Julian McGauran (Victoria, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

In continuation from earlier today, I am debating with my colleagues in this chamber the Anti-People Smuggling and Other Measures Bill 2010. As I said earlier this afternoon, the coalition supports the bill. We are giving our support to the government because in essence the bill tightens and clarifies certain criminal offences regarding people smuggling. We support it because it defines and extends the investigative powers of such critical agencies as ASIO, no less. But, as I said, this bill is too little too late—it does not go to the core of the problem, and the problem is we have a surge of boats coming to our shores virtually unchecked. Certainly, most of them are getting picked up—not all, tragically. As I left the debate earlier I announced in this chamber that the Hon. Brendan O'Connor, Minister for Home Affairs, has said that yet another boat has made it through our border security. I do not think the government has announced it other than by press release—certainly the minister has not come into this chamber and said anything. Mr O’Connor said that yesterday afternoon, 54 nautical miles south-south-west of Scott Reef, a boat with 48 people on board was picked up. It was picked by no less than the Oceanic Viking, still out there working the refugee trade when it should be assigned to more productive areas down south. As I mused earlier, how lucky are those refugees to see the name Oceanic Viking? It brings back all the memories of when the government was blackmailed last year by a group of refugees who got a special deal because they would not remove themselves from the boat.

Mr O’Connor said in his press release that while the nationality of these asylum seekers is not known, if they happen to be Sri Lankan or Afghans, the government, under its announcement of 9 April 2010, will not be processing them—at least not for at least six months. That is the new law that the government has introduced—the new dictum. I would have thought that to be the wrong end to introduce it. I would have thought that to be a little inhumane. I thought you built your case—your humane case, your moral case, with the minister trumpeting and yelling and shouting from his podium—on the fact that the processing would be done quickly. You are confused. You are absolutely confused. Now you are not going to process them if they happen to come from Sri Lanka or Afghanistan, the very two countries you said were the push factors. You built your case on the push factors from these two countries; now you will not even process people from there. I think that is inhumane and I think that collapses your whole case in regard to border security.

You ought to stop the boats before they leave, not treat the people inhumanely when they get here. They have a right to be processed, seeing as you have now picked them up. So the point is this: your case in regard to push factors has now been turned totally on its head. You are now not processing Sri Lankans and Afghans, because you do not think the problems lie in the countries that you once said they did—they are no longer the push factors, so you have banned processing. What a con; what a bunch of frauds! Even on this issue the Australian people do not know where you stand. And, while you are not processing Afghans and Sri Lankans anymore, you happen to allow three or more—I am not sure—unsavoury characters who ought to be sent home because the weight of evidence that they are not fit characters is compelling.

Who can forget back in April of last year the explosion of SIEV36 off Ashmore Reef? That was a very dramatic affair where the government allowed the Navy to swing in the wind when they were accused of not acting properly under those sorts of pressures. Of course, the coroner in the Northern Territory found otherwise. I have never heard the minister come in here and defend the Navy in their actions. Of course, they acted honourably, they acted properly and they acted according to the book. There happened to be some characters there found guilty by the coroner of setting that boat alight, but they are allowed residency in this country, perhaps pending charges or perhaps not. There is an ability under the law for the minister to act without waiting for the DPP and I say he ought to.

There are contradictions everywhere now in your policy. You are allowing unsavoury characters who put a light to the ship and cost the lives of five people. You have allowed the Navy to swing in the wind. You now no longer will process Afghans and Sri Lankans. Yet you will not change the core of your policy and the core of your policy is the problem: temporary protection visas, for example—no onshore processing. You would have none of these problems—the onshore processing problem you have now or the bursting at the seams of Christmas Island where people are living in tents—if you had a tough policy. How humane is that policy? You do not have a humane policy at all and you do not have a tough policy at all, as much as you trumpet around that you are getting tough, such as this legislation which has now become your cornerstone. It is not humane and it is not tough and you will not do anything about it. Either you are caught up in the politics of it or you are just plain weak. You are playing with Australia’s border security, you are playing with people’s lives and you are playing with people who are waiting in the queues of the refugee camps. Make no mistake: this is old-fashioned queue jumping. They are not my words; they are the words of the United Nations High Commissioner. He claims that such asylum seekers that make their way to Australia or anywhere are queue jumpers and he used the word ‘queue jumper’, I should add. Where is the morality in your policy?

Cory Bernardi (SA, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary Assisting the Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

In rising to speak on the Anti-People Smuggling and Other Measures Bill 2010 I would like to repeat and endorse some of the comments that have been made by some of my colleagues. The purpose of this bill is quite simply to make changes to the country’s anti-people-smuggling legislative framework. The aim is to create a range of new offences relating to people smuggling, extend the penalties for the most serious forms of people smuggling and make changes to six acts, including the Criminal Code and Migration Act—all worthy changes.

The changes that this bill seeks to make to the Criminal Code relate to targeting the people who provide assistance to people smugglers, whether it be through financial, organisational or other means. The penalty for this offence is a fine of $110,000, imprisonment for a maximum of 10 years or both. Changes to the Migration Act include offences for people who provide support to people smugglers, higher penalties for multiple offenders and a maximum 20-year prison term for those involved in aggravated smuggling crimes. This bill aims to extend the emergency authorisation provisions in the Surveillance Devices Act to offences under the Migration Act. It aims to simplify the criteria for the Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Act that agencies need to satisfy when they apply for telecommunications interception warrants against people smugglers. The bill aims to redefine the term ‘security’ in relation to the ASIO Act so that ASIO can do the job that we ask or expect them to do.

