Rudd and Senator Conroy was done in such haste that none of this was looked at. None of the proper resourcing was done. They just had to do something to try to save their own political bacon. And yet now the Labor Party, having had a conversion to purity since the election, want us to go in, invade Nauru and teach them how to do it properly.

What the current government did, as best it could, dealing with the internal affairs of another country, was to set up an independent inquiry with the agreement of that country—not a political witch-hunt in which the Labor, Greens and Green Independents have a majority, but an inquiry by an independent, respected former public servant, Mr Moss, who went in with all the resources that were needed and made a sensible investigation. As well as that there were police investigations, to the best of our ability as a nation looking at what might have happened in another nation but confining ourselves to where we were invited or to offences that might have occurred within Australia's jurisdiction. These brought out recommendations. As I understand it the government's reply, which is later in the documents that we will be debating today, indicates that most of the recommendations of these independent inquiries—I think probably all of, although I cannot be precise on that—have been put into place by the government, so far as the government is able to do in another nation's jurisdiction.

So again I say to the Greens and the Labor Party: you complain loud and long now, but where were you when your government, the Greens-Labor government, put these arrangements into place? Where were you? When you can answer that question I will give this debate a little more credibility than anyone who is listening to it could possibly ever give to it at the present time.