Warren Truss (Wide Bay, National Party, Minister for Transport and Regional Services) Share this | Hansard source

The honourable member for Brisbane has trotted out all of the old stories and all of the old discredited arguments without providing any plan or vision for how in fact Australia can handle its airport and other security obligations in any better way. I took the opportunity to read the Labor Party policy statement on airport security before the last election and there is not a single thing in that policy that we have not already completed and in fact exceeded. The reality is that Labor has no new plans, no new ideas and no new reasonable assessments and approaches to these issues.

I have always had a high regard for the member for Brisbane. We came into parliament together and I think he has generally been a decent sort of a guy. I have been a bit disappointed lately, however, because, even when he has been told that something that he has said may have been an inadvertent error, he has gone back and repeated it again and again, and in reality therefore has perpetrated an attitude of pathetic scaremongering without any substance. One of the worst examples of this has been his repeated statement that Australia does not check the baggage of international passengers.

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