In speaking in support of these changes, it cannot but occur to me that these changes are necessary because of the dereliction of duty and responsibility that this government has had towards Australia’s border security. There is nothing so annoying as to have listened to the voluble and many interjections and claims from the other side that their policies have had nothing whatsoever to do with the influx of illegal arrivals. For two years we have been hearing from those on the other side claiming that their change of policies had nothing to do with the increased boat arrivals in this country. We know that is now hogwash because they are attempting to change their own legislation to tighten it up. It is unlikely to work because the changes that they have announced have not stopped the arrivals. They have not stopped the boats. We have not seen Mr Rudd turn the boats back.

The government has maintained for two years that it is push factors that are bringing people here. If it is push factors that are bringing people here, why do we need to change these domestic arrangements? The government knows that what it has been saying is codswallop. It knows that it has been trying to spin its way out of this, but it is catching up with the government. It is catching up with the government because the Australian people are sick and tired of a government that has lost control not only of our financial situation but also of its borders. I have said before that a nation that loses control of its borders loses control of its destiny. The Minister of Immigration and Citizenship, Senator Chris Evans, says:

... I make the point that push factors are responsible for the increased movement of people ...

Wrong. Senator Wortley says:

This situation has been driven by the push factors of conflict, persecution and insecurity ...

How is changing our domestic legislation going to change that? It is not. It is more spin from the Rudd government and from Senator Wortley. Senator Wong, the minister for failed policies, has now claimed:

The reality is that there are a great many factors contributing to the increase of asylum seekers around the world and in Australia. That is why the government has in place a strong border protection regime.

Senator Wong will probably pick up the border protection regime because it is another failed policy to put in her suite of ministerial failed policy portfolio. Senator McEwen says:

They are the classic factors that see people in many countries attempt to find safe haven and secure future in an alternative country. They are what we call the push factors.

I could go on. Senator Pratt—master of the push factor—Senator Bishop, Senator Carol Brown, Senator Carol Brown again, Senator Evans—I could go on and on and on. They have blamed everyone else and they have refused to acknowledge or accept there is a direct correlation from when they changed the border protection policies that worked so effectively under the previous government. There is a red dot on the graph and then it skyrocketed. When they changed the policy the boats started coming. It is interesting to note the Department of Immigration and Citizenship are five weeks behind in updating the graph on their website—five weeks of shame, five weeks of boats—because they clearly cannot keep up. They cannot tally it. Maybe it has gone off the scale. They have to get a new axis.

Whilst this government is trying to do something here, it is doing too little, too late. We support these measures. As the shadow minister, Scott Morrison, said:

In this bill, we are supporting a policy that we believe will help and will add.

We believe it will help and, if it does help, it will make a mockery of what those on the treasury benches, on the government side of this chamber, have been saying for two years. It is too little, too late from a government that has lost complete control. Labor have made a mess of Australia’s border protection policies and they will not be able to make up for the effect of these soft policies that Mr Rudd and his incompetent team of ministers have implemented. These measures alone will not make up for that. They do not offer a comprehensive solution to the border security problem that Mr Rudd and his government have created. These are soft policies that have encouraged people smugglers and they have resulted in the highest rate of arrivals on record. We are getting not three boats a year; we are getting three boats a week. Three boatloads of people are prepared to risk their lives and pay tens of thousands of dollars to people smugglers to come to Australia knowing that the policies of this government are soft.

We have heard about the $1.2 million contract to put these illegals up in a resort-style hotel. It is alarming. I am sure the Australian people would be alarmed at the headline today in the Age: ‘Private VIP jets transport asylum seekers’. This government spent $5.6 million to 15 March of this financial year on luxury chartered jets. It spent $3.6 million on 48 chartered flights the year before and $5.6 million this year. What are these chartered jets doing? They are flying these people who have arrived in this country illegally from the overcrowded detention centre on Christmas Island, which the same party in opposition said was going to be a white elephant, to resort-style accommodation in Queensland. I know many Australian families who would love to be put up at taxpayers’ expense in resort-style accommodation in Queensland—many of them—particularly if they are going to get flown there in a private VIP jet that normally flies VIP flights for celebrities.

Barnaby Joyce (Queensland, National Party, Shadow Minister for Finance and Debt Reduction) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Kevin.

Cory Bernardi (SA, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary Assisting the Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

And Kevin. I wonder if they complain about the sandwiches they get or that hair dryers are not available, like our own Prime Minister, who set such a bad example. This government has lost control. It does not know what it is doing anymore and it is putting together a range of interim measures to try and arrest the decline in its public standing.

The problem is that they can arrest the decline in their public standing, they can try and do some window-dressing on their soft border protection policies and they can try and patch up or cover up the failures and put them in the basket of the minister for failed policies, Senator Wong. They can try and do all that. The problem is the Australian people no longer believe their rhetoric. They can no longer believe a word that comes out of the mouth of our own Prime Minister, and what a sad day that is for this country. What a sad day it is when the Australian people, who placed so much faith in Mr Rudd, can no longer rely on anything he says because, as I mentioned earlier, the government said for two years their soft border protection policies were not responsible for the influx of illegal arrivals by boat. They said that repeatedly—minister after minister, lacklustre backbencher after lacklustre backbencher. They have dutifully come in here and trotted out the lines given to them by command central and they have told the Australian people, ‘It’s not our fault.’ This bill indicates it is their fault.

