Mr HATTON (10:06 AM) —I thank the member for Melbourne Ports for holding the fort and give concurrent apologies for the member for Banks, who is delayed elsewhere. That means that, substantively, I am up first in relation to this very significant Crimes Legislation Amendment (People Smuggling, Firearms Trafficking and Other Measures) Bill 2002 we have before us today. However, you would not think it was too significant if you looked at the list of speakers in relation to this bill: for the opposition there is me and the shadow minister for justice and customs, the member for Banks, Daryl Melham, but only one speaker for the government on the other side.

On the core issues of the changes to the criminal law made by this bill, I will defer to the professional ability of our shadow minister, who is not only professional in his approach as a shadow minister but has a long and serried career as a public defender at the New South Wales Bar. The depth and scope of his knowledge is shown by just how well prepared he is and indeed how well the opposition has been prepared—with the shadow minister working in conjunction with Senator Faulkner and with other members of the opposition—in putting together Labor's policy in this area and a range of other areas associated with the Criminal Code and the changes that the government has sought to make.

This bill makes a number of changes, to some effect. On my reading of the changes in terms of people-smuggling—primitive though that reading may be, not being legally trained—the effect is the same kind of effect we have with other Commonwealth legislation, in particular those offences where Australians overseas on holiday participate in acts which we would find jailable in Australia. We have extended Australian law to have effect throughout Asia and, indeed, the rest of world, but particularly in areas of Asia in relation to sex offences with under-age people. The effect of those laws is to say that the reach of Australian law is normally encompassed by the borders of our nation but there are particular cases so significant that we need to reach beyond our borders in order to hold to account those people who are transgressing against local laws, particularly in a number of Asian jurisdictions. With the cooperation of those jurisdictions, we have put these laws into place.

That extension of Australian law is to bring to justice Australians who are perpetrating illegal acts overseas. It is also to assist foreign jurisdictions in their attempts to clean up the illegality they face—and we have seen a number of examples in the past in the illegal sex trade in a number of Asian countries where Australia's intervention and the legal changes we have made have been extraordinarily welcome.

Does this bill operate in a similar way? If I am correct, it inserts new provisions into the Criminal Code to criminalise further aspects of people-smuggling. One, we know that our laws are against people-smuggling; two, what is the particular element here? This element is dealing with Australian citizens who organise or participate in the act of people-smuggling. It does not cover overseas people smugglers at all; it covers Australians if they participate in illegal sex acts or sex trade overseas. Here it is transferred to the question of people-smuggling. The new provision in the Criminal Code Act 1995 criminalises:

Let us look at that. Firstly, it says `from Australia', our jurisdiction, `to another country' anywhere in the world, so it could be Finland or Iceland. It most probably would not be either of those two countries or any of the other 180 or so that we have. Secondly, it says `from a country other than Australia to a third country'—for instance, if people attempted to smuggle people from the United States to Sri Lanka, that would be covered by this bill. We know the movement generally is not from any advanced Western industrialised country to countries that are poorer and more dependent or Third World countries. It is generally going to be from countries where there is an economic incentive to get out of that context and go to a richer country. People smugglers say, `You get entry into this country and you will get everything that you want—jobs, pensions or whatever else.'

Thirdly, it says `with or without transit through Australia'. Why is that provision encompassed within this bill? You have to make a necessary or a contingent connection to Australia. If you are dealing with people being smuggled from Australia or with people being taken from one country to a second country outside Australia, this needs to encompass the fact that they might be routed through Australia either by boat or more likely by plane. Alternatively, Australia may not be involved at all. This condition might not be seen as necessary where Australia is not involved at all. Two countries may have no necessary association. However, if people were coming from Iceland through Australia to Fiji, as unlikely as that might seem, it needs to be covered in this bill. Further, the explanatory memorandum and the notes provided by the shadow minister, the member for Banks, indicate that:

Here the reach is similar. We are dealing with Australian citizens perpetrating acts of organising or assisting in people-smuggling. Wherever they are—in Australia in our normal jurisdiction or in overseas jurisdictions—they will be held to account. There is a penalty of $110,000 or 10 years in jail. Further, a case of aggravated people-smuggling is 20 years imprisonment or a fine of $220,000. There is a series of cases where it is a question of that being aggravated. I might go to that shortly but I will divert for a moment.

