Mr SNOWDON (9:07 AM) —As was said yesterday by Julia Gillard, the shadow minister for this portfolio area, this migration legislation is part of the government's agenda of belting double-dissolution triggers through this parliament. Mr Speaker, you will recall that I last debated this legislation in June last year.

Mr Ruddock —It doesn't have to be tricky. You can support us.

Mr SNOWDON —Unlikely. I go back to a comment I made then in concluding my remarks. I referred to an article by Mungo MacCallum in the Sydney Morning Herald of the previous week. That article referred, initially at least, to the government's excisions of the Christmas and Cocos islands. I will quote it again because I think it encapsulates the nature of this legislation and what it is about. It states:

But of course it was more than that; it was a tactical retreat: an admission that we could not protect our territorial boundaries even against a few leaky fishing boats, let alone against any serious invader. The decision by Howard and his fellow diminishers Alexander Downer and Philip Ruddock to star in their own version of “Honey, I Shrunk the Borders” should have been seen not as a clever political ploy, but as a serious defensive weakness.

That is not a bad encapsulation of this debate in terms of where the government's position is. As a result of contributions that have been made already, we know that the government's participation in this Pacific solution over a number of months has been obscenely expensive. In my view, it has been a cause for concern regarding our relationships with our neighbours. We have obligated our defence forces in the use of a frigate to patrol off Christmas Island at a cost, I understand, of around $1 million a day. We are deploying a very important naval asset to do potential boardings and thus far—and the minister has been expressing this view for some time—we have had no visitation. As a result, the minister claims that his border protection policy is a success. If it is a success, you have to ask why it is that we are deploying this particularly important defence asset in this manner; and why it is that in deploying defence assets we are actually using Army personnel as boarding parties for these vessels. These are Army personnel who, in the main, are from infantry battalions. In some cases, they are deployed out of the Northern Territory from 57 at Robertson Barracks to Christmas Island and then onto this vessel, where they sit and wait for we know not what.

The bill proposes to excise from the Australian migration zone more than 3,000 islands that are part of Western Australia, the Northern Territory and Queensland. Under the provisions of the bill, unauthorised arrivals who reach these excised islands will not be covered by the provisions of the Migration Act that deal with processing asylum claims. The bill intends to make unauthorised maritime journeys to Australia less attractive to those seeking asylum from persecution.

I am not sure that the claims of the government can be supported. We have here a situation where the government is proposing to excise islands that in many instances are simply a few kilometres from the mainland. The Tiwi islands Melville and Bathurst in my own electorate are home to over 2,000 Tiwi people. It takes just 20 minutes by light aircraft to get to these islands from Darwin. On a clear day they can be seen from the beaches of the northern suburbs. Yet under this legislation these communities will be excised. The same is true of other islands around the Northern Territory coast.

Mr Ruddock —The communities aren't excised; the islands are excised.

The SPEAKER —Minister, the member for Lingiari has the call.

Mr SNOWDON —I am happy to be corrected by the minister because all he does is confirm the stupidity of this arrangement. What I have put for the Tiwi islands and people goes for other islands and their communities around the coast of Arhem Land and into the Gulf of Carpentaria. Are we to believe, as the minister would have us believe, that people seeking to flee from oppression, torture and persecution, people who have sold all they have and who have risked their lives on barely seaworthy vessels, will stop at these islands within sight of the mainland and then simply give up?

I will not repeat my contribution of June last year, but I went through and summarised the landings on the Australian mainland from the central coast of New South Wales to the central coast of Western Australia. Very few of those landings at all had been made on the islands which the government now is seeking to excise. In his second reading speech to the bill to this parliament last year, the minister put forward this absurd suggestion:

The intelligence that we are gathering suggests that smugglers are now changing their tactics, not necessarily to target the mainland but to bypass the mainland on the way to New Zealand.

If this change in tactics is correct and these people are heading for New Zealand, it seems to me rather bizarre that we would be excising these islands which are particularly close to the Australian mainland. As I say, if you are looking for replenishment of supplies and you are floating around the north Australian coast within sight of the main-land, my guess is that that is where you would land.

I hear no proposal from the government—in fact, if my memory serves me correctly, the minister has excluded this proposition—that they could potentially excise areas of the Australian mainland from the migration zone. After all, the bulk of the landings of these vessels have been on the mainland. It seems to me quite possible that the government might put forward in this parliament, at some point down the line, a ridiculous proposal to excise areas of the Arnhem Land coast, for example, or the Kimberley coast, the coast of North Queensland or the coastal areas within the Gulf of Carpentaria.

Submissions to the Senate inquiry which examined and rejected the need for this bill reveal how disingenuous the government's position has been. The Acting Secretary of the Department of Immigration and Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs, Ed Killesteyn, told the inquiry that this bill would encourage boats to try to reach the mainland—which supports my view. When he was asked how the bill would make it harder for people smugglers to escape detection, he said:

It is a simple matter of geography. If you remove the outlying islands from the capacity of smugglers to simply drop off their cargo, they are forced to look for other routes that will invariably bring them closer to Australia.

Those are the words of the minister's own departmental acting secretary. This bill, if enacted, will force people smugglers to bring asylum seekers closer to Australia. One can only assume that this is the advice which was given to the minister and the government. As we heard yesterday, and it bears repeating, the Commissioner of the Australian Federal Police, Mick Keelty, went further by saying that it would be better to have people arrive on the mainland. He told the inquiry on 6 August last year:

This is a far preferable way for us to go, instead of having them left on a remote island.

When asked whether this legislation would result in increased arrivals of asylum seekers on the Australian mainland, he said:

Yes ... The whole object is to force people to come to Australia through the correct procedures but, if they are going to commit a crime in the way they are sending people to Australia, we can at least try to get them sent to where there is some infrastructure support for them.