The coalition has some form in protecting Australia’s borders. In the last six years of the coalition government, after the Pacific solution was implemented, only three boats arrived per year—three boats per year versus three boats per week. I think our record compares rather favourably with the very poor record of this government. Since the Labor government softened Australia’s border protection policies in August 2008, 122 boats—this is as at 11 May, so it could be 127 or something by now—with 5,624 people have arrived here illegally. In the 2009-10 financial year alone, over 4,500 people arrived in 98 boats, and this financial year is not even over yet. There are going to be many more luxury VIP chartered jets and many more resort hotel accommodations provided to the many more people that will risk life and limb to come to Australia, thanks to Kevin Rudd’s policies. But there is still an opportunity for Mr Rudd and his government to try their hardest to solve the problem. There is still an opportunity.

But Mr Rudd has not only failed the Australian people by softening our border protection policies; he is failing the Australian people financially. In this most recent budget—a budget that covers up the failings of this government, that covers up the fact that at the rate of $1 billion every three years it is going to take 450 years for them to pay off their $150-something billion debt—they have $202 million for more places in detention.

Does that indicate that there is a problem? Common sense would say that it does. There is going to be another $97 million for more Christmas Island infrastructure. It seems like only yesterday they were shipping in the bunk beds to double up in every room. Now they need another $97 million for infrastructure to cope with the influx of illegals. There is going to be $16 million for the lease of an extra ship to patrol our northern waters. It is a good idea but it should not be necessary. It should not be necessary, because we should be having a tight border protection policy that stops people wanting to come here, or they should come here through the appropriate, reasonable and legal channels. They should not be jumping the queue. They should not be coming here knowing that Kevin Rudd is going to put them up in resort-style accommodation and fly them in VIP jets around the country. This is not what the Australian people expect.

What I find equally galling in this budget is that there is apparently $6 million for two of Mr Rudd’s officials to work in Kabul to resettle those Afghanis that have been rejected here for asylum. Two officials and $6 million for the people that were sent home and told, ‘No, you are not allowed here, because you are not a refugee.’ It beggars belief. This is a government that is completely out of control. It is spending Australian taxpayers’ money flying people around the country in VIP jets, putting them up in resort hotel accommodation and then giving them counselling when they send them home. There is something severely wrong with these priorities. If people are coming here and they are not found to be genuine refugees and they are being sent home, is it really Australia’s responsibility? These are people who have lied to the Australian public; they are lying to officials. Clearly they are not genuine refugees and they claim to be. We are spending $6 million on two officials, according to press reports. Nice work if you can get it.

The coalition has had a commitment to strong border protection right through its time in office. When we realised there was a problem and the problem was getting out of hand, we took tough measures to do it. And we copped a lot of pain for it: the inflamed rhetoric on the other side about cruel and inhumane treatment, about people having to wait for quite significant amounts of time to get temporary protection visas or to have their status assessed. It is far less cruel than having people floating across the ocean in an esky—we had a couple of arrivals by esky. People conveniently forget that. We have those that jump off their leaky boats and try and swim to safety and are never seen again. What sort of a government do we have when they think that is the humane thing and the appropriate thing to do? As Senator McGauran said in his earlier comments, the moral thing to do is to put in place policies that will stop the boats from coming. We do not want more people in peril. This goes a little way towards it. It makes a joke and a mockery of all the government’s arguments about how it is not their fault. It makes a joke of all of that, but it is a start. But if it takes them three years of denial to realise that they have a responsibility to the Australian people to secure Australia’s borders, how long is it going to take them to implement a policy that is actually going to stop the boats from coming?

I fear for the future of our nation if this government is re-elected for another term. I fear it on a number of fronts. We see the nationalisation of industry, we see the great sovereign risk attached to their rapid changes in the business and commercial environment with regard to broadband, to mining tax. We have seen them undermine the value of trademarks and branding through their ill-considered plain packaging for cigarettes. We have seen them have smash-and-grab raids on anything that makes a profit. We have seen them squander tens of billions of Australian taxpayers’ hard-earned dollars on ridiculous schemes. And still the ministers are not accountable for it. The failed Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme—a dud, ditched. We had to lead the world. It was the great moral issue of our time. I would suggest that the great moral issue of our time is stopping people risking their lives coming here in leaky boats.

That is the great moral challenge for this government. Have they got the intestinal fortitude to do that? History would suggest they do not. History would suggest that this government takes politically expedient decisions, not decisions that are in the best interests of Australia. It does not take the decisions that are in the best interests of our national security, our balance sheet security, our food security or our environmental security. Those opposite takes the decisions that are in what they perceive to be in the interests of their political security, and that is the wrong approach for any government to take. The people of Australian know it. They know they have a fake, a phoney, a fraud, a toxic bore in charge of the government. They know that the ministers do not even have a decision about what their policies are; they are just puppets. It is all controlled out of Mr Rudd’s central casting office. That is where the decisions are made and they are dutifully given their piece of paper and out they have to come with it. They are stoic in their defence. Senator Wong has got the basket case portfolio now. We know that. That will be rapidly filling up with even more policies as it continues. Because the minister for immigration has clearly failed in securing Australia’s borders and managing Australia’s unauthorised arrivals, that portfolio I am sure will be shifting into the basket of failure that Senator Wong manages. And she is very competent at managing those failures, I have to say. This is a tragedy for Australians. It is an acknowledgement that this government is failing. This government needs to be changed, and this bill indicates that that should be the case.

