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

Thank you very much, Mr Deputy Speaker, for defending my honour! The member opposite will get his opportunity. But I have to say that he and every other member of the government ignores the advice of ASIO at its peril.

I am reminded of a story which was printed in The Australian on 4 September 2001. That was fortuitously one week before the infamous 9/11 attack on the World Trade Centre. That report was titled 'Bin Laden code red in Jakarta'. It said:

INDONESIAN and foreign military and government officials are concerned the organisation of notorious international terrorist Osama bin Laden is looking to Indonesia as a potential springboard for terrorist operations.

It quoted the then US Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, James Kelly:

Mr Kelly said the flow of illegal immigrants from South Asia and the Middle East into Indonesia was a further source of concern. "If it's easy to move people under strange identities around that's a capability that terrorists who we know exist can then use."

That is what he said.

Speaking about these issues, earlier this month the world watched in horror as scenes unfolded in the UK of the brutal slaying of a British soldier in the middle of London. There are two suspects in this barbaric atrocity, Michael Adebowale and Michael Adebolajo, both Muslim converts of African descent. Intelligence agencies warned of copycat attacks. But the intelligence services themselves have actually come under fire over in the UK for allowing these two men to slip through the net in the first place. According to reports, both of those men were on the radar of intelligence agencies but were not considered to be serious security threats.

A similarly revolting attack unfolded earlier in the year at the Boston Marathon where the accused perpetrators were family members of men granted asylum in the US. Russia had strongly opposed the US's decision to grant those people asylum, but America had ignored the warnings.

The Adelaide Advertiser reported yesterday that a suspected terrorist wanted by Interpol had lived in Inverbrackie with his family for about nine months, in a detention centre with the equivalent of a pool security fence. He was able to go out into the community, to go out to the local mosque, I assume, and on trips to the library—that was the level of security around that fellow. We cannot go on ignoring these warnings. We cannot continue to expose our citizens to unnecessary elevated risk.

The Liberal-National coalition has a plan to restore the borders, but I fear that the crisis that this government has created means that we are actually going to have to go much, much further than the Howard government went.

Mr Champion interjecting—

Adult governments need to take the concerns of their citizens seriously. Adult governments need to take the most important concerns and the important responsibility of national security seriously, because a nation without a border is like a house without walls; a house without walls is not a house, and a nation without borders is not a nation— (Time expired)

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