Mr HATTON (9:57 AM) —I actually do believe in mandatory detention. It was a Labor government that brought it in in 1993, it was a Labor government that sought to protect Australia's borders, and it was a Labor government that ensured throughout the three years that mandatory detention was in place that Australia's borders were protected. It was also the case that the Labor government, over more than a decade and a half, was attacked on very key questions on how Australia's borders were being protected and on the immigration program by a Liberal opposition which absolutely distorted the fundamental realities about how that Labor government ran its immigration program.

The Minister for Immigration and Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs knows full well that we did have a tough and uncompromising immigration policy whilst Labor was in government. The minister knows full well that there were variations of degree with which former Labor immigration ministers pressed their foot to the floor in terms of the way in which they described what was happening, but the minister also knows full well that Australia's borders were protected.

When we had an influx of 3,000 people coming from the lower parts of southern China—the Fujian Province, I think—the Australian Labor Party in government acted quickly and sensibly and, with Nick Bolkus as minister, sealed up that problem by adopting a multilevel approach. It was not a unilateral approach; it was actually an approach involving the government of China, the provincial government and Australia—not only the cabinet but also the people in the immigration department whose task it was to sort it out.

One of the people who sorted it out was a former regional manager from the Bankstown office—which unfortunately, Minister, of course no longer exists because your government closed it. That office served the people of Bankstown well. As would be known, I have a high immigration impact electorate. The people of Bankstown are now forced to travel to Parramatta, to the city or to Rockdale—although Rockdale may have been knocked over as well—when that area is impacted on the greatest by immigration policies. But we also face the situation where people not only cannot get adequate local recourse but also cannot get a straight-up view of what the past history has been in relation to the way in which governments, both Labor and Liberal, have approached the problem of dealing with people coming in illegally.

We had an influx of 3,000 people. What we did was ensure that a person of the quality of Joe Rodigari moved on from being a regional manager at Bankstown to running enforcement in New South Wales. He dramatically increased the capture of people who were here illegally and shipped them overseas. Because of his expertise, he was moved on to lead the task force that was involved, particularly in Western Australia, in dealing with the influx from China. It was through a process of discussion and agreement making and by Australia being willing to put the money up to ship these people back that we sealed off the influx from southern China. People from southern China still find their way into Canada and the United States, but Australia effectively dealt at regional, provincial and national government levels in China to stop what could have been a major problem.

Under Labor, we had an influx of 3,000 people in 13 years. What do we have with this government?—11,500 in 2½ years. The major crisis that developed with people illegally coming to Australia was a crisis engendered against this conservative government. I am not sure whether I spoke on the Migration Legislation Amendment (Further Border Protection Measures) Bill 2002 [No. 2] last time, so I have taken the opportunity to participate in the debate today. But I have spoken on other measures, including the transitional bill that was previously before the House. I may still be waiting for an answer to the question of whether or not that transitional bill was a vehicle for all of those people who were originally held up at Christmas Island and who took their sojourn in Nauru and other places to enter Australia and, in fact, stay. We know, despite the admonitions of the Prime Minister and the minister at the time, that a healthy number of those people landed in Australia, because they had refugee claims that were accepted. Those admonitions, as we know, were that not one single person would either enter Australia or stay here. But we know they have, and I think they have stayed in their hundreds.

At the time this so-called Pacific solution was introduced—it is no solution and never was a solution; it has only been an addition to budget costs and an additional cost in terms of the manner in which Australia is seen in the world—I argued that it provides no stronger protection of our borders than we had in the past. It is only a political fix for the government. It is time the government pulled the whole infrastructure to pieces. I have no problem whatsoever with the excision of Ashmore Reef and Christmas Island, given their proximity to Indonesia and given the ham-fisted manner in which this government dealt with Indonesia over East Timor. There were evident pressures on the Indonesian government due to the collapse of their economy and finances and, when that government was at its weakest, this Prime Minister put his foot down on its neck over East Timor. The surge of people through Indonesia coming as illegals to Australia was a direct result of that. It was payback for the manner in which this government put pressure on Indonesia at its time of greatest weakness. The minister knows that, but the Prime Minister may not know that. He may not have had it enter his consciousness that there could be a direct correlation between relations between Australia and Indonesia and the difficulties that Australia faces from illegal immigrants.