Michael Ronaldson (Victoria, Liberal Party, Shadow Special Minister of State and Scrutiny of Government Waste) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Speaking on the Anti-People Smuggling and Other Measures Bill 2010, it is difficult to decide which is the greater concern—the complete collapse of Australia’s border protection system or the Prime Minister’s bald faced attempt to deny the undeniable. The Prime Minister has spent the past 21 months trying to squirm his way out of the corner into which his failed immigration policy has painted him. But while the Prime Minister can run he surely cannot hide. The vain efforts by the Rudd government to duck responsibility for the asylum seeker debacle have long since passed from the realm of the ridiculous into the arena of the absolutely absurd. There are some things that are beyond the media black magic of even the Prime Minister’s battalion of spin merchants. Not even the steamroller tactics of Kevin Rudd’s press office can rewrite objective history. The record is clear beyond all reasonable dispute.

With much fanfare, the Minister for Immigration and Citizenship, Chris Evans, on 29 July 2008 announced a series of radical changes to Australia’s migration policy. The minister proudly proclaimed:

The Rudd Labor government will reform our immigration detention policies and the treatment of asylum seekers in a way that reflects the compassion and tolerance of the Australian community.

So the Rudd government abolished the detention of asylum seekers on Nauru—the so-called Pacific solution. Then Labor passed legislation that erased the debts imposed by the Commonwealth on those whose asylum claims were found to be without merit. The end result of this policy shift was as inevitable as it was predictable. Once again, people began to set sail in leaky, ramshackle boats and, once again, people began to die at sea.

The figures speak for themselves. The statistics provided by the Department of Immigration and Citizenship tell a story so clear it is crystal. During the years of coalition government, a strong deterrent border protection regime cut the influx of illegal immigrant vessels from a torrent to a trickle. During the 2007-08 financial year—the last before the Rudd government changed policy—only three boats, carrying 25 illegal migrants, arrived in Australian waters. But from August 2008 to the present date we have seen 122 boats carrying 5,624 people intercepted by our naval and Customs authorities. Just this Monday we saw two more boats arrive, bringing the total number since the beginning of 2010 to 54 vessels.

Because of this, the Christmas Island detention centre is overflowing, so the Rudd government is now spending $1.2 million to house 79 asylum seekers in a four-star hotel in Brisbane. I wonder what the 100,000 homeless Australians who are doing it hard on the streets every night think about that. $1.2 million to house 79 asylum seekers in a four-star hotel in Brisbane. On the streets of Australia tonight we will have homeless people, homeless Australians, sitting back and watching a government spend $1.2 million to house 79 illegal immigrants. The priorities of this government are highly questionable and should be questioned by the Australian community.

It is a simple fact of nature—one that the Prime Minister seems unable to grasp—that if you water down the deterrent against a particular behaviour you will get more of it. More is precisely what we now face in the form of an upsurge in illegal immigration vessels that began almost immediately after the Prime Minister emasculated Australia’s border protection regime. Labor sent a signal to the people smugglers and their clients that Australia is open for business. News that Australia was once again worth a go began to circulate through the global refugee grapevine and legions of illegal immigrants and asylum seekers responded by placing their lives at risk in rickety rust buckets that I would not take on a crossing of the Yarra much less on a high seas voyage. The people smugglers have become so brazen they now set sail directly for Christmas Island, aware it will be their destination anyway.

But equally as brazen has been the Labor government’s refusal to admit the obvious—that this entire debacle is a direct result of its failed immigration policy. Mr Rudd persists in his lame effort to defend the indefensible. He would have us believe that this massive increase in immigration has nothing to do with his gutting of Australian border protection. Sorry, Prime Minister, but, as opposed to the stream of spin spewing forth from your office, dates and numbers do not lie. Again, I will quote the statistics. From only three boats carrying a mere 25 people between 1 July 2007 and 30 June 2008—the last fiscal year the coalition was in government—the seaborne influx of illegal migrants has exploded over the past 20 months to reach 122 vessels bearing over 5,624 persons. As I said earlier, there have been 54 boats this year alone.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees does not lie either. Back in March, a representative of the UNHCR provided an interview to the Australian that completely undercut the Rudd government’s ongoing work of fiction on this issue. The UN official commented that the special deal cut by the Rudd government to defuse the Oceanic Viking crisis:

… was a form of queue-jumping … it was a bad practice. There are Sri Lankan refugees who have been sitting in Indonesia for some time. When you are faced with an emergency and have people demanding resettlement, the (UNHCR’s) position is you should not give in to that because it does give an incentive for people to try this irregular movement.

The UNHCR’s position is that you should not give into that, because it gives an incentive for people to try this irregular movement. There you have it straight from the mouth of the global expert on immigration who is commenting on how the Prime Minister’s special deal for illegal immigrants on the Oceanic Viking allowed them to play the system and win. The triumph of the Oceanic Viking illegals sent a clear message to the legions of aspiring boat people throughout the world. It confirmed once and for all that if you can outlast this wishy-washy Labor government your entry ticket into Australia is assured.

When the timing and extent of this radical upsurge are taken into account there can only be one rational explanation. Under the false banner of a fairer and more humane policy Kevin Rudd’s penchant for moral posturing led him to gut the coalition’s strong deterrent policy against illegal migrants. The people smugglers and their clients rightly interpreted ‘fairer and more humane’ to mean ‘weaker and less rigorous’. The announcement of Labor’s changes to the Australian asylum seeker policy in 2008 triggered the onset of an illegal immigration crisis that shows no signs of abating. It was all done in order that the Prime Minister and his ministers can pat each other on the back and tell each other how morally righteous they are.

I wonder how many people will have to lose their lives in rickety, unseaworthy boats before the Prime Minister and his immigration minister will admit the obvious. It will be more than a few, I fear, because the Prime Minister is in a state of denial. Like a cat up a tree the Prime Minister has climbed so far out on a limb that he is unwilling to make a backwards move. Rather than lose a little political face the Prime Minister prefers that people continue to jeopardise their lives in ramshackle boats on the high seas. This is crass political cynicism at its worst. This is nothing more than crude political calculation garbed in the empty guise of high-minded moral rhetoric that endangers the lives of people less fortunate than us.

