Brendan O'Connor (Gorton, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Immigration and Citizenship) Share this | Hansard source

It would be a lot easier if the honourable members asked me these questions and did not embarrass themselves in the House as this honourable member has done. There is no change to the policy in relation to regional processing centres. There are children and in fact all demographics on regional processing centres including Manus. There are men, women and children on the regional processing centre on Manus right now as we speak, so the premise of the question is fundamentally wrong. But again I am not surprised by an opposition that does not care about the facts and only wants to insinuate all sorts of things and sloganeer. We have an opposition leader who really does not want to fix this problem. He says yes to a country that says no, Indonesia, and no to a country that says yes, Malaysia, when it comes to returning people safely to a transit country. That is because fundamentally this man is not a leader. He does not care about people dying at sea, he does not care about what is happening to people—

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