The minister has argued time and time again that the actions the government took in placing people on Manus Island and Nauru, as part of the so-called Pacific solution, added absolutely enormous costs to this budget. All he needed to do was to excise Ashmore Reef and Christmas Island and put up a facility. A facility is finally being constructed at Christmas Island and we have had other facilities constructed. That excision only needed to be there. It did not need to be what we have in front of us today—3,000 islands, some of which are 40 kilometres from the mainland. Tasmania is not included, but who knows? Later on it might get a guernsey. I do not see why you would not put the whole mainland into it and just say: `It is one job lot. This country is an excision zone for immigration purposes.' Why not do the lot? Why not say that it is possible to get people here? We are an island continent. If you are going to deal with an island that is 40 kilometres off the coast, why not include the lot? Why not say that for immigration purposes it is going to be dealt with in another way?

In a fundamental way, the drive by our shadow minister is to have the United Nations approach to dealing with these issues accepted globally so that there is a multilateral approach to this which all nations that are impacted upon adversely and all nations that could be part of creating the problem need to sign up to. The UNHCR approach to this could be made global and universal. In effect, you would then be excising the whole of continental Australia. One of our key problems is a question of differential treatment between those people who come by boat versus those people who come by air, including differences in how they might be treated and, far more importantly, in how their refugee claims are assessed at law. The key question in relation to the original excisions was: how do you create a different layered approach so that those who might seek to gain an advantage over the commonality of people applying from overseas might not have that?

When the minister originally proposed the excision of Christmas Island and Ashmore Reef and we accepted that, that key question needed to be addressed because of things that were happening at the time. I accepted that; that is my personal view. But how the government then went about creating storage areas in New Guinea, on Manus Island and in Nauru was, I think, absolutely reprehensible. It is no solution whatsoever in Australian budgetary terms and it is no solution to this problem. The minister well knows that, but he is under the hammer of the demands of his Prime Minister and the demands of his colleagues who have pressed this on and on.

What we are faced with here is another political bill—as we had a political khaki budget last night—to place this issue on the running lines in the run-up to the next election. There is no safety for this country or its people in the provisions of this bill that add all of those extra islands to the excision zone. There is no fundamental safety either in maintaining those outlying areas where people are kept. A number of people—including the member for Denison—have alluded, in relation to the rather cute terminology of Nauru now being `self-managed', to the fact that the people who are inmates there have taken over and are running the shop. I do not think we should be too surprised about that. If we look at last night's budget and the self-management that is demanded in health, in education and indeed across the board, we will see that it is part of the government's way of doing things. So it may not be so extraordinary that they expect people to take up not just cost burdens but managerial burdens as well.

The core from which this comes is a total government failure to deal with the people-smuggling problem and its initial genesis in relations between Australia and Indonesia. The fact is that the Indonesian government chose to turn a blind eye, at the very minimum, to people travelling through to Australia and, at the maximum, absolutely assisted people to move through to Christmas Island or Ashmore Reef, creating a flood of illegal arrivals into Australia who utilised other means, including aircraft, to get into Indonesia initially but then launched into the boat method.

There is the question of how you deal with the different types of people coming into Australia illegally and the original excision of Christmas Island and Ashmore Reef. Then there is the question of the attempted political message from this and from what the government attempted to do previously when they first put these regulations in place—and they were in place for, I think, a total of seven days from about 7 January to 17 January before they got knocked on the head by the Senate. This bill seeks to put them back in place. Does the Minister for Immigration and Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs really believe that this would have a major practical effect in stopping people-smuggling? That is for the minister to answer. I expect, though, that fundamentally neither he nor the people in his department do. The larger purpose of this bill is to signal that the government will attempt to pump out the message that they are against people-smuggling and will do a tougher job than Labor.

