Slade Brockman (WA, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I too rise to make a brief contribution on the Home Affairs Legislation Amendment (2025 Measures No. 1) Bill 2025, and at the outset I will say that the coalition will be supporting the passage of this bill. We do so because the measures contained in this bill are a necessary protection for Australian society, and our first responsibility as legislators in this place and in the other place is always to the safety and wellbeing of Australian society—in this case, addressing the so-called NZYQ cohort, which, sadly is a great failure of the Albanese Labor government that now stretches back years. I well remember, in the previous parliament, Senator Paterson prosecuting the case against this government's failure of foresight, failure to respond in a timely fashion, failure to perceive the seriousness of the issue at hand in a way that the Australian public demand it.

If we go back to the origins of this case, where the government was given very clear warning that this was a live risk—that the High Court's decision in that case was a live risk and that the government should have prepared itself for the potentiality of that outcome—the government completely failed, as clearly prosecuted by Senator Paterson, to prepare for that risk and to have contingency plans to allow the Australian parliament to deal with that situation. As a result, the Labor Party came late, they came half-heartedly and they came in a way that subsequently has required further and further legislative response. So we see now in this bill a tightening of the law so that members of this NZYQ cohort cannot continue to use our legal system in Australia to endlessly delay, and that is why we will be voting in favour of it.

But, as Senator Cash made very clear in prosecuting the issue in this chamber earlier, this is not a blank cheque to the Labor government, because we have seen before that what they put forward as potential solutions always end up having further problems and it always ends up in a situation where the actual practice of the legislation in operation is not quite what they said it was going to be. Even last night, in the very rapid Senate committee hearing into this bill, Senator Cash unearthed the fact that this deal, so-called, with Nauru is very sketchy. There is not a lot of transparency; there are only a lot of very vague assurances.

What do we know? Officials revealed last night that this deal could cost the Australian taxpayer $2½ billion. Two and a half billion dollars is an extraordinary sum of money. What else came out last night was that, even with that money on the table, there was a kicker: that Nauru gets to pick and choose who they take. In fact, they are under no obligation to take anyone from the NZYQ cohort at all. I find that to be the most astounding piece of information: that this arrangement has been entered into, seemingly, with no minimum number of individuals set out, and if there is no minimum number, then it strikes me that that number could be zero.

So I think the Labor government has a lot to do in this space to prove that this arrangement is actually going to achieve the outcome that they say they want to achieve—as opposed to merely papering over a problem, which is what we have seen from this government time and time again in this space. Their assurances that they have done the work and have actually fixed the issue have not proven to be correct.

We on this side want to see an outcome in this space. We want to see the Australian community protected. We don't want to see the endless legal battles in courts in Australia. But, sadly, we do have very little faith in this government actually being able to follow through on any of these issues.