Australians want to know: will the Labor Government stop asylum seekers arriving by plane? And will they treat this problem with urgency?
Labor has been talking about asylum seekers arriving by plane since 2019 and they sat on the Nixon Review for seven months before announcing a response.
Australians will by cynical that Labor is serious about addressing this problem.
Under this Labor Government:
• 23,822 asylum seekers arrived by plane and lodged a protection claim in Australia.
• The number of monthly asylum seeker claims is trending upwards: just 726 asylum claims were lodged in April 2022 before the election, but in the last three months under Labor 1762, 1940 and 2164 asylum claims were lodged.
• The total number of asylum seekers in Australia has grown to more than 105,000.
• Just 167 failed asylum seekers have been deported.
Labor needs to answer these questions about the asylum seekers arriving on their watch:
• How fast will Labor process asylum claims to deter non-genuine applicants?
• When will the number of asylum seekers in Australia start to fall?
• Labor waited seven months to respond to the Nixon Review, how long before they take action on this problem?
• What is Labor doing about unscrupulous lawyers and migration agents providing shadow advice to non-genuine asylum seekers?
• Will Labor deport more failed asylum seekers? Labor has deported just 2,161 criminals and failed asylum seekers in a year compared to 6,352 deportations a year under the Coalition (average 2013-2019).
• Does Labor even know where the failed 75,430 asylum seekers are living in Australia?
If blaming others actually solved problems, then life in Australia under this Labor Government would be trouble free.
But that’s not how responsibility works. Labor sat on an important review so they could use it as a distraction from the Voice.
Cracking down on criminals and dodgy asylum seekers is hard work and it will be unpopular with some Labor supporters but it’s the right thing to do. This is a test for Labor.
Remember what Kristina Keneally had to say about the issue, when Labor was all talk and no responsibility:
• “Criminal syndicates, people smugglers, have shifted their business model from boats to planes. They're trafficking people here,” 8 October 2019.
• “This is the development of an economic model that relies on exploited and low-paid workers, and it is a misuse, it is an abuse, of our asylum-seeking process,” 9 October 2019.
• “If a government is serious about stopping a flow of people coming to Australia, then it would be doing something about airplane arrivals,” 6 September 2019.