Michael Keenan (Stirling, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Justice, Customs and Border Protection) Share this | Hansard source

The Minister for Immigration and Citizenship has just had 15 minutes to outline to the parliament some of the arrangements that he believes need to be put in place for the people who are sent to Malaysia and to answer all of the questions that the opposition and many others in the community have asked—legitimate quest­ions about what the fate of people who are transferred from Australia to Malaysia is going to be if this deal is actually ever concluded by this government. He was not able to touch on or answer how people who are sent to Malaysia will sustain themselves. He was not able to answer whether the children who are sent there will go to school. He was not able to answer any of the basic questions about the protection of their human rights. He came in and he gave his usual rant. He professed that he was not obsessed with the opposition spokesman for immigration, the member for Cook, and then proceeded for 15 minutes to talk exclusively about the member for Cook. There is probably a therapist he could call for that, but perhaps he would be best off concentrating on his portfolio and explaining to the Australian people what is going to happen if this Malaysia deal ever does come to pass.

Amongst Labor's extensive failures in their four years in government, border protection is surely one of the most disastrous. On coming to office, they found themselves with a situation where the people-smuggling trade had been destroyed, there were four people within our detention network who had come here illegally by boat, and the administration of that detention network was costing the Australian public millions and not billions. But, within the space of four years, they have managed to push the people smugglers back into business, they have cost taxpayers literally billions of extra dollars, they have trashed any semblance of a coherent regional foreign policy and they are currently presiding over the essential collapse of our immigration detention network. Things have been so bad in border protection that Julia Gillard was forced to knife Kevin Rudd—

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