Bob Debus (Macquarie, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Home Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

Can I especially thank the member for Makin for his contribution to the debate. It was very gratifying to hear such a sensible, compassionate and well-informed explanation of the issues of people-smuggling and border protection. People-smuggling is, indeed, a most serious crime. It preys on the vulnerability of desperate people, and it puts lives at risk. The government is committed to combating people-smuggling.

The Customs Legislation Amendment (Name Change) Bill 2009 implements the Prime Minister’s announcement in his national security statement last December which created the Australian Customs and Border Protection Service from the existing Australian Customs Service. The bill reflects the role of Customs as not only an important civilian service but a service that deals directly with transnational crime. Customs deals firsthand with activities like trafficking in persons, drugs and arms, and maritime people-smuggling.

The Rudd government is committed to ensuring that all agencies work together to prevent, detect and deter people-smuggling, and, as a result, the government is creating the Australian Customs and Border Protection Service as a single agency responsible for the coordination of the response to people-smuggling. This change was a highlight of the Prime Minister’s first national security statement, as I have said. It signals the seriousness of our commitment in particular to combating this crime of people-smuggling, and I am very pleased to be putting this change into legislation today.

The member for Cook asked during the debate what changes will actually occur for the Australian Customs and Border Protection Service. I am pleased to be able to tell the House that, under the new arrangements, Customs and Border Protection will have an unprecedented capability to coordinate intelligence collection and analysis on people-smuggling ventures and networks across government. This will include the transfer of a number of resources from the Department of Immigration and Citizenship to Customs and Border Protection; the co-location of the Australian Federal Police people-smuggling strike-force team with Customs and Border Protection; and the collocation of the newly established people-smuggling intelligence and targeting unit, comprising intelligence analysts from various agencies. Customs and Border Protection will also lead government efforts to engage internationally with source and transit countries so that we may comprehensively address and deter people-smuggling—specifically, by early intervention initiatives to provide alternatives to displaced people and refugees in source and transit countries; by diplomatic representation and active support to foreign governments, which is aimed at improving official controls on people-smuggling in transit countries; and by on-the-ground operational advice and technical support to overseas law-enforcement agencies to stop imminent launches of people-smuggling vessels. So I hope the member for Cook can see from that description that, in fact, a great deal is going to be done to improve our capacity for coordinated and purposive responses to the problem.

For those vessels that do depart for our shores, the government will continue to maintain extensive patrols of our borders, with Customs and Border Protection continuing to coordinate surveillance and response on the water. Our maritime surveillance operates every day of the year, and it includes 11 Customs and Defence aircraft, flying more than 2,400 missions a year, and 16 Navy and Customs patrol boats.

Members of the opposition have criticised these arrangements today. The member for Farrer called these arrangements lax and said that she did not believe the government were doing enough. Though I do welcome the opposition’s apparent final support for this bill, I do wish to address those comments. The facts are that this government have either the same number or more boats patrolling under Border Protection Command than the previous government had and our aircraft are actually more capable. Recent detections and interceptions show that our surveillance is indeed strong and effective. The response time for aircraft locating the most recent boat to be intercepted was less than 30 minutes. The AFP was also involved in February this year in an investigation with Indonesian police which led to 41 passengers along with six suspected people smugglers being detained before they got to leave Indonesia. These examples only highlight the necessity for a more coordinated approach across agencies—something the government have recognised and which this bill is now delivering.

In speeches today several opposition members also made some alarmist statements about maritime arrivals being on the rise. They said that that was linked to the government’s humane policy for dealing with asylum seekers. The member for Murray called this a ‘new surge’ and went so far as to say the government had given a green light to people smugglers. To the opposition I would say this: people-smuggling is a problem that is not determined by domestic policies. Australia has had a comparatively small number of arrivals over the last five years. Of course, we have to remain vigilant and we have to approach people smugglers as the criminals they are—threatening innocent lives as well as Australian sovereignty. But these are not Australian problems in isolation. There was a report in the Sydney Morning Herald on 7 February this year that figures from the United Nations established that 36,952 refugees landed on the coast of Italy last year. That was a jump of 75 per cent on the previous year. Thirty-one thousand of those people were rescued by the Italian Coast Guard. Last year’s arrivals in Australia were entirely comparable to previous years, with seven vessels arriving in our waters with 179 people. There were not 37,000 people but fewer than 200 people, so let us keep this in some kind of perspective.

