Madam Speaker, I never actually said that we would turn the boats away. What I said was that if the boats do arrive on our shore, we would detain them for over a year and we would prevent them from sponsoring their kids into Canada. They will stay in Europe and it will be at least eight years before they can get into Canada. God knows what will happen to them by that time.
The Australian Human Rights Commission, an organization created by Parliament, conducted a national inquiry into children in immigration detention and found that the children in Australian immigration detention centres had suffered numerous and repeated breaches of their human rights.
Far from deterring people, depriving refugees of their right to family reunification appears to have caused some people to arrive by boat, as later boats brought their wives and children of refugees in Australia into Australia because they were not able to bring in their families through legal channels. We in fact had more boats showing up in Australia because of those kinds of wrong policies, and certainly we--