Murray Watt (Queensland, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry) Share this | Hansard source

This is a very serious question, and I don't think that any Australian is happy about the fact that people have been in detention offshore for as long as they have, but our government was very clear going to the election that our policy in relation to people on Nauru was that we would support third country resettlement. That is something that we said a very long time before the election, and the fundamental problem here is that it took so long for the former government to do anything about the resettlement of these people. We all remember the years that an offer was on the table from the New Zealand government to resettle people from Nauru and it didn't happen. If the former government had taken up that option of resettling people in New Zealand, we should have been in a position where no-one was still in Nauru. But, of course, that was not taken by the former government, and that offer from New Zealand remained unanswered. We are certainly continuing to work with a number of third countries to consider facilitating resettlement, and that remains our policy.

In the meantime, as Senator McKim may be aware, we have also made a commitment to make permanent the very large number of people who are in Australia on temporary protection visas, who have been on those for far too long and have been left to languish in that situation while on Australian soil. So we are doing a lot of work across a range of visa categories. I was talking yesterday about the work that we're undertaking to clear the visa backlog as well, but our position remains that people on Nauru should be resettled in third countries, and we continue to work very hard with those countries and the people themselves to enable that to happen.