The bill we are debating at present is just another fig leaf that the Rudd government is attempting to drape over the tattered rag of their immigration policy. It is just the latest in a series of ill-conceived bills and measures motivated more by election year panic than by rational policy. We have already seen the arbitrary decision by the Rudd government to impose a moratorium on asylum applications from Afghanistan and Sri Lanka. While the questionable legality of this policy will be ultimately tested in the courts one thing is certain: it has not worked. The boats have continued to come. And now we see this bill, the Anti-People Smuggling and Other Measures Bill 2010, which is more of an attempt to immunise the Rudd government from political criticism than to come to honest grips with the problems caused by Labor’s botched policy.

It is not that the coalition is opposed to harsher penalties for people smugglers, I hasten to add—far from it. A tough criminal justice policy is a central pillar of Liberal faith. People smuggling is a vile trade that exploits the hopes and fears of people who are at their most vulnerable. Longer prison terms alone will not quash the people-smuggling trade any more than they quash the drug-smuggling trade. As long as there is demand for the services of people smugglers there will always be those willing to provide it. As the coalition demonstrated during its time in government, the only way to address this problem effectively is to make Australia an unattractive destination for asylum seekers who have the money and motivation to jump the queue by taking to the seas. Australia is a ‘field of dreams’ for millions of poor and oppressed people throughout the world. Like the movie of the same name, if you build it they will come. The problem is that the policy the Prime Minister has built is ill-conceived and dangerous.

We are indeed the lucky country and we have a moral obligation to provide refuge to those who are suffering from oppression and persecution. But the 13,000-plus humanitarian visas that Australia grants each year should be allocated on the basis of need rather than nerve. Our help should go to those who are most deserving, not to those who have the financial means to cut corners and the mindset to cheat the process.

The Prime Minister’s botched border protection policy can be added to the growing list of disasters and debacles that Labor has inflicted upon Australia over the past 2½ years such as the home insulation debacle; the rort ridden school construction program; and the massive debt burden Kevin Rudd’s profligate spending has loaded onto the backs of taxpayers. The damage inflicted on Australia by this bevy of Labor incompetence extends beyond squandered millions. The government has also cost lives. I view the behaviour of the government on this policy as probably one of the worst derelictions of responsibility from any government in recent history. This change of policy was premised not on the back of concerns for this country and not on the back of legitimate concerns about what an appropriate border protection policy is. It was on the back of a series of statements and comments by the present government prior to and immediately post the last election. It was designed only for crass political purposes. I suppose you have to acknowledge that, in that regard, it has been spectacularly successful.

I again ask the question, as I have asked it time after time in this place and indeed in the other place many years ago: what responsibilities does this government have to those people who do not have the money or, as I said earlier, the nerve to come to this country? What about those people the UNHCR were talking about who have been waiting their turn legitimately in Indonesia and elsewhere? On what basis does this government, if they are running a line that this is a humanitarian response to an issue, justify their actions on the back of a so-called humanitarian response? What is humanitarian about providing a change of policy which allows people to break the law?

George Brandis (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Attorney-General) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

And puts lives at risk.

Michael Ronaldson (Victoria, Liberal Party, Shadow Special Minister of State and Scrutiny of Government Waste) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

And puts lives at risk, as my colleague said. What is humanitarian about that? What is humanitarian about forcing people in refugee camps throughout the world to go to the back of the queue because of a crass political policy that devastated a successful border protection policy?

This government has got as big an obligation as the Howard government and governments before that had to make sure that we have a legitimate and achievable border protection policy that can be implemented in this country’s interests. The fact that this government has refused to acknowledge the outcome of this policy is bizarrely, as I said, cloaked in some humanitarian approach to this. What this so-called humanitarian approach has done is put people’s lives at risk. It is now acknowledged, I believe by all parties, that this has cost lives. There are people dying on the back of a crass political response to a serious issue, and the Prime Minister is sitting back and doing nothing—doing no heavy lifting—because he is afraid of another backflip. Prime Minister, let us see you backflip on this—to the cheers of the opposition and the bulk of the Australian community and the people who are sitting in refugee camps waiting their turn to come here on a legitimate basis.

We are, on any measure, an incredibly generous country in relation to providing relief for those who seek to come to our shores—a remarkably generous country. What the Prime Minister has done and what the immigration minister has done is to impose another layer of so-called border protection which has put at risk lives and which has put at risk this country’s sovereignty. This is not, I can tell you, a policy that this government should be proud of. There are many that this government should not be proud of, but this is right at the top of the list. We urge the Prime Minister to accept his responsibility as this nation’s leader to put in place a border protection policy that serves this country’s interests and stops putting at risk the lives of innocent people. When the Prime Minister does that, he will get the plaudits; until then, I can assure you that he will get the brickbats.

George Brandis (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Attorney-General) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The purpose of this bill, the Anti-People Smuggling and Other Measures Bill 2010, is to deter people smuggling, to expand ASIO’s charter to include border security issues and to make related amendments to the Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Act 1979. The bill makes amendments to the Criminal Code and the Migration Act to increase the sanctions applicable to people smuggling; to the ASIO Act to include the protection of Australia’s territorial and border integrity from serious threats within ASIO’s statutory charter; to the Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Act and the Surveillance Devices Act to include people smuggling within the definition of a serious offence and thus permit the use of these tools to investigate allegations of people smuggling; and to align the definition of ‘foreign intelligence’ in the Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Act with the definition of that term in the Intelligence Services Act.

