Julia Gillard (Lalor, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the opposition leader for his question. Before directly dealing with his question, perhaps I should just place a little bit of context on the record here. Of course, we know we live in a world where there is movement of people around the globe. I think we would all prefer to live in a world where there was no war or no persecution and no-one moved. But the truth is that each year of the last 20 years in this country people have arrived here by boat. This happened under the Howard government. For example, from 1998 to 2001 under the Howard government—

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