Mr SWAN (Lilley—Deputy Prime Minister and Treasurer) (14:02): I thank the Leader of the Opposition for that question. I am certain that the member for Wentworth does not thank him. I will deal with the question in detail. First of all, these are matters which are decided for operational reasons at sea. Secondly, those opposite want to have it both ways. On the one hand they say they believe in the refugee convention, and on the other they oppose it and put forward courses of action directly in conflict with it. So what we see here, yet again, is the aggressive negativity of the Leader of the Opposition, who wants to play politics with people's lives. He wants to go the biff on this issue, day after day after day. I know there are members of the front bench over there who cannot stomach this approach—it is playing with people's lives. It is a bit rich for the opposition to go down this road when they held up the consideration of establishing— Mr Pyne: Madam Deputy Speaker, I rise on a point of order. It was a very straightforward question about why the government will not return asylum seekers found in Indonesian waters to Indonesia, as is required, and the Treasurer should answer the question. The DEPUTY SPEAKER ( Ms AE Burke ): The Manager of Opposition Business will resume his seat. It was a very long question with many things raised in it but I do ask the Acting Prime Minister to return to the question before the chair. Mr SWAN: This government will never—I repeat, never—seek to direct the Navy when it comes to operations at sea. There is a stark contrast between our approach and the approach of those over there. It has been nine months since we offered the opposition a compromise that would have seen the Malaysia policy and processing put in place along with Nauru. In that nine months people have drowned at sea. The fact is that the minute we could get a bill through this parliament to set up offshore processing, we did so. We have been opposed by those here day in and day out—all they want to do is play politics with the lives of people getting on boats. That is what this question is all about. It is a continuation of the aggression of this Leader of the Opposition, who wants to go the biff all of the time. He does not want to have a substantive discussion about policy. We will get on with implementing the Houston report.