Of course our maritime threats are different from those of Europe. We have a smaller potential volume of illegal immigrants but we have a massively larger area to keep under surveillance—the archipelago of Indonesia and the vast coast and territorial waters of Australia. To back up her claims about a purported new surge in arrivals, the member for Murray quoted figures on arrivals over a number of years. But, interestingly, she failed to quote the number of arrivals during 2007. That was of course a Howard government year. There were 148 people that year. As I have said, that figure is comparable to the figures we saw last year. The figures simply reiterate what the government has been saying all along: the number of people seeking asylum in Australia fluctuates, and the fluctuation is actually influenced by conflict overseas—in Afghanistan and Sri Lanka, for instance, and elsewhere in our region—by seasonal conditions and by the actual state of the sea. I repeat that these arrivals are not for the most part affected in any way by government policy in Australia.

The government has maintained a system of excision and mandatory detention on Christmas Island for all unauthorised boat arrivals. We have ended the embarrassing and inhumane Howard government policies that saw women and children locked up in detention centres and people languishing for years in detention without any review of their cases. That change in policy was part of the platform upon which the present government was elected. In my view, and in the view of all of my colleagues on this side of the House, that new policy has restored our honour as a nation.

We have also strengthened the Australian government’s response to the crime of people-smuggling. On the one hand we have established some humanity in the way that we deal with illegal entrants to this country but, contrary to what has been said by those opposite, we have also strengthened the Australian government’s response to the crime of people-smuggling through the measures that accompany the legislation that we are introducing today and the simple improvement in the material circumstances of the surveillance efforts that we carry out.

Customs also deals with the detection of drugs at the border. The member for Farrer criticised Customs container-screening operations this morning and criticised the harm minimisation component of the government’s drug strategy. I would like to briefly respond to those criticisms. The fact is that the Australian Customs and Border Protection Service has one of the best cargo inspection and examination regimes in the world. All Australian sea cargo imports and exports are risk assessed. We think about and collect intelligence on the risks associated with all cargo that enters Australia and then, where appropriate, through Customs and Border Protection we conduct further examination and inspection of that cargo.

In criticising the government’s wider drug strategy, the member for Farrer has apparently failed to understand that this is not a circumstance that one might ordinarily have expected, but the fact is that there has not been any change in the government’s tough stance on drugs from that of the previous government. We have not gone soft on drugs; in fact, the present government’s approach to illegal drugs is exactly the same as that of the previous government. We have adopted the National Drug Strategy of the previous government. We did so because it was a sensible one, and it encompasses the three elements that any good drug policy should have: it looks to reduce supply, it looks to reduce demand and it looks to reduce harm. Harm minimisation is in fact an integral part of our fight against drugs, but it does not in any way mean that we have dropped the ball on detection and supply. It is hardly a dramatic proposition to say that all three components of a policy are just as important as each other—reduction of supply, reduction of demand and reduction of harm.

On the bill at hand I want to be clear: the government has as many, and sometimes more, patrol boats in operation than the Howard government had in place. We have more capable aircraft than the Howard government had in place, and now we are improving coordination on people-smuggling to a level that is without precedent and is, by its nature, bound to be more effective than any arrangement that existed under the Howard government. We are doing all that without leaving asylum seekers in detention indefinitely without review of their case and without putting little kids into confinement. We are behaving like a civilised nation again. We are achieving this while also having better and more coordinated arrangements in place for dealing with people smugglers than those opposite ever had. I have pride and pleasure in commending the bill to the House.

Question agreed to.

Bill read a second time.

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