Humphries, Sen Gary

Senator HUMPHRIES (Australian Capital Territory) (17:30): There are times during major debates of this kind when one would dearly like to see some kind of tear in the space-time continuum to allow the present to hear the future come back to educate us about what we are debating. I cannot help but wonder about the course of the debates that went on about the Pacific solution between 2001 and 2008, in particular, when it was dismantled by the Rudd government. I would just love for some of the Labor Party critics of the Howard government's solution to somehow have heard the speech that Senator Lundy gave today in the Senate, when she told us, magisterially, about how we need to reopen the Nauru detention centre to deter people smugglers and that we need to deter people-smuggling businesses by not having a system of onshore processing but rather we should process people offshore in a place such as Nauru. How extraordinary it would be, how embarrassing it would be for those critics who lined up, week after week, to hector the Howard government and its supporters for having the audacity to suggest that we were doing refugees a favour by having offshore processing. These people went on for not months but years. Mr Bowen said, 'We closed Nauru because it was the right thing to do.' Senator Evans said, 'The Pacific solution was cynical, costly and ultimately unsuccessful.' Mr Rudd said, 'The Pacific solution is just wrong. It is a waste of taxpayers' money. It is not the right way to handle asylum seekers or others.' But today, of course, that is exactly the solution which is being reinstituted by this government. Tail between its legs, humiliated beyond belief, the government is now telling the Australian people that everything it said between 2001 and 2010 was wrong. Ms Gillard, as the then opposition spokesperson on immigration, said, 'The so-called Pacific solution is nothing more than the world's most expensive detour sign. The so-called Pacific solution is not a long-term solution.' That was in May 2003. Then she said, and this is interesting: 'Can anyone in this place really imagine that Australia will be processing asylum seeker claims on Nauru in 10 or 20 years time?' Yes, we can imagine it, because Ms Gillard's government is actually implementing a return to the processing of asylum seeker claims on Nauru—almost exactly 10 years after that claim was made. So we know that that is the case. In contrast, we have the words that the Minister for Immigration and Citizenship, Mr Bowen, has uttered to justify the decision to reopen the Nauru detention centre: I consider designating Nauru to be a regional processing country will discourage irregular and dangerous maritime voyages and thereby reduce the risk of the loss of life at sea; And further: I think that the cost of irregular maritime voyages, in terms of the loss of human life and in respect of the substantial financial and resourcing costs to the Commonwealth in dealing with such arrivals … means that it is in the national interest to attempt to reduce the number of such voyages, and to do so urgently. He is saying those things now without the slightest sense of irony, when he said such different things in the past. The truth is that this government has finally been mugged by reality and it realises, after so much wasted money, after so much patent and obvious failure, after so many deaths at sea, that its policy just was not working and that it had to be reversed. It simply had to be reversed. The government is taking steps now, through gritted teeth, to reinstate the policy which it spent a decade systematically tearing down—from opposition and then from government—and it expects us to somehow believe that it is sincere in its conversion to this new position. The fact is that it is putting on the clothing of the Howard government—and doesn't it hurt! The question has to be asked by the Senate, in looking at this change of position by the Gillard government: how effective will a change of policy actually be? And that leads to another question: how much does this government actually believe in what it is doing? Does it have the conviction to carry forward the policy which it reviled and denigrated for so long? The answer to that question has to be no, because this policy is based not on the government's assessment of what it needs to do; rather, it is a reaction to the opinion polls which said that its policy was not trusted by the Australian people to deliver any longer an effective policy on border control. What is the evidence for that statement, my assertion that this government actually does not believe in what it is doing? Last year when the High Court brought down the decision striking down the Malaysia solution, Senator Lundy said on ABC radio in Canberra that she would never vote for the Nauru solution, the reopening of Nauru. But today in the Senate, Senator Lundy moved a motion for Nauru to be reopened. Only last night on Q&A, in the midst of the government implementing a policy of evacuating its opposition to the Pacific solution, Senator Evans defended the policy that had dismantled it in 2008. On ABC Radio National today Senator Cameron made it very clear that he did not support this policy and that he was rolled by the caucus. Again, he was extremely concerned about the treatment of refugees and he had opposed in caucus implementation of this policy but was bound by the caucus decision and will have to vote for it on the floor of the Senate. Are we to believe that the spirit of what Senator Evans said last night and the spirit of what Senator Cameron said this morning does not reflect the views of most members of the Australian Labor Party caucus? I do not believe that, although that is what we are told. I think those voices were the authentic voices of the Labor Party which is not implementing these changes of policy because it believes in them but because it feels it has to do this because its policies are no longer trusted by the Australian people. The Labor Party knew that its policies were spectacularly failing and, more to the point, were being seen by the Australian people to be spectacularly failing and it had to do something to change the dynamics of the debate. This government, without any conviction in what it is doing, has taken back the position that it denigrated and opposed under the previous government and cannot be said in any sense to have its heart in what it is trying to do. It is clearly doing this with the greatest of reluctance. The Howard government opened the Nauru detention centre from scratch 19 days after deciding that we needed to put in place a more effective policy in the form of the Pacific solution. I know it is now 29 days since the Gillard government came to a similar conclusion, and we are yet to see the reopening of the centre—even though there was a centre, albeit one that had been allowed to run down, courtesy of the Rudd and Gillard governments. But there is even now a fundamental problem in the way that the government is approaching this task. It is implementing the Howard government policies without the conviction that goes behind such policies. The government is hoping that the policy it grabbed quickly off the shelf, as it were, is the policy that will get it out of