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Transcript and video link - Channel Ten - Meet the Press

Sunday 11th July 2010

Subjects: Loss of an Australian Soldier in Afghanistan, Julia Gillard’s failed election fix on illegal boat arrivals, Coalition Sustainable Population Policy, The Coalition's real action plan for restoring integrity and fairness to refugee decision making, UN convention on refugees

PAUL BONGIORNO, PRESENTER: Welcome to 'Meet The Press'. Julia Gillard's pre-election housekeeping continues at pace. It seems to involve sweeping asylum seekers offshore to a near neighbour. The Prime Minister drew fire from all sides and an egg from a protester in Perth. She also managed to scramble her message on just where she'd like to put the boat people.

JULIA GILLARD, PRIME MINISTER (TUESDAY): In recent days I have discussed with President Jose Ramos-Horta of East Timor the possibility of establishing a regional processing centre.

JOSE RAMOS-HORTA, EAST TIMOR PRESIDENT (TUESDAY): I wouldn't want Timor-Leste to become an island prison for displaced persons fleeing depravation, fleeing violence.

SENATOR BOB BROWN, GREENS LEADER (THURSDAY): It's pretty appalling that the leader of the richest nation in our region, Australia, is asking the leaders of the poorest nation in our region, East Timor, to take the burden of processing asylum seekers in our region.

JULIA GILLARD (THURSDAY): But this is a dialogue that will happen more broadly than East Timor. It will happen across the region.

PAUL BONGIORNO: Tony Abbott came up with a suite of harsher measures of his own.

TONY ABBOTT, OPPOSITION LEADER (TUESDAY): You have got to be tough to protect our borders and this Government is not tough enough to do it.

SCOTT MORRISON, SHADOW MINISTER FOR IMMIGRATION (MONDAY): And they now want the Australian people to believe, on the eve of an election, that they've had some sort of midnight conversion.

PAUL BONGIORNO: Shadow Immigration Minister, Scott Morrison is a guest. Later, Human Rights Advocate, Julian Burnside joins us. First, what the Nation's papers are reporting this Sunday, 11 July. The ‘Sun Herald’ leads with "We'll fight on: PM", as Julia Gillard attended the funeral of our 16th casualty in Afghanistan, news came in of our 17th soldier to fall, Private Nathan Bewes of Sydney. The Prime Minister says Australians will understand our continuing determination. The ‘Sunday Age' carries the story "Gillard to pursue East Timor", despite that country's parliament planning to send a strong message of protest about the regional refugee processing centre. The Prime Minister says she is determined to pursue with determination dialogue with that country. The Sunday Telegraph' has “Our economy, the brutal truth”. A reader poll shows 48% of people nationally say they are worse off now than they were at the last election in 2007. And The ‘Sunday Mail' in Adelaide says “Election call at any moment” and reports the Prime Minister slipped quietly into the City of Churches to have a family reunion dinner with her parents and sister last night. Welcome back to the program, Scott Morrison. Good morning, Mr Morrison.

SCOTT MORRISON, SHADOW MINISTER FOR IMMIGRATION: Good morning, Paul.

PAUL BONGIORNO: It's sad news of our 17th casualty in Afghanistan. It does ram home that Afghanistan is a war zone, it's a brutal place. Can you blame Afghanis for fleeing?

SCOTT MORRISON: First of all, let me say the Coalition and I are terribly saddened at the loss of Private Nathan Bewes. This is a terrible tragedy. It’s our 17th tragedy and our thoughts are obviously with the families at this time, but not just with those who have fallen, but those who have people serving there as well. It would just be one of those sick feelings in the stomach this morning and last night and our thoughts are with them. This is true - Afghanistan has 1,500 Australian troops serving there today. We have 400 troops in East Timor serving today, and around the world, sadly, there are places that are falling apart and trying to be put back together again. That's our task and that’s the task that the Coalition is committed to and I think there's a bipartisan commitment to that.

PAUL BONGIORNO: So people fleeing persecution, people fleeing for their lives is something we accept. Australia is a safe haven from that point of view.