This bill covers a range of things. In some ways it is a grab bag because it covers people-smuggling, the question of importing guns, cross-border firearms trafficking and a series of other attendant measures. People-smuggling and firearms trafficking issues are not foreign to my electorate of Blaxland, which is in the dead centre of Sydney, the area that is most impacted by immigration, by activities involving people-smuggling and by cross-border trafficking of arms. Over a long period we have seen a change not only in the way in which the people in Blaxland live but also in the character of the area.

One issue here that might be seen as political—it is a fairly heavy and important issue—is the fact that, if there is no control of your borders and of who comes to Australia in government programs 10, 20 or 30 years down the track, the quality of life and communal living in your area can be destroyed. There is fear and loathing on the streets of Bankstown because of what the Fraser government did in the late 1970s, when more than 14,000 people were introduced into Australia with no criminal checking as to crimes that had been committed in their country of origin or their association—no departmental activity at all. This was a privatised operation. One travel agent was given the job of organising the mass exodus of more than 14,000 people from Lebanon—from the war in Lebanon—to Australia. That was sanctioned by the Fraser government. They simply told the departments to stand aside.

Mr Hunt —Mr Deputy Speaker, I ask whether the member for Blaxland would give way very briefly to answer two questions.

Mr HATTON —No, not in this case. This matter is too important. All of the publicity that we have seen over the last 1½ years to two years—running back four years—about problems in Bankstown can in part be traced back to the fact that there were no proper controls by the Australian government, which should have put those controls in place. This coalition government is attempting to control people smugglers.

The people in my electorate have to live with the consequences of the late 1970s. Twenty-eight people involved in the Telopea Street gang in Bankstown have gone to jail. They controlled gun-running in Bankstown. They sold hand guns and automatic weapons and controlled the heroin and associated drug trades in the city of Bankstown. Thankfully, our police force, under Bob Carr's state government, has pursued those people to the point where they have been put into jail—where they properly should be. Those people attempted to do a range of things that endangered normal community life: they decided to shoot up the Lakemba police station and to bomb the Bankstown police station. They had no regard for Australian law or for the normal civilities operative in the city of Bankstown or anywhere else. They presented themselves as criminal in mind and activity and were not afraid to take on our police forces.

When we look at the issues of people-smuggling and government control of our borders, we should look to the great untold story in Australian immigration and see what happened in 1975-76 and thereafter when the Fraser government abrogated its responsibilities to protect Australia's borders and citizenry because it did not check the criminal backgrounds of people who came to Australia. On behalf of the people of Bankstown and Blaxland and all of those in my community who, for a long time, have found it difficult to hold their heads up because of the bad publicity that came about because of a small section of that community, I urge this government to take its responsibilities very seriously.

Since the time I adopted an attendant role, working for the former member for Blaxland in his electorate office, and since being elected to this parliament on 15 June 1996, I have sought to have policies on immigration and border control fashioned in as tough a way as possible. When you come from an area that has absorbed large numbers in postwar migration and, since then, great influxes of people, continuing right through to now, you have to protect and stand up for those in your area. When governments of whatever flavour decide to operate immigration programs that impact on your area, its character, its people and their safety, you had better be sure that you are standing up for them and not for some misguided pristine principle delivered by those in leafier parts of Australia—whether the North Shore of Sydney, dominated by Liberal electorates, the cosy parts of lower Tasmania, Perth or anywhere else.