The reality is that throughout its period in government Labor was tough on immigration, tough on people-smuggling and tough on controlling our borders—despite the fact that we had a spineless opposition which not only within this parliament but also throughout the community used immigration issues as a whip to beat the government with to try to undermine the picture people had of it. The lackeys of this current government—those lackeys in the media, Alan Jones and the rest of the crew, who poured battery acid year after year on Labor supporters in Western Sydney and used the question of Australia's immigration program as a weapon to flail the government with—knew absolutely that what they were doing was entirely misrepresenting the situation.

The people who worked in the immigration department did their job whilst Labor was in government. They did not seek to deny border security or border control for Australia. They did not seek to walk away from their responsibility, as members of one of the then government's departments, to try to make sure that Australia was secure. No-one rightly experienced in this area could say that the people in the immigration department throughout the 13 years in which Labor was in power sought to weaken Australia's control of its borders or turn a blind eye to those problems. What we did in government we now propose to do, and to do even more of, when we come back to government. The shadow minister for immigration has proposed a long-term solution to the questions posed by this government.

There is no long-term solution in self-management in Nauru. There is no long-term solution in keeping people holed up on Manus Island. There is no long-term solution in keeping a facade which was built around the fact that this government should have been condemned and thrown out of office because it had totally lost control of immigration matters and of Australia's borders. The government's overreaction in putting up its so-called Pacific solution was to cover its hide—to cover the fact that it had lost control of relations with Indonesia and that the flood of people brought in by people smugglers was direct retribution for the manner in which the Prime Minister had treated the Indonesians. If you ask Australia's intelligence agencies whether or not that has a fundamental basis in fact, I think you will get the answer that that is absolutely true. Relations between countries cannot just exist on a bilateral level. This government would like that to be the case—it would like trade matters to be dealt with only country to country. By and large it is averse to multilateral approaches. Even at the bilateral level we have suffered enormously in this area. But there are multilateral solutions—and the shadow minister for immigration has alluded to those—in getting a new regime whereby UNHCR rules prevail.

As the member for Blaxland since the middle of 1996, and since 2 January 1985 when I started working on immigration issues for the then Treasurer and afterwards the then Labor Prime Minister, I have adopted—necessarily, because my electorate is an immigration impact zone—the toughest approach to border control and immigration policy that one could reasonably expect given the tremendously important and deep reality of the impact of that policy on people in my electorate. The shadow minister for immigration knows this full well, because the character and nature of her electorate is very similar to that of mine. People who live in those electorates feel the impact of uncontrolled migration. They will feel the impact now of increased levels of migration—as, during the four years in which Paul Keating was Prime Minister, they would have felt the impact of the fact that Australia had the lowest levels of immigration since the program was inaugurated by Arthur Calwell after the Second World War.

There is only one government that had those low levels of 70,000, and that was the Australian Labor Party, under Prime Minister Paul Keating, in reaction to the fact that we were in recession. If the levels demanded by a number of people who advised him had been in place, then normal Australian people would not have been able to get access to jobs, there would have been more savage competition for those and the cost to the Australian budget would have been much greater. Sensible policy—policy that is based not just on the national interest of Australia as a whole but on the interest of people in the electorate of Blaxland and the interest of people in the electorate of Lalor and of other similar electorates around Australia—demands an Australian Labor Party opposition and an Australian Labor Party government that is tough when it comes to people-smuggling, that is tough when it comes to issues of border control and that is tough when it comes to protecting the interests of our electors and of the Australian people.

It is this government that failed the test when it came to the question of controlling Australia's borders. This government was re-elected on the basis of a figment, a fig leaf created by this minister and the Prime Minister that this government was tough in these areas. There have not been people coming since these measures were put into place, and that is the government's rejoinder time and time again. But it caused the problem in the first place. Do a simple comparison: 3,000 people in 13 years versus 11,500 in 2½ years. Excuse me? There is a localised problem here which has been engendered by a failure of government policy at the fundamental regional level. We need to rebuild the relationship with Indonesia. We need to have a new set of policies where the UNHCR can operate on a more effective and more universal basis. I think we need to maintain the excision of Christmas Island and Ashmore Reef because of the question of proximity, but this grab bag of 3,000 islands is a political attempt in this bill, as it was in the regulations, to posture in order to cover up the fact that the government's record was so reprehensible. It just is not good enough, and I oppose it. (Time expired)