SCOTT MORRISON: There's been people fleeing persecution for centuries. In the last 10-15 years that's always been the case. It's always been the case over a longer period of time. It's not a question of whether people are fleeing persecution; it’s a question of what our measures are and how we’re going to allow people to come to this country and who we're going to be able to help. We helped 13,750 people in this program of refugee and humanitarian assistance. We always have. We did under our government and the same is true under this government. It's not a question of whether we want to support refugees, it's a question of how we are going to do that, the process by which you do it, whether it's fair, whether it’s humane, and whether it has the opportunity to ensure we are in control of our own sovereignty.

PAUL BONGIORNO: Election fever is in the air. Within 8-10 weeks, you could be the next Minister for Immigration, you could be in charge of the refugee program. Can we get it straight this morning, is Nauru the offshore detention centre, processing centre, that the Opposition would turn to?

SCOTT MORRISON: As we have always said, we are in Opposition. It's inappropriate for Opposition to seek to have negotiations with other governments. We haven't made the same mistake that Julia Gillard has naively made by going out there.

PAUL BONGIORNO: Can I put it to you this way - on coming to government, will your first priority be to return to the Pacific solution in the same way as John Howard, and reactivate Nauru. It's on offer.

SCOTT MORRISON: I can give this commitment and that is we'll implement the policy that we’ve announced…

PAUL BONGIORNO: Do you have a time line?

SCOTT MORRISON: ..to have offshore processing in a third country and people have the assurance we will do that because that is exactly what we did last time.

PAUL BONGIORNO: Tony Abbott pointed out that Alexander Downer and John Howard were able to do it within nine weeks. Is that your timeline?

SCOTT MORRISON: We'll deal with the timeframe that we’re presented if we’re elected. You make a good point. Within 10 days of John Howard announcing that there'd be offshore processing in a third country, there was a formal agreement with Nauru and he said Nauru at the time and within 19 days of that announcement, it was open for business. That's what you do when you’re in government. That was our record. So we look forward to seeing what this government achieves.

PAUL BONGIORNO: Let's take the Howard template. Would you charge any asylum seekers sent to Nauru for being sent there? In other words, would you charge them rental?

SCOTT MORRISON: No, I am not quite sure what the point is, Paul.

PAUL BONGIORNO: The point was that the Howard Government actually charged asylum seekers to be kept in detention. Is that your intention?

SCOTT MORRISON: We have made no announcement that we'd be restoring the detention debt policy.

PAUL BONGIORNO: So your policy won't be a carbon copy of John Howard's?

SCOTT MORRISON: Our policy has evolved since we were last in government. The other day we announced measures to ensure that those who were known to throw away their documentation on the way here and presumed upon Australia for refugee status would have a presumption against them. We'd actually put tougher controls there to protect the integrity of deciding who is a refugee. Australians want to support refugees, but they want to be sure that those who are given the tick are legitimate refugees and we won't allow a ‘tick and flick’ approach.

PAUL BONGIORNO: There is no doubt deterrence is a key measure for you and indeed for the government here. Isn’t this just a nice word for ‘cruelty’? If we go back to the Nauru situation, the government of Nauru, with the last asylum seeker there had to say to Australia, “we are going to charge you $100,000 a month unless you take this guy off the island”.

SCOTT MORRISON: As I said, detention debt policy is not our policy at this election. There's nothing humane about a policy which has had 600-800 people seek to come here. There’s nothing humane about a policy which has seen 170 people drown on their way here and over 500 children who have made their way here under the Labor Government's policies, and are now being detained.

PAUL BONGIORNO: During the week, Tony Abbott described the boat arrivals of the past three years as an “invasion”. This is how Julia Gillard framed it.

JULIA GILLARD (TUESDAY): Even if all of those who arrived in unauthorised boats were found to be refugees, which they will not, they would still be only 1.6% of all migrants to Australia.

PAUL BONGIORNO: Well Mr Morrison, isn't the Opposition playing on the fears of Australians?

SCOTT MORRISON: No, absolutely not. The Coalition has always had a consistent view and policy on this matter, and a consistent record of implementing policy in this area. We are not new arrivals on this debate. It's always been a strong part of the things we stand for. It's the Government, it’s Julia Gillard who has flipped and flopped. In 2002, she said she supported John Howard's policy of turning back boats.