this political bind, that will eliminate and cancel the pains the government has felt so obviously in the last two to three years as the policy has progressively collapsed. Senator Thistlethwaite said a few weeks ago during the debate on the legislation that underpinned today's motion that he was glad that this was happening because now the issue was going to go away. The problem is that it is not going away: the boats are still coming. In the last 24 hours, four boats have arrived carrying 205 people, bringing the total number of arrivals this year to 10,000. The policy is not working, because the Gillard government has picked up only part of what the Howard government was doing. The Gillard government has only adopted those elements it thinks it can get away with to make it look as though there are some differences from the approach of the previous government. But the government hopes these differences are enough to make it look to the people smugglers as though the government now means business on the question of deterring their trade. But it is not working. I am sorry to disappoint Senator Thistlethwaite and others, but I think this issue will be part of a live debate for the Australian community for some time to come. This government has so stimulated the business of people smugglers, so encouraged them to put up a shingle and open their doors to vulnerable people wanting to find a new life, that it is going to take a great deal of conviction and effort to stop the trade. Picking up only part of the elements of the previous government's policies is not going to achieve that. We have made it perfectly clear that you need at the very least to put other elements in place, such as the re-enactment of temporary protection visas and the policy of turning boats around when it is safe to do so in the waters around Australia. The government at this point is not prepared to take those steps, but how many more boats do we need to have, how many more risks to people's lives do we need to have before the government takes those other steps? Until the government takes steps of that kind, I do not think this issue is going to go away. I turn to what the Greens have had to say in the course of this debate. They have thrown out a fairly large number of insults to other parties in the course of this debate. They have attacked the sincerity and the bona fides of the other parties in the Senate. Senator Hanson-Young, in the course of her remarks, said: 'No-one believes that the major parties will look after refugees.' Senator Hanson-Young: Well, you haven't done so yet. Senator HUMPHRIES: You continue to make that assertion. First of all, I think that is obviously hyperbole. I remind Senator Hanson-Young that under successive coalition governments, from after the Second World War until the present day, hundreds of thousands of refugees have been brought to Australia and successfully settled here because we wanted to make sure refugees had a decent chance at a life. That record stands very clearly. Senator Hanson-Young: Until Philip Ruddock came along. Senator HUMPHRIES: You can interrupt all you like, Senator Hanson-Young, but our record on refugees is second to nobody's. This party, this opposition, has been responsible for many tens of thousands of refugees being brought to this country and offered homes here and new lives. What I also think needs to be said at this time is a point that the Labor member for Fraser made in a debate a few weeks ago when the policy was in the first stages of being reversed. He said the Greens are hardly in a position to talk about this because it has been the Greens' policy on onshore processing which 'has been in place for the last four years'. The Greens have had their policy put in place; it has been put into effect. Senator Hanson-Young interjecting— Senator HUMPHRIES: I know you did not like elements of the policy; you would have liked more things in more areas. The Greens are never satisfied in these sorts of areas. You would like to spend more money on this or put more money into that—there is never enough money as far as the Greens are concerned. But your policy is the one that has been in place for the last four years and, as a result, your party has to share some of the responsibility for the 704 deaths at sea since October 2009. You wanted onshore processing, you got it under this government and you have got to share some of the blame for the consequences of that policy. You tell us now that the policy is not working. You would not know a policy that works if you saw it. You claim that the policy was not working between 2001 and 2008 under the Howard government even though the boats virtually stopped and there were virtually no deaths at sea. That was the record of the Howard government. The record of the Rudd and Gillard governments is one where the policy has failed and the deaths have occurred. The Greens cannot pretend that they sit magnificently divorced from those actions because they supported those actions on the floor of the Senate, they buttressed the government's moves towards that end and today they have to bear some responsibility for the fact that the policy has been a failure. Notwithstanding their attempt to say it was not done the way that they wanted it done, the policy has been a failure and they share some responsibility for that failure, including the massive waste of money and the huge loss of life at sea. It is time to acknowledge that new measures need to be put in place. The government has been brought, kicking and screaming, to the position where it is now implementing the policies which it says were not successful in the past but which it now says, miraculously, are of course the ones that have to be implemented in order to be make it work. I welcome the fact that the government has come to that position. It would be the decent thing to do if the government was to acknowledge, at least in passing, in a begrudging kind of way, that what the coalition have been saying for some time deserves a little bit of credit, that it was what we have been urging you to do for the last four years and you have only just come to the conclusion that it is the right thing to do. And don't pretend that there are differences in your approach, because if you say, 'We're not doing TPVs and we're not doing turning back the boats,' you could find yourselves embarrassed by that claim because you might yet have to come back and do it when you realise that the policies you now have in place are still not deterring the boats. I think I am entitled to a little bit of venting today at the government for the ungracious way in which it has acknowledged that its policies need to be reversed and that it needs to come back and pick up the policies of the coalition. It is good that the parliament has the chance today to approve the instrument of designation made by the Minister for Immigration and Citizenship to put this policy firmly in place. But I warn, as both Senator Cash and Senator Brandis have done already in this debate, that you cannot get the solution to the problem which the Howard government had unless you pick up all the elements of the Howard government policy. That has not yet happened and you are therefore very far from being out of the woods yet on this question.