In relation to criminal sanctions, the amendments will create a new offence of providing material support or resources towards a people-smuggling venture; establish in the Migration Act an aggravated offence of people smuggling which involves exploitation or danger of death or serious harm; and apply mandatory minimum penalties of eight years imprisonment with a non-parole period of five years—the maximum penalty being 20 years or $220,000 or both—to the new aggravated offences and to multiple offences. The offence of providing material support does not apply to a person who pays smugglers to facilitate their own passage or that of a family member to Australia.

The fact that the bill recognises people smuggling as a serious threat to Australia’s territorial and border integrity—and therefore a national security threat—demonstrates by the government’s own admission the systemic failure of the Rudd government to confront the problem of people smuggling. These measures, which the opposition will not oppose, are piecemeal measures that have been brought forward by a government which found a solution and created a problem. Let it never be forgotten that, at the time the Rudd government was elected—two and half years ago—the people-smuggling problem had largely been solved. The arrival on Australia’s shores—and particularly on our north-western shores and on Australian offshore islands—of unlawful entrants whose passage is facilitated by people smugglers has been a problem in Australian history from time to time throughout our lifetimes. The problem grew acute in the late 1980s and in the 1990s—so acute that the then Howard government made a decision to take strong measures to stop the problem, to protect Australia’s borders, to secure our territorial integrity and, therefore, to protect our national security. Those strong measures—which my colleagues have described—were introduced by the Howard government in 2001. They followed, I might say, strong measures that had been introduced by a previous Labor government, during the Hawke-Keating period, including the policy of mandatory detention.

But it was the Howard government that got the mix right. From a crescendo of unlawful arrivals in 2000, the introduction of tougher-still policies by the Howard government in 2001 fixed the problem because it did the one thing no previous policy had ever done: it denied the people smugglers the capacity to sell a service to their clients. It denied the people smugglers the capacity to say to their clients: ‘We will guarantee you arrival on Australia’s shores. We will guarantee that you will be able to avail yourselves of Australia’s refugee assessment system, from which you are highly likely to receive a favourable outcome’. It took away from the people smugglers the capacity to sell that product.

What happened as a result? As a result, the people-smuggling trade died. This evil trade which plays dice with the lives of innocent men, women and children died. The number of unlawful boat arrivals from 2001 when the tough measures were introduced to 2008 when the tough measures were abandoned in a gesture of faux compassion—not real compassion—by the Rudd Labor government fell to approximately three per year.

Since the reversal of the Howard government’s policies in September 2008, the number of unlawful arrivals—the number of men, women and children whose lives are put at risk on the high seas between Indonesia and the north-west coast of Australia—has crept steadily and remorselessly upward so that now, in May 2010, an average so far of one unlawful boat every two days has sought to penetrate Australia’s borders. What a reversal from an average of three per year, or fewer than one every 100 days for nearly a decade because the previous policies worked, to a situation today in which we have approximately one unauthorised boat arrival every two days.

But it gets worse, because that rate of arrival is itself escalating. We have just been through the monsoon season—the season when, because of the turbulent weather and sea conditions in the Timor Sea, people smugglers are less inclined to seek to make the voyage to Australia. As anybody familiar with this area of policy knows, it is during the winter months that the numbers tend to spike. We are just going into the winter months now. If during what might be called the low season for people smuggling in the early months of the year the number of unauthorised attempted boat arrivals has escalated to one every two days, heaven alone knows what it is likely to be in the months ahead when the waters are calmer.

There have been 5,762 illegal arrivals in Australia since the Rudd Labor government weakened Australia’s border protection regime. In this financial year, since 1 July 2009, there have been 4,723 arrivals. That is 13 per cent greater than in any previous financial year in our history and, of course, this financial year still has more than six weeks to go.

As my friend Senator Ronaldson has said, the result of the government’s attempt to strike a compassionate pose by weakening the Howard government’s tough but successful border protection policies has been to relegate to the back of the queue thousands of deserving people who do not have the money to pay people smugglers US$10,000 or US$15,000 to secure a passage—people who are not prepared to put their own or their wife’s or their children’s lives in peril on the high seas to secure a passage to Australia, people who are not prepared to break Australian law in order to seek to enter our country unlawfully. Those thousands upon thousands of people waiting in refugee camps for a humanitarian entrance visa into Australia have been pushed to the back of the queue.

That is yet another reason why the so-called compassion of the Rudd government is so phoney. It is such a gesture. It is such an exhibition of moral vanity. It is supposed to be compassionate by authoring a policy which puts lives at risk, which encourages people to sell themselves and their families into the hands of people smugglers and to put their own and their family’s lives at risk, and at the same time punishes genuine impoverished refugees who are prepared to wait, obey Australian law and have their claim for humanitarian entry assessed in the proper way.

In 2008-09, the most recent financial year, Australia granted 13,507 humanitarian entry visas, of which 11,010 were granted to offshore applicants. In 2009-10, the current financial year, the refugee and humanitarian program has 13,750 places allocated, of which the offshore component is 6,000 people and the onshore component is 7,750 people. That ratio reflects the early and immediate response to the government’s policy change. The onshore component, which includes illegal entrants who made their way to Australia and sought to have their claims assessed within Australian territory, tripled, and the offshore component halved. Those entering the country illegally by boat were directly responsible for squeezing out more than 5,000 offshore applicants.

