Steve Hutchins (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to Senator Vanstone, the Minister for Immigration and Multicultural Affairs. Does the minister recall the Prime Minister’s decision to change the government’s immigration policy last year in response to serious concerns raised by backbenchers such as the member for Kooyong? Does the minister further recall the Prime Minister’s assurance on the ABC’s 7.30 Report on 20 June 2005 about those changes:

... we have introduced some changes which ensure that families with children will be looked after in community detention, in other words they won’t be in a detention centre ...

Does the minister stand by the Prime Minister’s commitment and will she now provide an absolute guarantee that families and children will be placed in the community rather than in a detention centre on Nauru? What has changed that has led the government to again seek to lock up children in detention centres?

Amanda Vanstone (SA, Liberal Party, Minister for Immigration and Multicultural Affairs) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the senator for his question. Yes is the answer to the first one. In relation to the second—whether I remember the specific comments of the Prime Minister—the answer is no, but the substance of them is certainly correct. What the senator did not tell the Senate and therefore the Senate Hansard record or anyone who happens to be listening on replay is that those agreements made last year were made quite specifically limited to the Australian mainland. Nauru was quite specifically excluded from that. It is a surprise to me that the senator who could have and should have known that would come into this place and ask a question which might lead those who had not been following the debate to conclude that the opposite was the case. Senator, if you did not know that, you do now.

Nonetheless, what the Prime Minister said at the time is right. We certainly want to detain women and children as a last resort. That is certainly the case, and the changes we have made subsequent to June 2005 are proof of that. But Nauru was not a part of this agreement; it is another country. That is why it is called offshore processing.

Steve Hutchins (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Mr President, I ask a supplementary question. Minister, doesn’t the decision to ditch the Prime Minister’s commitment to not lock up children in detention centres confirm that the bill is just an unprincipled attempt to appease the Indonesian government?

Amanda Vanstone (SA, Liberal Party, Minister for Immigration and Multicultural Affairs) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The bill is designed to strengthen Australia’s border protection, and it does of course mean that we want to ensure that we keep positive cooperation with Indonesia. I might take the opportunity to repeat what your leader said a few years ago, in 2001. This is what he said:

... in the end the only solution to the problem that we now confront resides around the relationship that we have with Indonesia and the attitudes that develop in this region to illegal people movement ...

He went on to say, ‘What we need to do is exercise leadership’—in other words, get our relationship with Jakarta on a positive footing, so this could all be fixed by a good relationship with Indonesia. And now, Senator, you seem to be saying, ‘Throw it in the bin’—a complete regional irresponsibility.