Cameron Thompson (Blair, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Yes, a one-armed bandit. He was not one-armed—he had two arms and one of those arms was hanging onto a whole bunch of gold. What was the Labor Party’s response to that? Mr Deputy Speaker, I submit that, if you were to properly analyse that, you could see the possibility of a whole lot of horrors coming out of that incident. If a human being could crawl onto an aircraft and conduct an activity like that, then who knows how many bombs might be able to be put, or what sort of sabotage or what other kind of activity might be able to be got up to, in the belly of an aircraft anywhere in Australia. In fact, you could say a properly-functioning government considering such an activity might start to anticipate that a coordinated series of attacks on aircraft could occur and that that might have an outcome. If you wanted to be wise in hindsight, you could say that, but I believe that the member for Brisbane and the opposition in general are now trying to be too clever by half and are taking the obvious course of saying, ‘You are being too soft,’ and, if the opportunity presents itself, no doubt they would also say that the government is being too hard in its responses. They really are just presenting an argument for argument’s sake, and if you want to do that then let us go back and consider what you the Labor Party did in response to that great gold heist. What was the outcome of that? Stuff all!

The member for Brisbane was saying that we are not X-raying every single bag going by. They certainly did not X-ray those boxes that contained the human beings that were hopping on the planes and stealing the gold. It really is quite incredible that they—

See this speech in context