The coalition makes no apology for its belief that one of the elementary obligations of a national government is to keep the nation’s borders secure. Because Australia is a maritime nation and all of our international borders are maritime borders, we make no apology whatsoever for demanding and, when we had the opportunity to do so in government, for implementing tough and strong policies to deter people from embarking on unlawful voyages to Australia and to apprehend them and seek to return them when they did. That is entirely appropriate for a maritime nation which takes the task of protecting its own borders seriously. There is an issue of sovereignty here. A nation without the capacity or the willingness to protect its own borders sends a signal to the world that its borders are permeable, its national security is compromised and, in a profound way, it is incapable of defending itself. So there is an issue of principle and an issue of international law here.

There is also, as I have said—and as Senator Ronaldson said and Senator Bernardi said—an issue of real humanitarianism. How could we possibly countenance, as a civilised, liberal democracy, a set of policies which implicitly condone the conduct of people smugglers by giving them a tradeable commodity that they can sell to people with the wherewithal to pay their fee and secure this risky package? How could we as a civilised nation do that, knowing that it puts lives at risk and that it pushes genuine refugees who are prepared to observe Australia’s laws to the back of the queue? During the period of the Howard government, after that government toughened the policies in 2001, this problem was, for all practical purposes, solved. What happened in those years? The number of humanitarian entrants processed offshore in the orthodox fashion rose. Of those people in Australia today who have been in the desperate circumstances of being refugees, more of them have found a new home in this land as a result of the Howard government’s policies than as a result of the Rudd government’s weakened, new, falsely compassionate policies.

The year 2002, the first year after the Howard government toughened the policies, was a year of significant international turmoil. It was just after the 9-11 terrorist attacks and the invasion of Afghanistan. The Sri Lankan civil war was intermittently in full flight or in temporary ceasefire. Yet in 2002-03, not one boat arrived in Australia—not one—despite those so-called ‘push factors’. In 2003-04, there were three boat arrivals; in 2004-05, there were no boat arrivals; in 2005-06, there were eight boat arrivals; in 2006-07 there were four boat arrivals; and in 2007-08—within the time of the Rudd government but before the government weakened the policies—there were just three boat arrivals. In six years there were 18 boat arrivals, notwithstanding the turbulent international circumstances which elevated the push factors from both West Asia and South Asia. Yet look at the pass we have come to now as a result of the Rudd government’s catastrophic policy failure.

As I have said, the opposition do realise that this is a very, very serious policy crisis and the Australian national interest does need to be protected. For that reason, we will not oppose these measures but we regret the weakness of will, the cowardice and the policy confusion which necessitated these measures in the first place.

Presumably, one of the consequences of this legislation is that ASIO will need to be better resourced. Therefore, it must be asked what effect the expansion of its charter will have on its existing functions. In last night’s budget not only was there no new funding for ASIO but the agency was asked to find another $15 million beyond the efficiency dividend in so-called ‘efficiencies’ over the forward estimates. The Treasurer announced last night that the Rudd government has also slashed funding to the Australian Customs and Border Protection Service with a further $146.3 million of cuts over the next four years. Of the $1.2 billion announced in the budget last night to deal with border security, the government is actually denying resources to front-line agencies, including the very agency, ASIO, whose powers are being expanded tonight by this legislation to deal with this problem of the Rudd government’s own creation.

The opposition accepts that the amendments in this legislation are necessary. For that reason we will not oppose them. But we lament and regret the fact that they were necessary in the first place, as the direct result of confusion, cowardice and failure by the Rudd Labor government.

Sarah Hanson-Young (SA, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise tonight to speak to the government’s Anti-People Smuggling and Other Measures Bill 2010. This bill, as we have heard, seeks to strengthen the government’s anti-people-smuggling legislative framework as well as to ensure that people smuggling is comprehensively criminalised in Australian law. Yet, despite the Attorney-General stating in his second reading speech that the United Nations Global trends report ‘indicates that people seeking asylum in Australia reflects a worldwide trend driven by insecurity, persecution and conflict’, nowhere in this bill are Australia’s obligations to those seeking our protection under international law recognised.

I find it very concerning and disappointing that an incredibly complex piece of legislation such as that which we are discussing today has been introduced and is expected to pass with such expediency, with limited scrutiny on the full impact of the proposed measures. All we need to look at is the turnaround time for the inquiry by the Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs Legislation Committee and the pathetic report that was put together on behalf of the majority of the committee. It was an appalling report that did not reflect the evidence given to the committee, which of course is why I authored a dissenting report. It did not reflect the views of those who are experts in the field and who made submissions. In fact, there was only one submission that supported this legislation, and that was from the government departments themselves. Every other submission spoke about how poorly drafted this piece of legislation was, how poorly defined the definitions within it were, how poorly the arguments as to why this legislation needed to exist in this form had been put by the government, and the lack of public consultation and review that this piece of legislation had had.

While it is clear that the Greens are in no way supportive of people smuggling, that does not mean that this Senate should give up its responsibilities as a house of review; its responsibilities to scrutinise legislation—and this legislation is so, so poorly drafted. While I speak to the legislation itself, I must say that the Greens will not be supporting this legislation going on to the next stage because it is clear that it needs to go back to the drawing board. The government themselves have said that in the absence of bringing forward any human rights act they will introduce a new human rights committee that will scrutinise and review legislation. This should have been the very first piece of legislation that went to that committee. Until this legislation goes to that committee, the Greens believe it should not proceed.

The failure of the government to articulate why it is necessary to introduce the measures proposed in this bill highlights that wider public consultation and debate is necessary before these measures can be seriously considered. While it is incredibly important for measures to be implemented to prevent asylum seekers from embarking on treacherous journeys across dangerous waters to get to Australia, I would argue that there are plenty of things the government could have announced in last night’s budget to do that.