In an electorate with such a high concentration of people from migrant backgrounds, the expectation in the past from the very uninformed media, from the very uninformed commentators, has been that in those areas former migrants would be very supportive of immigration; the fact is that they are not. If you understand the character of the area and of the impacts on these people, you can understand that the cross-border firearms trafficking regulations, operating here in this bill today, are important for the City of Bankstown. Such regulations might not be so important to Woollahra or Harbord, but they are dramatically important to the City of Bankstown. Blood has flowed in our streets because of people who have chosen to deal and traffic in illegal hand guns. People have had access to a whole container load of Glock pistols, which were meant for the New South Wales Police; they were sold in the streets of Bankstown. Luckily, those who were responsible were apprehended by the state police and incarcerated, as they should have been. But the shadow minister and I well know—as both our electorates encompass parts of the City of Bankstown—that, unless you stand up for the people in your electorate, as we both have, and fight within your party, whether in opposition or in government, the necessary strictures of the law will not protect them. At other times and in other places, I will probably come back to the great untold story of what the Fraser government did not only to the people of Sydney but to the people of Australia by perpetrating totally uncontrolled access to Australia—no border control and no oversight of the criminality or otherwise of people coming into Australia, with dramatic consequences.

There is a message there to this government, given that when running its election campaign and since coming to government in 1996 it distorted the record in terms of what Labor was about. For the four years of the Keating prime ministership, Australia had its lowest migrant intake in this country's history of immigration. Why? The then Prime Minister recognised—and I am glad that I put my job on the line to argue the case—that, in a recession, it is no use talking to people who do Economics 1 who say, `We need to create greater demand,' when the demand created is that on the Commonwealth for public housing and for other Commonwealth benefits. You really should concentrate on people in the City of Bankstown and electorates like Blaxland. Those people are doing it hard, looking to retrain and looking to get back into the work force as soon as possible. You need a different approach to Australian immigration. You need a different approach to how you moderate that program during a recession. The awareness of what the real impacts are from a recession informed that decision, and that was to Australia's and the electors' benefit. The story told by those opposite is entirely contrary.

Throughout its period in government, Labor had a tough and concerted program in relation to people-smuggling and immigration. Liberals, over a 10- to 15-year period, sought to blackguard the government's name. They argued that there was no control and that Labor was soft in this area, with John Laws, Alan Jones and a tribe of radio commentators pouring battery acid on the Labor voters of Western Sydney—and to effect. The one great problem from my point of view and my party's point of view is that neither Paul Keating as a Prime Minister nor our Labor ministers at the time adequately explained just how tough we were in this area. As tough as our economic policy was, particularly from 1985-86 on, there was an absolute conjunction in terms of Labor's running of immigration. Why? Because in our electorates immigration policy matters. Our electorates are the ones that feel the brunt of it. That is why Bob Carr, as Premier of New South Wales, talks so openly about the importance of control of the immigration program and why he talks so openly about the necessity to moderate the effects and to deal effectively with people-smuggling.

During Labor's period in government 3,000 people were smuggled into Australia. When this government totally lost control of the situation and did not protect Australia's borders at all, 11,500 people were smuggled into Australia in 2½ years. They completely lost the plot. They were saved by the Tampa and the way in which the government presented that incident. The Tampa saved them from the accusation—directly pointed at them and buried home, deep into their political heart—that they, irresponsibly, had not put together an adequate program of border control and that they, irresponsibly, had not done what we did in government. We had a program, which cost us in the order of $1 million, to take 3,000 people who were mostly from Fujian Province in southern China. There was a problem with some of the Vietnamese people in Hong Kong, but that was a different matter which was solved globally. In terms of those people from southern China, through negotiation with the Chinese government and intergovernmental cooperation, Australia's borders and Australia's immigration program were protected.

This government was re-elected on the basis of a distortion of history. The story of recent and past history has not properly been told. People-smuggling needs to be stopped and this legislation is a good step towards that and towards dealing with Australian citizens who are involved in people-smuggling either onshore or offshore. But the history of the Liberal Party's incapacity to deal with this question has not been told. It should be told and it will be. (Time expired)