Kevin Rudd has no moral authority on boats: Tim Wilson

Peter Dutton challenges Bill Shorten to say whether he stands with government on border protection, or with Kevin Rudd.

Peter Dutton. Picture: Adam Taylor

Immigration Minister Peter Dutton has challenged Bill Shorten to tell Australians whether he stands with the government on border protection, or with former Labor prime minister Kevin Rudd.

Mr Rudd today attacked the Turnbull government’s “lifetime ban” on asylum seekers who are settled in a third country returning to Australia, saying the policy is “designed to throw red meat at the right, including the Hansonite insurgency, and to grovel to the broad politics of xenophobia”.

In an opinion piece published in Fairfax Media, Mr Rudd accused Malcolm Turnbull of trying to appease “thugs like Abbott, Dutton, Abetz and Andrews”.

Mr Dutton said Mr Shorten had conspicuously failed to endorse Mr Rudd’s words or comment in relation to them during a doorstop earlier today.

“Mr Shorten needs to say to the Australian public whether or not he stands with the government on this important issue, and indeed with the Australian people, or whether he stands with Mr Rudd and the people smugglers that Mr Rudd put into business,” he said.

“Bill Shorten stabbed Kevin Rudd in the back and it seems to me today that Mr Rudd is trying to return the favour to Mr Shorten, because by highlighting the Rudd period of disaster when he was prime minister is to shine a light on the fact that 1,200 people drowned at sea, that 50,000 people on 800 boats arrived, and that Labor had completely lost control of our borders.

“What we saw in the run-up to the last election was, yes, Mr Shorten saying, just like Mr Rudd did in the run-up to the 2007 election, that Labor would be a carbon copy of the Coalition when it came to border protection, but it was demonstrated during the course of the election campaign, with the division within Labor, that they have no capacity to deliver on this policy.

“We are not going to hand control of our borders back to people smugglers and we are not going to take advice from Kevin Rudd, who, from the lofty heights of his apartment in New York, somehow wants to give us a lecture on how to control Australia’s borders.”

Reflecting on Mr Rudd dubbing him a “thug”, Mr Dutton said the former prime minister’s language had become more polite in recent times.

“Perhaps he’s sombred a little bit in his old age,” he said.

“I wasn’t called a rat fornicator or anything else he might have called people in the past. Credit to Mr Rudd for improving his vocab since then.”

Mr Shorten accused Mr Turnbull of trying to appease “the right wing of his party and some of the more extreme right wing views in the Senate” with its lifetime ban.

“My initial reaction when I heard about this latest effort by the government to look tough was that the idea just seemed ridiculous,” he said.

“On one hand Labor’s committed to stopping people smugglers and we’ll work with the government on sensible policies, but this is a ridiculous overreach.

“What they’re saying someone who’s an American citizen or a Canadian citizen in forty years time because they were once a refugee couldn’t even visit Australia on a tourism visa. It doesn’t make sense.”

Mr Shorten accused the government of playing politics to distract from the fact that a couple of thousand people remain in semi-indefinite detention on Nauru and Manus Island.

“What they’re trying to do is they’re pressing the ‘look over here’ button to look tough on refugees to distract from the government’s instability,” he said.

Mr Dutton said the lifetime ban played an important role in achieving the government’s aim of getting further agreements with third countries to resettle refugees currently on Manus Island and Nauru.

“We have been able to return hundreds of people back to their country of origin, or, in some case, to third countries,” he said.

“We are down to the hardest of cases, where people are negotiating with us, we’re talking through individual cases, so their circumstances, the fact that they’ve paid a people smuggle to come to Australia.

“We’re providing financial support, assistance around helping people re-establish their lives in their country of origin, talking about employment, talking about housing, talking about ways in which we can help people restart their lives. “The show stopper, though, comes when they say, ‘Well, look, I’m interested in all of that, and, yes, hundreds of people before me have taken that option, but I’m reading these Facebook messages and these tweets and I’m reading in certain parts of the Australian media that a deal will be done eventually for you to come to Australia, and eventually just hold out, because the Australian government will fold and you’ll come to this country’.”

Mr Dutton said there was an imperative in the legislation the government was putting forward which made clear that Australian border protection policy would not change.

“We are not going to allow people to come to this country by boat to settle permanently in this country,” he said.

“The second point to make is in relation to third country arrangements, and I have been consistent in what I’ve said and I’ll repeat it again today: that is that the government has ongoing discussions with a number of countries, and over a long period of time we have been negotiating with a number of nations.

“I do want to get people off Nauru and Manus. I have been very clear about that. I wanted to get children out ofdetention. I’ve got children out of detention. I wanted to make sure that the boats remain stopped. They have remained stopped. So, we are in a position of strength to act and negotiate with third countries.

“I’m not going to have any outcome that we put in place undermined by people coming back to our country through a separate visa process.”

Mr Dutton said any future immigration minister would have the power, as he does now, to override the life ban for individual cases.

“Circumstances can be contemplated and considered, and we can work with those particular cases,” he said.

Asked whether Australia was looking at doing a deal with prospective third countries involving a refugee swap, Mr Dutton declined to rule any particular country in or our.

“I don’t want to preempt any decision or announcement,” he said.

“I want to confirm to you that we are working to an outcome and I don’t want that outcome undermined.

Mr Dutton also declined to comment on a timeline, when asked whether an arrangement would be in place before Christmas.

“If there is an arrangement arrived at, it will quickly be scuttled if the people smugglers can say, ‘Look, we’ve found a way around it’,” he said.