What is the use of spending hundreds of millions of dollars on facilities in Indonesia and billions of dollars on border protection but not increasing the number of refugees you agree to resettle from these treacherous places? It is ludicrous that we talk about the numbers of people arriving here by boat but do not increase the numbers of people we resettle from places like Malaysia or Indonesia, where these people are warehoused in Australian funded detention centres with no hope of freedom despite already being classified by the UNHCR as genuine refugees. Last year Australia took only 70 people from Indonesian detention centres. Seventy people who had been recognised by the UNHCR were resettled by Australia, yet we cry foul at the idea of people jumping on boats, coming to Australia and seeking refuge.

The best way for the Australian government to stamp out the scourge of people smuggling would be to go to the source—that is, to resettle those people who have already been found, in places like Malaysia and Indonesia, to be genuine refugees through processes that Australian taxpayers fund. We should be putting those processes to more effective use and resettling those people, rather than spending the money there, waiting for them to get on a boat to Christmas Island and then spending another billion dollars over the next four years simply because we could not increase our humanitarian intake the way we should have.

This bill has nothing to do with the practicalities of tackling people smuggling. This bill is all about Kevin Rudd being able to go out and say: ‘You know what? I’ve stamped strong, loud and hard on refugees and asylum seekers. I’ve done it so well in this election that I’ve given ASIO the powers to tackle people smuggling.’ We know, through the evidence given to the committee, that this legislation will not deal with the actual issue. During the inquiry I asked the departments themselves, both ASIO and the Attorney-General’s Department, how effective this legislation was actually going to be, pointing out that the organisation of people smuggling is not done primarily from Australia; it is done offshore. They agreed. This legislation as it is currently written is badly argued and badly drafted. It is only for show for the Rudd government. It does not deal with the actual issues at hand. There is no mention of our obligations under international law, no mention of the definitions that we have signed up to under anti-people-smuggling protocols and our international obligations. There is an anti-people-smuggling protocol. Australia is a signatory to it. Yet we have not even incorporated the definition of people smuggling that the protocol uses. We have made up our own so that it suits us in this piece of legislation.

Like many in the legal profession, the Greens have serious concerns that this bill in its current form not only breaches our obligations under international law but also breaches our obligations under domestic law. We remain very concerned that this bill is a direct attack on refugee communities within Australia and on those who support them. Despite assurances from the Attorney-General’s Department during the course of the Senate inquiry that innocent individuals would not be caught under this poorly drafted legislation, the definition of ‘providing material support’, which nobody seems to be able to define, is such that anyone here in Australia who sends money to a friend or relative in a refugee camp who subsequently—without the awareness of the person who sent that money—uses that money to pay a people smuggler could be charged under this broad definition. This legislation is poorly drafted and too broad, and yet it does nothing to tackle the issue of people smuggling or the issue of our obligations to asylum seekers under international law.

The point is: if the intention is to catch those individuals who provide humanitarian support, then why not make it explicitly clear in the legislation? It has been argued that no court would actually convict somebody who is providing humanitarian assistance to someone overseas who may then use a people smuggler to get out of a horrific detention facility in, say, Indonesia. If that is the case then why allow those people to be investigated in the first place—under broadening the roles and responsibilities of ASIO, allowing ASIO to use their current powers of interrogation and surveillance and possibly charge them in the first instance.

The government says these are not the people we are targeting. These are good-hearted Australians doing what they have always done—support the most vulnerable people in other parts of the world, particularly in our own Asia-Pacific region. If the government’s intention is not to target them then it should go back and redraft this legislation, because this legislation currently captures them. It is far too broad.

Professor Crock from the Sydney Centre for International Law told the Senate committee that:

This legislation targets refugee communities in Australia who are sending remittances to their families overseas. Every time they send money across to a relative, if there is a chance that that relative is going to get on a boat at some stage, they are at risk of being put in jail for 10 years. This legislation will only be seen by the very vulnerable emergent communities in this country as a direct assault on them—a frontal attack.

Who is the government trying to win over with this legislation? They are not delivering anything that tackles the issue of people smuggling and they are not doing anything to deal with the fact that we have people in places like Indonesia and Malaysia, desperate for freedom, security and a future, who have been found to be genuine refugees. It does not deal with any of those things.

What is this about? It is purely so that Kevin Rudd can say: ‘I am as tough as Tony Abbott. I can kick refugees too. Just watch me.’ That is what this legislation is about. It is so that Kevin Rudd can stand up and think that he can be as tough as Tony Abbott. But neither of them are tough, because neither of them are actually dealing with the real issue. Australia has obligations under international law to protect asylum seekers, to process their claims. I know the government does not believe in processing people’s claims any more; they have suspended that. ‘That is all right. We will just put that aside for a little while. Who cares about international law or our obligations?’

It is actually not the tough, strong thing to do to kick those who are most vulnerable in the world. The strongest thing to do is stand up and face the responsibilities we have and find mature, practical, humane and fair ways of managing it—for example, increasing the intake of resettlement of offshore asylum seekers, not warehousing them in desert prisons like Curtin and not setting up a whole new system of laws and regulations that are going to be seen as a direct attack on those within the Australian community who support refugees and asylum seekers. Church groups around Australia collect money on a weekly basis for individuals and families in refugee camps or those waiting for the determination process. Imagine if something happens and those people get so desperate that that money ends up getting spent on people smugglers because they have to get out of that situation. These are the types of cases we are talking about. Yet, those people who—

Judith Troeth (Victoria, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Order! The time for the debate has expired.

Sarah Hanson-Young (SA, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I seek leave to continue my remarks later.

Leave granted; debate adjourned.