George Christensen (Dawson, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

Threats to national security are very important to any nation. But we are faced with this Labor government that simply cannot grasp the serious nature of the issue that is before us right now.

The Australian people have watched on as the government took a perfectly good solution—the border protection measures that were put in place by the Howard government—and dismantled it. They tore it down. They threw away a perfectly good solution and created for themselves and for the nation a problem, an escalating problem—a problem that is so out of hand that the very issues that were actually raised in this place by way of an MPI a couple of weeks ago pose a serious threat to the Australian public.

The budget, as we all know, is in crisis. The $5 billion border protection blow-outs in the budget, resulting from this government's poorest border policy, are a threat to the Australian people. It is the taxpayers who have to fork out for this waste and this largesse. It is the taxpayers who have to stand by and watch their government open the doors and windows and invite terrorist threats into their country.

Every time someone gains illegal entry into Australia without documentation, without identification, without knowing who these people are and what their background actually is, we open the door to a potential national security threat. When we open the door to two of those unauthorised entries, that threat is doubled. If three illegal entries sneak through the back door, then it is tripled. The reality is that, in the last week alone, 900 security threats entered through the doors. And that is this government's legacy.

Since November 2007, when the term of the last government ended and this government came to power, we have seen over 42,000 illegal immigrants arrive on Australian shores. The population of the Whitsunday Regional Council in my electorate is smaller than that!

The sheer scale of Labor's border protection failure now surpasses the population of most towns in my electorate of Dawson. And people in my electorate have genuine concerns about their country throwing its doors open to economic refugees, to people smugglers, to human traffickers and, potentially, to terrorism threats.

We have had 22,000 illegal arrivals come to this country so far this financial year. That is a figure that the department of immigration has admitted could blow out to 25,000 by 30 June. Yet we have the government pretending in their budget that somehow they are going to get it down to 13,200. That is simply not going to happen. This month is the second consecutive month in which more than 3,000 people have arrived by boat in Australian waters. That is going to continue as long as this government remains in power.

But, as I said, people in my electorate have genuine concerns about this issue and about the potential security threat. And so they should because, in the post 9/11 world, we see airport security getting tighter and tighter and tighter, and we see all of these measures in place, but we see border security, under this government, getting looser and looser and looser.

When I warned of potential security threats to our country when I spoke on the last MPI, it was not just my view. This is what the Australian Federal Police have to say about illegal entrants gaining access to our country. They say it raises serious security and criminal concerns. It raises quarantine and health issues. It costs, obviously, time and money in processing. Most importantly, they say, illegal immigration infringes on Australian sovereignty, giving us less control over our own borders. As I said, they are not my claims; they are statements found on the Australian Federal Police website in relation to people smuggling.

The Gillard Labor government, not content with having the worst border security crisis in the history of our nation because they dismantled the policies that actually worked, are now trying to pull the rug out from under our national security agencies. These are the agencies that are charged with the responsibility of ensuring that those who are coming illegally to our shores do not pose a risk to this nation.

This is what the Labor Party wants to do about those agencies. At the start of this month, on 1 May, there was a report on Radio National headed 'Labor backbenchers pressure government on ASIO assessments' in which we heard:

The Federal Government says it's considering calls by its own backbench for increased scrutiny of the way ASIO makes adverse assessments of asylum seekers.

These guys—and I presume there are some backbenchers over there who are amongst them—are upset because 55 asylum seekers are being detained by ASIO because they are security threats to the country. They want them released into the community. So, far from recognising the security threat to this nation, the Labor Party wants to ignore what our national security agency, ASIO, is saying, and just let them in.

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