PAUL BONGIORNO: But he described it as an invasion. Isn’t that playing on people’s fears?

SCOTT MORRISON: No, Tony did not say that. He said ‘you are at risk of putting Australia in a situation where it's open’...

PAUL BONGIORNO: He said peaceful invasion.

SCOTT MORRISON: I know he did… what he said was that we were open to the prospect of that, if you were to go down that path. He never actually used that phrase the way you have outlined it. What he has said is that when you allow others to make decisions about who comes to the country, people smugglers, and those of that nature, then you are removing the sovereignty of Australia's decision and if you are just going to allow people to come and presume upon you, rather than insisting on an orderly process, which is what our policies are about, then you do open yourselves up and that's not something that we want to see happen.

PAUL BONGIORNO: Coming up when we’re joined by the panel - downsizing a big Australia. How do you shrink the population? And one of the lions of the Labor Party, Defence Minister John Faulkner, has announced he is quitting the ministry, but at the Prime Minister’s insistence, he's staying in the Senate.

REPORTER: Would you accept the position of President of the Senate?

SENATOR JOHN FAULKNER, MINISTER FOR DEFENCE (WEDNESDAY): No. (LAUGHTER) Nice of you to offer it, but...

PAUL BONGIORNO: You are on 'Meet The Press', with Shadow Immigration Minister, Scott Morrison and welcome to the panel, Steve Lewis from News Limited and Michelle Grattan from 'The Age'. Good morning, Steve and Michelle. Julia Gillard has ditched aspirations for a ‘big Australia’. She wants a ‘sustainable Australia’ that involves planning for better services and amenities and placing people where they are needed.
JULIA GILLARD (TUESDAY): In many faster growing parts of A
ustralia, like Western Sydney, south-east Queensland, and the growth corridors of my own electorate in Melbourne's west, Wyndham and Melton, people would laugh at you if you told them that population growth was intended to improve living standards. People in these communities are on the front-line of our population increase and they know that bigger isn't necessarily better.

PAUL BONGIORNO: Michelle Grattan.

MICHELLE GRATTAN, THE AGE: Mr Morrison, surely over the decades the Liberals have argued that immigration is one of the mechanisms to getting a stronger and more prosperous Australia. Why are you deserting that fundamentally sound argument at this point?

SCOTT MORRISON: There are three things that deliver it. There is productivity, there’s participation and there is population. The thing that has emerged over recent years is the inadequacy of our infrastructure and services and systems to actually cope with the rate of growth. I mean, we are now at the rate of population growth over the 2%. Now, during the course of our term of government, that was running at about 1.35%, 1.4. At current rates of net overseas migration, we’re going to have a population by 2050 of over 42 million people. We made the observation earlier in the year that that was an unsustainable rate of growth and we were accused by the government, Julia Gillard in particular, of being everything from an economic vandal to racism.

MICHELLE GRATTAN: In that debate earlier in the year, it was a bit confusing as to how much you would cut the immigration intake by. Can you clarify today that point?

SCOTT MORRISON: Well, unlike the Government, who’s just appointed two committees and changed nothing, even with a change of leader on this issue, what we’ve committed to is to stay within what we call “guard rails of population growth” and those guard rails will be a percentage rate of population growth that we can sustainably proceed at and they would be set by the Productivity Commission and we would call it the Productivity and Sustainability Commission and we would commit to keep our program within those guard rails. That’s a clear commitment. What we have from the Government and from Tony Burke and from the Prime Minister is nothing more than two committees and a grab for the TV news. There's no change to their policy. They might change their language, but there is no change to policy under Julia Gillard. We are still heading for 42 million.

STEVE LEWIS, NEWS LIMITED: Mr Morrison, can you this morning outline to us where the cuts would come to the immigration program.

SCOTT MORRISON: It's not possible to do that from Opposition without access to the information the government has access to.

STEVE LEWIS: Don't voters have a right before the election to find out from the Coalition, you made a big deal about this issue, for you to outline where those cuts should come?

SCOTT MORRISON: How large those cuts would need to be, and how wide they would need to be will be a function of any program we would inherit. Let's make a couple of points about what’s been growing the population – it hasn’t been the blowout in skills migration. We have committed to having two-thirds of our permanent immigration program to be on skills migration. Where we’ve had the massive explosion in population has been in the temporary area and as the Government knows, and as Julia Gillard knows, the area where it has blown out largely has been in the student program where the Baird report showed there'd been rorts and abuses.

