Speeches and Transcripts

Transcript - 6PR Mornings

Wednesday 9th May 2012

SUBJECT: Another Labor budget delivers another blow out of $1.7 billion for taxpayers on illegal boats

EandOE

PAUL MURRAY:
I’m joined now by the Scott Morrison, the Opposition’s immigration spokesman. Good morning Scott.

MORRISON:
Good morning Paul.

MURRAY:
So what does it show in terms of this blow out?

Well next financial year Australians are going to pay $1.1 million extra per day for the cost of managing asylum seekers compared to what Wayne Swan said a year ago. The cumulative blow outs now in the budget are $4.7 billion. This is a government that has lost control of our borders and lost control of our budget. In fact the only surplus this government has delivered is for the people smugglers who continue to make profits as boats continue to arrive.

MURRAY:
That $4.7 billion goes back to when Labor came to power back in 2007?

MORRISON:
From the 2009/10 budget is when we started to see the cost increase. When we lost office the budget for this was just $85 million a year and over four years it cost around $450 million. Those figures today are that it is costing us over $1 billion a year and over the full four year forward estimates it is costing us just under $4 billion a year. So the blow out is just ridiculous and this year if they just left the measures in place that the Howard Government had and they inherited there would have been around $3.3 billion extra, to not have the debt or to put on the priorities for infrastructure and other things the country needs. That is the cost of Labor’s border failures.

MURRAY:
You sent us a graph this morning showing the number of people arriving on boats illegally, I mean people claiming asylum from 1989/90 right up to now and it is interesting that there was a spike from 1999 to 2002 and then from 2002 through to 2007 it is running at 0, 82, 0, 61, 133, 25 and then whammo up it goes to over 5,600 a year.

MORRISON:
The three biggest years we have ever had for illegal boat arrivals have been the last three years including this financial year. We had more people turn up on boats on Monday than in the last six years of the Howard Government and that is all down to one thing – they just changed the measures that were working when they came into government and they continue to refuse to acknowledge that, continue to refuse to put them back. Yesterday Chris Bowen was blaming these blow outs on the coalition. I mean, give me a break. The guy has just simply given up putting up any sort of form of credible defence for what is the indefensible when it comes to this government’s failures.

MURRAY:
Well they blame you because you wouldn’t agree to the Malaysia Solution but my memory is they didn’t actually put it to a vote in the Parliament.

MORRISON:
Well they actually voted against having a vote in the Parliament, even worse, when we last sat before the budget session. They just want the Malaysian flop out there as an excuse to do nothing and to continue to adopt the Greens policy. We now have their ‘granny flat solutio’n which we were able to expose last week which they didn’t want to tell anyone about. That combined with community release and bridging visas that were announced last week have led to another big surge in arrivals and that is what is driving these costs. They had a choice, either go with our policies and put them back or they could go and cuddle up to the Greens as they always do and that is what they did and this is the result.

MURRAY:
Just give the listeners an idea, because we have been talking this morning about the $33.6 billion worth of cuts that the government is going to have to institute to get to surplus. Just give us an idea in this year and the next year the extra money that Wayne Swan has had to put into the budget to meet the blow out in asylum seekers.

MORRISON:
Well the blow out for next year was around $420 million. That is next year’s . So next year taxpayers are going to be paying an extra $1.1 million a day to cover just the blow out but if you take it back to the original figures, I mean as I said earlier, it was costing us just $85 million a year, it is now costing us $1.2 billion a year because of these failures. So it is a ten fold increase. The figures are just staggering when you think about it and they were just so unnecessary to come to this point if they just swallowed their pride, admit they got it wrong years ago and just put the Howard measures back in place.

MURRAY:
In terms of the stand off between the Opposition and the government is there any movement at all between the two parties on ending the stalemate and coming up with something realistic?

MORRISON:
Well the government just refuses to restore our policies and they want us to embrace their failures…

MURRAY:
They have actually embraced a fair bit of it, offshore processing etc. They were diametrically opposed to that in Opposition.

MORRISON:
But they had this Malaysian joke they wanted us to support. We are not in the business of supporting failed policies. If they want their Malaysian people swap they should go to the Greens, make it a matter of confidence for their government and bring it back into the Parliament but they refuse to do that, they don’t want to do that, they just want to use it as an excuse to do nothing. So the only way this is going to change Paul is with an election. That is the only way now that we can get the policies back that worked. We have stood by those policies consistently for a decade. This government has had every position on them imaginable but the one thing they have never done is implement them.

MURRAY:
Good to talk to you, thanks Scott.

MORRISON:
Thanks Paul.

END

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