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

Do not wish that on the member for Indi, Mr Deputy Speaker! We have just heard everything that is wrong with the Gillard government. The minister who is actually responsible for doing something about these problems got up for 15 minutes and did nothing more than rant about the opposition's policies. It is not leadership when all you can do is complain about the opposition when you have completely failed to control our borders and when Labor's border protection failures are, without a doubt, their most significant policy failure in the life of this parliament.

This MPI today focuses on the very significant implications for our budget and the significant national security implications of Labor's border protection failures. I want to particularly focus on the national security dimensions, given that the member for Cook has already outlined some of the budgetary problems that are associated with this failure. Firstly, I want to talk about what this is doing to our national security establishment. The national security agencies are the agencies that are tasked with cleaning up Labor's mess. We have got the wrong immigration policies. That is encouraging people smuggling and it is encouraging people to take this dangerous journey, and the national security agencies are the ones that are forced to deal with the consequences. Secondly, I want to talk about what happens when you lose control over who comes here and the fact that undesirable people will seek to take advantage of that.

We have been talking in question time today about ASIO and the cuts that ASIO have had to their budget. This has been confirmed to the opposition by government responses to Senate estimates questions. ASIO have had significant cuts in the life of this government, both the Rudd and the Gillard governments. By this stage they were supposed to have 1,860 people. That was the goal of the Howard government, which was adopted by the Rudd government and was recently abandoned by the Gillard government, who have frozen ASIO staffing at 1,730. This is occurring at a time when ASIO are being asked to make security assessments on the upwards of 42,000 people who have arrived here courtesy of a people smuggler. They have been asked to conduct 34,000 security assessments, and the drain on their resources is enormous.

When people arrive here on a people-smuggling boat the chances of them having identity documentation are very slim, because they are told by the people smugglers to destroy it. So I think people in this chamber can appreciate how difficult it would be to properly establish somebody's identity. In fact, with the resources at their disposal, it is impossible for them to do a comprehensive security assessment on the sheer volume of people who are arriving here, so they do what is called a light-touch assessment. That means that you come in and you say to the Australian authorities, 'My name is Bill Bloggs,' and then they go and check the name 'Bill Bloggs' against their intelligence holdings and they come back and say, 'Well, we don't have anything on Bill Bloggs, so that is all fine.' They do not have the resources at the moment to properly establish someone's identity and they are forced to accept the identity that is given to them by the person who they are supposed to be vetting.

Clearly this is an unsatisfactory situation. It means that there could be people coming to Australia who, quite frankly, we do not want here. Astonishingly, in light of the fact that ASIO's workload has gone up so much and their budget has been cut, one of the budget cuts that was inflicted on them by the Labor Party was a $6.9 million cut to the budget that ASIO have to conduct these security assessments on asylum seekers.

ASIO, our national security establishment, are not alone in being subject to, firstly, very significant cuts by the Labor Party and, secondly, having their resources diverted away from other things that they should be doing to deal with Labor's border protection failures. The Australian Federal Police have been the subject of very significant budget cuts since the Labor Party came to office. In every single budget they have had both funding and personnel cuts—to the point where they are clearly struggling to fulfil their responsibilities, as the Australian public expect of them. At the same time, they are forced to divert an enormous amount of resources to, firstly, tracking down people smugglers and, secondly, dealing with some of the consequences of the fact that we have a detention network that is literally falling apart.

The AFP's public order specialists—basically the federal government's riot squad—have been forced to sit at Christmas Island to deal with any unrest that might occur. That is enormously expensive. To prosecute people smugglers is also enormously difficult and expensive and it takes an enormous amount of Federal Police resources—resources that could of course have been used to go after other criminals rather than people smugglers if that trade had not been reinvigorated by the Labor Party's failed border protection policies.

Customs and Border Protection have been dealt savage blows by the Labor Party since they came to office. Under the Howard government, Customs had 5,850 officers; under the Labor Party, their workforce has been reduced by over 15 per cent and they now have 5,000 officers. Customs have enormous challenges in dealing with the increase in cargo that is coming into Australia and in dealing with the reinvigorated people-smuggling trade through Customs and Border Protection Command. Customs have had to divert an enormous amount of their resources to deal with Labor's border protection crisis, and this has occurred in an agency that has been savagely attacked by the Labor Party for six years—to the point where the opposition has serious concerns about whether Customs have the resources that they require to stop contraband and other goods from coming into Australia.

There are consequences when your national security agencies are having their resources attacked, when they are having their personnel numbers stripped and when they are having to divert an enormous amount of their time and energy to deal with Labor's self-induced border protection crisis. One of those consequences is that it is virtually impossible for the national security establishments to make a sensible judgement about the sheer volume of people who are arriving here and whether they pose a threat to the Australian community.

Under the Labor Party's failed border protection policies, 42,500 people have arrived here illegally. We know that upwards of 60 have failed security assessments and we are hearing now through the media—not through the government, because they refuse to come clean about these things—about particular cases that have caused enormous concern for the opposition.

One case in particular was somebody who was the subject of an Interpol Red Notice, the highest form of alert that the international policing organisation can issue. It is the equivalent of an international arrest warrant. Somebody who arrives in Australia who is the subject of such a notice should have immediately rung alarm bells within both our law and order community and our national security community.

Instead, what happened was that the Labor Party placed him for almost a year in the low-security detention centre at Inverbrackie in the Adelaide Hills, a detention centre they promised the locals nobody remotely dangerous would be placed in. If you are the subject of an Interpol Red Notice, you are a serious person of interest to another law enforcement body, in this case, presumably, the Egyptian government, and you are not somebody who should be appropriately detained within a detention centre that is effectively surrounded by a pool fence.

When the government was alerted to this—and I do not know when they were first aware of this—they kept the guy in Inverbrackie for almost a year. They did not do anything about it until it was raised in a newspaper, and when it was raised in the media they moved this individual to Villawood, which is a higher security environment. It is not even clear that the government was aware of who they were keeping in Inverbrackie until they were alerted by the media, and they have failed to explain why it took the media exposing what had occurred before they took some action to put this person in a more appropriate detention environment.

In the case of another man who has come in via people smugglers, somebody who is accused of murdering his girlfriend, what happened was even worse. He was released into the community on a bridging visa as an accused murderer.

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