MICHELLE GRATTAN: That's going down already though.

SCOTT MORRISON: The Government hasn't actually said how much it's going to go down, and what is going to be done with this massive pipeline of students who are now in the system who have been part - many of whom have been part of that sort of dodgy program, that has been allowed to continue under this government and get to record levels. Now, we need to take assessment on that, and we'll make decisions as we go forward. We have committed absolutely to a skilled migration, permanent intake of two-thirds.

PAUL BONGIORNO: During the week, Tony Abbott attacked Kevin Rudd for failing to turn the boats around as promised. His own policy not quite so robust either.

TONY ABBOTT (TUESDAY): Our policy involves turning around boats, where this can safely and practically be done.

STEVE LEWIS: Mr Morrison, isn't it an impractical solution to try to turn the boats around wouldn’t you be putting the lives of Australian sailors and others at risk as well?

SCOTT MORRISON: Let's go over the history. When we were in government, we did it. We did it, the government tells us on seven occasions. On four occasions in 2001, we did it and those boats were taken back and were escorted back within a safe distance of the ports in Indonesia. That had the effect of sending a message to people smugglers, which was incredibly effective, and the person that agreed with it most was Julia Gillard.

MICHELLE GRATTAN: But Indonesia won’t accept those boats now.

SCOTT MORRISON: Look, I wouldn't blame Indonesia for not doing anything with this Government at the moment, when they verbal the Bali process on this mythical regional solution for asylum seekers, when they verbal other nations around the region, when they engage in a process where they say they are going to do something, where they say they are going to talk to Indonesia before they make major announcements.

MICHELLE GRATTAN: Are you saying you could get them to accept those boats?

SCOTT MORRISON: If you address the things on our side of the fence, if you deal with the ‘sugar’ as President Yudhoyono used to refer to it, and he still does I’m sure, of what happens with our policies, permanent residency for example, we need to deal with things on our side of the fence. That is what this Government isn’t doing and that, I think, is really destroying our credibility as having a serious policy that will address the flow of people that are coming through South East Asia.

STEVE LEWIS: Aren't you just tapping in to the politics of fear with this issue, Mr Morrison? Aren’t you really, as many would say the Coalition did in 2001?

SCOTT MORRISON: I notice the government used to accuse us of this as well, but the fact is we’ve always had this view, Steve. We’ve always had this view. We’ve always implemented these views in government. The reason we are talking about this issue today is that this Government's policies have failed. We wouldn't be having this conversation if 144 boats hadn’t turned up. We wouldn't be having this conversation if there were more than 4,000 people in detention in places from Leonora and the re-opening of the Curtin Detention Centre and people in motels and hotels. This Government’s asylum policy has been an absolute train wreck and now they are taking that into the international stage and making themselves look like an embarrassment because they are embarrassing themselves on this issue.

MICHELLE GRATTAN: Do you think there's grounds for overhauling the UN Convention on refugees, which was a post-war convention, dealing with, really, quite different circumstances? Is it still relevant to Australia? Should we be pressing for change?

SCOTT MORRISON: I think the objectives of the convention obviously remain important. You are right, Michelle. This was a document drawn up in a very different world. I think it's important that the Convention does not become a tool for people smugglers to impose their clients on nations in a way that is unhelpful for the way those nations want to run their own immigration programs. We would always be party to a constructive conversation about how the Convention can be improved, because the Convention is an old document. We were in the first batch of signatories, the Menzies Government were the ones who signed it.

PAUL BONGIORNO: Are you tempted to want to ditch it?

SCOTT MORRISON: No, of course not. We are committed to the principles of that Convention and as I said, as a Liberal Government, we were the ones who signed up to it but it is an old document and it was constructed in a very different world. Today's people smugglers are not what they were in the 1950s. Today, they are criminals, they are gangs who are exploiting people, putting their lives at risk and people are drowning at sea and we want to stop it.

PAUL BONGIORNO: Thank you very much for being with us today, Scott Morrison.

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