Mr Dutton said the parliament should deal with the government’s lifetime ban legislation as quickly as possible.

“If the Labor Party think this is going to be shoved off to some committee so that they don’t have to make a decision, well, I think that’s irresponsible and it would show an ultimate failure of Mr Shorten’s leadership,” he said.

“It should be dealt with within days, and Mr Shorten needs to come out and tell us that he will support this bill.

“We will provide the briefings and the detail to Mr Shorten in the normal course of events, as we would, and as we have done in past practices as was the practice when Labor was in governent.

“Bill Shorten needs to stand up to the left of his party, this week. He can’t allow this to continue.”

Mr Dutton, who was speaking in Canberra, was asked about a protest at his electorate office in Brisbane earlier.

“I would ask you to carefully have a look at who the people are that were up on the roof,” he said.

“There’s one with links to the Labor Party, in fact, I’m advised heavily involved in the Young Labor movement, despite her denials to the contrary.

“Again, Mr Shorten needs to come out today to condemn these actions. They’re dangerous.

“As the local police pointed out, there were more important jobs queuing up, that they needed to go to, to attend to local families and businesses that needed the police attendance, and yet the police resources and the fire brigade resources are tied up at my office.”

Rudd ‘has no moral authority’

Liberal MP Tim Wilson has accused Labor and former prime minister Kevin Rudd of returning to the same language Mr Rudd used in 2007 when he watered down Australia’s border protection policies.

Mr Rudd today attacked Malcolm Turnbull for the government’s “lifetime ban” on asylum seekers who are settled in a third country returning to Australia, saying the policy is “designed to throw red meat at the right, including the Hansonite insurgency, and to grovel to the broad politics of xenophobia”.

In an opinion piece published in Fairfax Media, Mr Rudd accuses Mr Turnbull of trying to appease “thugs like Abbott, Dutton, Abetz and Andrews”.

Mr Wilson said Mr Rudd was using the same language he had used in 2007 which led to 50,000 people arriving on 800 boats and 1200 dying at sea.

“I think Kevin Rudd’s intervention in this is truly extraordinary,” Mr Wilson said on Sky.

Appearing on a Sky News panel with Labor MP and former Rudd staffer Peter Khalil, Mr Wilson said; “On the panel today we have the man who was the national security adviser to Kevin Rudd, the man who was actually recommending the watering down of Australia’s national security laws that lead to these horrific consequences and then people having to be held in long term detention, and when we have Kevin Rudd and Peter Khalil all talking from the same talking points, which is to undermine a strong border protection regime for Australia, that has negative humanitarian consequences,” Mr Wilson said.

“These people have no moral authority and they’re actually going further and undermining Australia’s national border protection regime.

“This can’t be allowed to stand. They should look at the legislation, support the legislation, and make sure that Australia’s borders are secure.”

Mr Wilson said third-country resettlement had been the policy of the Australian government since Kevin Rudd announced it, following Labor’s border protection policy reversal in 2013.

“It’s quite rich to suggest that there’s something lacking in morality when it’s the policy that Kevin Rudd announced,” he said.

Mr Khalil said Labor had not seen the government’s proposed legislation, but that the lifetime ban announcement was “ridiculous” and a “sop to Pauline Hanson”.

“It is reaching out to the lowest common denominator and the darker angels in the Australian psyche,” he said.

“Let’s see the details. If there is a broader multilateral solution here, where are the details of that?”

“If Tim talks about moral authority, I’ve said that this has been a morally bankrupt announcement, because there’s no detail around it, and if you’re talking about morality, how are you supposed to explain that any refugee that has been on Manus or Nauru, becomes a US citizen, becomes the head of a multinational or a tech company, comes to visit Australia in ten years’ time and is barred.”

Liberal backbencher Eric Abetz said Mr Rudd’s intervention was “akin to the arsonist returning to the scene of the crime”.

“Despite Kevin Rudd’s commitment before the 2007 election to implement the Howard government’s border protection policies, they opened our borders which saw a $10 billion budget blowout, the opening of 17 detention centres, more than 1,000 men, women and children drown at sea and more than 2,000 children in detention,” he said.

“Kevin Rudd created the mess and now he wants to help send a message to criminal people smugglers that they should be back in business.

“Under Mr Rudd, Australia lost control of its borders and we saw more than a thousand men, women and children drown at sea as well as a massive expansion to our detention centre network.

“Instead of lecturing the Government about its policy which has achieved the right policy settings right, Mr Rudd should apologise for the irresponsible policy that he implemented.”

Labor defence spokesman Richard Marles, who previously had the immigration portfolio, said Mr Rudd’s article was an “important contribution”.

“There’s much in Kevin’s piece that I think a lot of Australians will find appealing,” he told Sky News.

“Kevin obviously comes to this from some authority in terms of the role that he plays in his term in government, both the first term and indeed negotiating the resettlement arrangement with PNG in 2013, so I think it’s a useful contribution.”

Mr Marles said that Mr Rudd’s reinstatement of offshore processing in 2013 had played a key role in ending the journey between Java and Christmas Island.

“In fact it more than any other decision of an Australian government has been the major factor in seeing the reduction of a flow of asylum seeker vessels, and as a result a reduction in the drownings at sea, but Kevin certainly didn’t envisage that there would be the same people on Manus Island three years later and that resettlement would have been an abject failure on the part of the Coalition,” he said.

“Really the point that Kevin makes which is absolutely right, is that this government has failed to find resettlement options for those on Manus and indeed those on Nauru.”