It is clear that this legislation will not do what the government says it will do; we only have to ask the government's own advisers for evidence of this. It will simply drive the smugglers into the mainland and strip back the government's responsibilities to protect excised communities. I am very concerned by how far the government will go to absolve itself of this responsibility. We gained some insight into that last year when, on the weekend of 14 December, the government secretly excised four islands off the coast of Western Australia, showing their utter contempt for this parliament in the process. The minister made the decision to excise the four islands—Bernier, Dorre, Faure and Dirk Hartog—without parliamentary consent, following reports of a boat in the area. As it happened, the boat was nothing more than a fishing vessel.

What was truly outrageous about this particular act was that it happened just one week—one week only—after the Senate rejected the government's attempt to remove more than 3,000 islands from the migration zone. That is the regard in which this government and the minister hold this parliament. The absolute contempt shown by the minister in that instance is mirrored by the government's contempt for the advice they have received on the most appropriate way to deal with this problem. This action begs the question: if the government can be spooked by a fishing boat into divesting themselves of territory, what will happen when a smuggler's boat approaches the coast of Northern Australia? As I said, it is very clear that there is a potential when this threat emerges—if it ever does again—for the government to simply say, `We will need to excise parts of the mainland.'

I want to go to some issues to do with the way in which the government has treated people on the excised islands. In particular I want to go to the question of Christmas Island, and then, if time permits, I want to go to an important matter to do with the Cocos Islands. I accompanied the minister to Christmas Island as he informed—not consulted—the island community about a proposal to build a reception facility on Christmas Island. The minister will say that he consulted, but there is one way to consult and it is a two-way process: `This is what we would like to do; what do you think?' That is not what happened. He said, `This is what we are doing; what do you think?' In any event, I have to say that the community of Christmas Island was supportive of the proposal. But there was very little, if any, consultation with the island community over the nature of that facility, and the government made very little effort to have informed discussions with the community members about it.

You will recall, Mr Speaker, that the original proposal was to develop a facility of 1,200 beds on Christmas Island. Some groundwork had been done on the site, which I visited on a number of occasions. The government had delayed the construction without explanation; indeed, in my view they misinformed the parliament through their agencies about why the delays were caused. They claimed that there were voids beneath the surface of the earth where they were doing the clearings. I spoke to the construction people and the engineers and, in fact, there were no such voids. It was merely an excuse because of the delay which had been caused by indecision by the government in terms of how they might proceed with the project. On 19 February this year, after having delayed the construction, the government terminated the contract. The Christmas Island residents were not told about this; they had to learn about it themselves. That same afternoon the government announced a proposal to retender for the construction of a scaled-down centre—reduced in size from a planned 1,200-bed facility to 800-bed facility. To this point, no tender has been let.

I note a government press release in the last day or so indicating their appointment of a project manager. The fact is that people on Christmas Island, at the invitation of the minister and the Minister for Regional Services, Territories and Local Government, geared up because they were requested to gear up for the benefits that the construction of this facility would bring to the Christmas Island community. I know businessmen on Christmas Island who invested heavily—to the tune of millions of dollars. They brought equipment onto Christmas Island in preparation of their involvement in this project, as they were invited to do by the government. In February this year they learned that the contract had been terminated. They have incurred substantial losses as a direct result of the decision-making processes and the absolute failure of this government to live up to the commitments they made to the Christmas Island community—never mind the fact that there was little or no consultation. Now, of course, despite the heightened expectations that were built up as a result of the minister's visit last year about the potential of this construction, the local economy has dived. People are out of work and some are having great difficulties.

I will read from a letter to the editor in the March issue of the Shire of Christmas Island news,written by a local resident, Paul McCallum. The letter says:

At the last auction of Christmas Island properties ... every single property was passed in despite some frantic early bidding. For the long-term, long suffering and somewhat ... cynical attendees at the auction, it was probably a predictable outcome, given the timing ... in the aftermath of Minister Tuckey's soul-destroying statement relating to the government's cancellation of the detention facility at North West Point.

This sums up the views of the people of Christmas Island. I want to quickly go to the issue of the Cocos Islands. The minister at the table, the Minister for Immigration and Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs, will recall the use of the quarantine facility on the Cocos Islands as an interim reception facility. Prior to the requirement by the minister and his department to use this particular facility, it had been arranged for it to be dealt with by DOTARS, the department responsible. The minister then said that his department required the use of this land. They no longer require the use of this land.

In a meeting of the Joint Standing Committee on the National Capital and External Territories in the parliament this week, on Monday 12 May, witnesses from the Australian Quarantine and Inspection Service told us, in a response to a question on whose books this asset was retained, that it was one of their assets but it had no book value; its value had been written off. This land—which covers a substantial area, 30 acres, and comprises paddocks, administration buildings, housing and laboratories—was initially scheduled to be sold by the government in 2000. I request of the minister and I ask him to convey this to his colleague minister that, because of the scarcity of land on the Cocos Islands, this land be divested from the Commonwealth and be transferred to the control of the Cocos Island Shire Council for their use, as an asset for them. This would show the government's good faith in this community, which in many respects it has exploited by bringing it along the road of expecting certain things to happen and then not doing them. It is very important that the government accept its responsibility to the Christmas and Cocos island communities, that it fulfil the promises it made to the people of Christmas Island and that it seek to transfer this facility at no cost to the Cocos Island community. This asset has no book value to the Quarantine and Inspection Service. It could be transferred at no cost to the Cocos Island Shire Council so that they can use it as an asset for themselves, to be developed for the purpose of the Cocos Island community.